Brian Heater
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.
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VR Party is a social DJ dance club for virtual reality
Twelve hours into last night’s Disrupt NY Hackathon, Andre Smith still wasn’t sure what he was doing. “People ask me about what my ideas are before the Hackathon,” he explains in a bit of a sleep-deprived daze. “I have no idea. I was already in deep. I didn’t really have a clear vision. I had all of this technology on my desk, but I didn’t know what to… Read More
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NVIDIA ups the power and drops the price with its impressive new graphics cards
While you were out enjoying your Friday night, NVIDIA kicked off the weekend with a surprise unveil at the DreamHack gaming event in Austin to debut its latest gaming GPUs. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took to the stage at the city’s Emo’s music venue to showcase the GeForce GTX 1080, the company’s first Pascal-based GPU, which promises double the performance and three times the… Read More
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A $1 paper-based test can detect the Zika virus in around two hours
“For our group it’s become an interesting case study in how quickly a group can mobilize in the face of an outbreak,” Dr. James Collins explains over the phone. The MIT biomedical engineering professor has been fielding press inquiries all day, in light of a newly published paper detailing the cheap, fast and effective tool his team developed to diagnose the growing threat of… Read More
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Researchers have developed a flexible holographic smartphone screen that plays a mean game of ‘Angry Birds’
The first thing you do upon developing a flexible holographic smartphone display? Fire up a game of Angry Birds, naturally. All the rest of that smartphone functionality can wait until you’ve finished a few rounds of slingshotting avian missiles. Maybe it’s not the first thing — but it was clearly high on the list of the Human Media Lab researchers who developed the HoloFlex. Read More
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Skoog 2.0 brings wireless connectivity to the multi-use educational musical instrument
“The key was to create an instrument for all children,” explains Skoog co-inventor Dr. Ben Schögler. “That includes kids with disabilities, whether physical or learning disabilities. It was made to be an inclusive instrument, because musical instruments are beautiful, they’re fantastic, but they’re difficult to play.” Born out of Edinburg University in… Read More
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A closer look at Samsung’s connected Family Hub Refrigerator
Imagine for a moment that you’re a fly on the wall of a Samsung executive board meeting. It’s pretty easy to imagine why the Family Hub Refrigerator seemed like a great idea. Someone probably said something about leveraging the smart home and disrupting the kitchen and they were off to the races. And sure, there are certainly pieces of the fancy new smart refrigerator that make a… Read More
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EHang reveals plans to deploy its passenger drones for emergency organ deliveries
There were plenty of questions surrounding the actual real world functionality of EHang’s impressive human-sized drone when it made its debut on the CES floor back in January. Was the Chinese manufacturer actually planning to bring the thing to market, or was the giant quadcopter more of a (admittedly quite effective) promotional tool to help attract attention to the rest of its more… Read More
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Connected-battery maker Roost announces two new low-cost smart smoke alarms
Beginning life as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, the team at Roost found a compelling, low-cost backdoor into the world of smart smoke alarms dominated by the team at Nest. Roel Peeters and James Blackwell, both formerly of Wi-Fi chip maker Ozmo, applied their Wi-Fi know-how to a smart battery, a component that transforms an existing smoke alarm into a connected device that can be… Read More
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Seaboard RISE maker ROLI raises $27 million in Series B led by Foundry Group
I first saw the ROLI Seaboard GRAND backstage at a show during SXSW 2013. Someone had tipped me that some startup was showing off a strange new piano that let the player bend its keys like a guitar string. It was strange and rubbery and fascinating — a silicone piano that made it possible to manipulate keys beyond the standard press. The company has grown a fair deal in the… Read More
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Huawei’s opulent jewel-encrusted smartwatches are now available in the US, starting at $500
Perhaps you missed the excitement in amongst the deluge of gadget news that is the International Consumer Electronics Show, but back in January Chinese handset maker Huawei introduced this pair of strange specimens. The incredibly unsubtly named Elegant and Jewel are the company’s shot at appealing directly to female smartwatch owners. That said, the wearables aren’t too large… Read More
