Brian Heater
TechCrunch
New York, United States
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Recent articles by Brian:
Raspberry Pi introduces a $6 board with Wi-Fi –
The new Raspberry Pi Pico W is launching today for $6 -- the “W” (and additional $2) brings 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity to the system. → Read More
Actuator: Fulfillment automation, drone swaps, moon mining –
Actuator is TechCrunch's weekly newsletter covering all things robotic. → Read More
HTC looks to the metaverse for answers –
LG officially pulled the plug on its smartphone division in April of last year. It was another signpost in a dramatically changing mobile market that had left the electronics giant behind. HTC tends to be lumped into that conversation, though the Taiwanese manufacture has – in spite of everything – continued to press on, even […] → Read More
Nura brings its killer audio tech to a pair of pro earbuds –
Nura's user-customizable sound profiles have remained a genuinely exciting feature that’s managed to set the company apart from the throngs of headphone makers. → Read More
Airrow is automating battery and payload swapping for drones –
Any given year, the real unsung highlight of re:Mars are the dozen or so startups and researchers who show off their wares on the show floor. There are always a couple of cool projects that have somehow managed to escape our radar, thus far. Los Angeles-based Airrow jumped out with a clever product offering. The […] → Read More
Alexa goes down the conversational rabbit hole –
Onstage at re:Mars this week, Amazon showcased a developing Alexa feature meant to mimic the flow of natural language. Conversation between two humans rarely follows some predefined structure. It goes to strange and unexpected places. One topic segues into another, as participants inject their lived experience. In a demo, a conversation about trees turns to […] → Read More
Actuator: A quick trip to MARS –
Greetings from Las Vegas, where it’s 105 degrees outside, but it mostly doesn’t matter because you can’t figure out how to get outside. I’m here this week for my first-ever re:Mars. It’s wild being back in Vegas for the first time since January 2020, which hasn’t really changed but is somehow completely different. I’m here […] → Read More
OSOM’s OV1 is now Solana’s web3 Android handset, Saga –
OSOM and Nothing have quickly become two of the most fascinating companies operating the smartphone space in recent years. Nothing is the latest project from OnePlus co-founder, Carl Pei, while OSOM is largely composed of former Essential employees looking to launch their own thing in the wake the company’s messy dissolution. That Pei purchased Essential’s […] → Read More
Amazon debuts a fully autonomous warehouse robot –
You can’t discuss fulfillment robots without mentioning Amazon. Over the past decade, the retail juggernaut has become the 800-pound gorilla in the category, courtesy of several key acquisitions and seemingly endless resources. And while warehouse robotics and automation have been accelerated amid the pandemic and resulting employment crunch, Amazon Robotics has been driving these categories […] → Read More
Alexa will soon be able to read stories as your dead grandma –
At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech. In […] → Read More
Liteboxer goes portable –
Today, Liteboxer introduced the portal fitness system Go, relying on subscription fees rather than the standard up-front hardware cost. → Read More
Glowforge raises another $43M
Seattle-based laser-cutting hardware startup Glowforge announced this morning that it has raised another $45 million Series E. → Read More
Apple MacBook Pro M2 13-inch review –
There are impressive gains from the new silicon, but there are few reasons to recommend the MacBook Pro over the new MacBook Air. → Read More
Wingcopter raises another $42M ahead of ambitious Africa deployment
In mid-May, Wingcopter announced an extremely ambitious plan to deploy some 12,000 of its fixed-wing UAVs in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next half decade. → Read More
Impossible Mining is combing the seafloor for battery metals –
Impossible Mining believes it has a method to mine the depths of the ocean for polymetallic nodule rocks without harming the fragile ecosystem in the process. → Read More
Planning for the Impossible –
Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown sees biodiversity as an even more pressing concern than climate change (though, obviously, one can’t entirely uncouple one from the other). → Read More
Senators call for US to adopt common charger –
Democratic senators sent an open letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo urging that the United States adopt a common charger. → Read More
Funding the robot revolution
Actuator is TechCrunch's weekly newsletter covering all things robotic. → Read More
Corvus is using drones to track warehouse inventory –
Boston-based Corvus Robotics is one of a handful of startups looking to leverage indoor drones to help warehouses keep track of inventory. → Read More
Former Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter goes Collaborative –
Collaborative Robotics aims to build a six-degree-of-freedom robotic art that’s collaborative, works with humans and can meet a wide variety of use cases. → Read More