Latest Technology

Today’s cars are dumb where they should be smart, and smart where they should be dumb. Enough already. Make a car that’s pretty much all dumb and watch it sell — because what automakers are giving people is so bad, they’ll pay more to have less of it. Cars now are like budget smartphones with wheels: loaded with bloatware, unintuitive and slow to operate. Carmakers have always struggled with user interfaces, but until recently the biggest problem we had was “too many knobs.” How I long for those days! The proliferation of touchscreens and LCDs has made every car feel like a karaoke booth. Animations show reclaimed energy from braking, the speedometer changes color as you approach the limit, the fan speed and direction is under three menus. And besides being non-functional, these interfaces are even ugly! The type, the layouts, and animations scream “designed by committee and approved by someone who doesn’t have to use it.” Not to mention the privacy and security concerns. I was dub...

Igor Bonifacic Contributor Igor Bonifacic is a contributing writer at Engadget . More posts by this contributor US airlines warn C-Band 5G could cause ‘catastrophic disruption’ Magic Leap grants healthcare startups access to its new AR headset ahead of mid-2022 release Following a two-month delay , Valve’s Steam Deck will launch on February 25th. In a blog post the company published on Wednesday, Valve said it would open orders to the first batch of reservation holders that day. Those customers will have 72 hours to purchase the handheld. If they don’t use the opportunity, Valve will release their spot to the next person in the reservation queue. The first orders will then ship on February 28th. Moving forward, Valve says it plans open orders to more customers on a weekly basis. Steam Deck launches on February 25th, 2022! https://t.co/6WKynbibkv pic.twitter.com/Un54Jwdq1H — Steam (@Steam) January 26, 2022 Valve had planned to release the Steam Deck at the e...

NASA’s Spinoff magazine is one of the things I look forward to reading every year. The space agency’s research trickles down to the rest of the world in surprising and interesting ways, which it tracks and collects in this annual publication. This year is no different, and NASA tech can be found in everything from hiking gadgets to heavy industry and, funnily enough, space. There are dozens of technologies that have made their way to everyday use in a variety of places highlighted in this year’s issue , which you can browse here . (It’s about 60 pages long, so pour some coffee and settle in.) I talked with Daniel Lockney, the head of NASA’s Tech Transfer Program overseeing the deployment of its tech and research among terrestrial companies looking to put it to good use. “Typically what happens is: NASA develops something, they report it to my office, and we look at it to figure out, first, does it work? And second, who else can use it? And if someone can, we figure out how to get i...

There’s a global competition to build the biggest, most powerful computers on the planet, and Meta (AKA Facebook) is about to jump into the melee with the “AI Research SuperCluster,” or RSC . Once fully operational it may well sit in the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world, which it will use for the massive number crunching needed for language and computer vision modeling. Large AI models, of which OpenAI’s GPT-3 is probably the best known, don’t get put together on laptops and desktops; they’re the final product of weeks and months of sustained calculations by high performance computing systems that dwarf even the most cutting-edge gaming rig. And the faster you can complete the training process for a model, the faster you can test it and produce a new and better one. When training times are measured in months, that really matters. RSC is up and running and the company’s researchers are already putting it to work… with user-generated data, it must be said, though Meta was ca...

Peloton ended 2020 on top. Its own supply chain issues had presented a hurdle — but if anything, these were side effects of the company’s own stratospheric successes. It simply couldn’t keep up with demand , one of the better problems to have as a business on the rise. Always leave them wanting more, as P.T. Barnum may or may not have once said. The connected fitness firm had already developed a kind of cultish following in various upscale circles, well before most of us had an inkling of knowledge about novel coronaviruses. But the pandemic accelerated Peloton’s success beyond what most could have reasonably predicted. Gyms across the world began to shut down, and with everyone stuck inside, home fitness provided a solution. Peloton, offering some extra connectedness in a socially distanced world, was a hit. Investors bought in, sending Peloton’s share from around $30 at the start of 2020 to above $160 in the closing days of the year. In 2021, however, things hit the skids, with Pel...

Tech sees differently, and can fuse multiple types of data we can’t even perceive: lidar, IR, ultrasonic, and so on. Metalenz , maker of highly compact “2D” cameras for advanced sensing, hopes to bring polarized light into the mix for security and safety with its PolarEyes tech. Polarization isn’t a quality of light that’s often paid much attention. It has to do with the orientation of the photon’s movement as it waves its way through the air, and generally you can get the info you need from light without checking its polarization. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. “Polarization generally gets thrown out, but it really can tell you something about what the objects you’re looking at are made out of. And it can find contrast that normal cameras can’t see,” said Metalenz co-founder and CEO Rob Devlin. “In healthcare, it’s been used historically to tell whether a cell is cancerous or not — the color and intensity don’t change in the visible light, but looking at polarization it works.”...

French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion. Exotec sells a complete end-to-end solution to turn a regular warehouse into a partially automated logistics platform. It’s a hardware and software solution that replaces some human tasks. 83North and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the funding round. Previous Exotec investors include Bpifrance, Iris Capital, 360 Capital Partners and Breega. Image Credits: Exotec The key component of the Exotec system is called the Skypods. These low-profile robots roam the floor autonomously. When they’re next to the right rack, they can go up the rack to pick up a bin and then go down with the right bin. This is particularly useful to increase the storage density of a warehouse as you can store products a few meters above ground. The Skypod then caries the bin to ...