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Leka, a spherical robot designed for children with special needs, seeks funding on Indiegogo
“There are not a lot of toys targeted at children with special needs,” says Ladislas de Toldi. “Because of their special needs, it’s harder for them to focus and progress. So how do you make an exceptional child learn and progress?” The Paris-based engineer is making the hard sell for Leka over the phone, a few days ahead of launching the company’s big… Read More
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Formlabs acquires Pinshape, an online 3D printing community/marketplace
By the time the Form 1 began shipping to Kickstarter backers, the market was already flooded with countless 3D printers built around the same basic plastic extruding technology. But Formlabs offered something different. The Massachusetts-based startup eschewed the RepRap process offered up in popular consumer machines from companies like MakerBot and 3D Systems in favor of a more complex… Read More
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Yes, it’s early May, but here are some new HP back-to-school Pavilion PCs
It’s May, and students everywhere are making last-minute preparations for the prom and eagerly watching the clocks tick down to summer break. But HP’s here to remind you that back-to-school season is just around that next corner, as the world continues mercilessly spinning forward. The computer maker’s got a big lead on the fall with a new series of devices aimed at… Read More
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Oculus Rift demos are coming to select Best Buys May 7th, with a ‘small number’ available for purchase
Elvis Costello once famously said that writing about music was like “dancing about architecture” — or maybe it was Martin Mull or Laurie Anderson or Frank Zappa, but that’s beside the point really. Reporting on VR carries a similar caveat. You just really have to try to get it. Retail is likely to be a large part of the technology’s outreach, and there’s… Read More
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Puma’s got a tiny racing robot that can move as fast as Usain Bolt
Its story is that of an epic battle. Mankind versus machine in a race for dominance. Only one can win. In practice, thankfully, it’s much, much more adorable. A four-wheeled robot that looks remarkably like an RC car crossbred with a shoebox , programmed to give athletes something to race against. A sort of free-roaming robotic rabbit to their inner-greyhound. BeatBot was created for Puma… Read More
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A Dyson engineer explains why the company spent $71 million and four years developing a high-tech hair dryer
Hair dryers are everywhere. Bathrooms. Gym locker rooms. Open a drawer in your hotel room — boom, free hair dryer. It usually requires a lot to get me to really notice a hair dryer. But Dyson has succeeded, and all it took was $71 million and four years of development. Read More
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The MacBook Returns
For many, the Steve Jobs manila envelope trick was enough. Sure, it seems a bit silly with the benefit of nearly a decade’s worth of hindsight, but when Apple’s late CEO unwrapped the standard bit of office stationary to reveal what he’d enthusiastically declared “the world’s thinnest laptop” onstage at Macworld back in 2008, the crowd, predictably, went… Read More
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HP and Google join forces for a souped-up metal Chromebook
You know it’s not just any old Chromebook when Google and HP team up for the thing’s product launch. And indeed, the HP Chromebook 13 looks to be a pretty compelling alternative to the MacBook upgrade Apple ushered into the world last week. The laptop makes a compelling case both in terms of looks and muscle, sporting a 2.8-pound all-metal design, measuring half an inch thick and… Read More
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That time when we ate super-powered hot sauce live on Facebook
I’ve officially been at TechCrunch for a week and a half now, which I’ve been informed is the hot sauce anniversary. You know, the one where Thrillist sends you a bottle of scientifically-engineered hot sauce made from peppers with names like the Trinidad moruga scorpion, Carolina reaper and the only slightly less ominously named ghost pepper. And I’ve been assured that the… Read More
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Apple Music hits 13 million paying subscribers
During an earnings call marked by a lot of less than stellar news, Apple CEO Tim Cook did manage to locate some bright spots in the company’s ever-expanding portfolio. Among them was a steady increase in paying Apple Music subscribers. That number has surpassed 13 million, up from the 11 million announced by execs Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi back in February. Of course, the number… Read More
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