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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Carbon is raising a $200 million Series D to scale 3D printing for manufacturing
It’s hard to get a much better poster child for your 3D printing company than Futurecraft 4D. Adidas’s line of custom 3D sneakers are all you really need to know when it comes to 3D printing’s potential as a manufacturing powerhouse. Bay Area-based Carbon has been bringing that technology to life courtesy of its proprietary Digital Light Synthesis technology, which is able… Read More
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Is the time finally right for platform-agnostic cloud gaming?
We’ve heard it all before. Gaming in the cloud, the ability to play the most demanding titles, regardless of the limitations of our own hardware. That was the dream of OnLive, way back in 2010. It was a dream that didn’t end particularly well for the company. Parsec co-founder and CEO Benjy Boxer, for one, believes the service’s ultimate failure was a matter of bad timing. Read More
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Amazon’s Echo Buttons get their own version of Trivial Pursuit
Echo Buttons got lost in the deluge of Alexa products announced by Amazon a few months back. Understandably so — they were fun, but weird additions to company’s portfolio of smart home products. The little glowing devices finally start shipping today, priced at $20 for a two-pack, and Hasbro’s offering one of the more compelling reasons to pick them up for the… Read More
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ZTE’s dual-screen phone is a fascinating mess
While the world was focused on bigger names like Apple and Samsung, one of the industry’s great workhorses went ahead and released a dual-screen smartphone. But the Axon M’s dual-screen technology isn’t the result of industry breakthroughs. At its heart, the Axon M is an average phone with one (admittedly compelling) gimmick to justify its flagship price. Read More
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Blink introduces a $99 video doorbell
The best way to stand out from the CES deluge? Announce your product three weeks before everyone else. Last year’s show was big one for the connected home, and all signs are pointing to 2018 being even bigger, so Blink is getting out in front of things by announcing its new video doorbell this week. The biggest differentiator from the competition here is price. At $99, it’s… Read More
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Good luck getting Apple AirPods before the holidays
Apple’s wireless earbuds have been on the market for just over a year now, but they’re shaping up to be one of the biggest tech gifts for this holiday season. In fact, most of the big online retailers appear to have sold out of their stock. Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart’s sites have all been depleted — and even Apple’s currently showing them out of stock. Read More
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Adidas shifts away from making its own wearable tech
Wearables are hard. Some of the biggest names in technology have tried and failed to find success in the space, and even those that have become synonymous with the category have struggled to keep up. Adidas is only the latest company to learn this lesson the hard way. Read More
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The Echo Spot is my new favorite Alexa device
I got excited when the Echo Spot debuted. At the time, I tentatively declared it the best Echo at the time, and after living with the device for the better part of a week, my sentiments haven’t really changed. Read More
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Edge Mobile Payments buys what’s left of Plastc in hopes that there’s still life left in smart cards
The death of Plastc back in April looked to many like the final nail in the smart card coffin. After all, the news came only a few months after the space’s other big player, Coin, called it quits. Of course, the loss of Coin wasn’t totally in vain — the company was ultimately purchased by Fitbit. Now Plastc is getting a second lease on life of sorts. Read More
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Apple Maps gets indoor mapping for more than 30 airports
As of this morning, Apple Maps has expanded to include indoor layouts of 30 airports across the globe. The company has primarily hit American cities thus far, covering what looks to be most of the big cities across the contiguous U.S. There are some key international airports, as well, including Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Geneva, London, Berlin and a handful of Canadian locations. Read More
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Canary brings person detection to its cameras to help avoid false positives
Canary’s finally bringing one of its most requested features to its full line of connected home security cameras. After spending some time in beta, person detection will be rolling out over the course of the next six weeks to all of the company’s existing customers. Read More
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Samsung refreshes its Notebook 9 laptop line
They say Christmas season gets earlier every year, and the same seems to apply to CES. The year’s biggest tech show is a little less than a month away, yet Samsung’s already showing off what’s likely to be two of its bigger debuts for the show. Both are updates to the company’s solid Notebook 9 line of Windows PCs. Read More
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Scientists make kale plants glow in the dark with firefly enzymes
A team of MIT research have engineered plants that glow in the dark, using luciferase, the enzyme that lights up firefly butts. The answer to the question of why, precisely, anyone would want to do such a thing is clearly, “because science is cool.” The longer and slightly more boring answer, however, has to do with energy savings. Thus far, the scientists have only been able… Read More
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Amazon Echo’s multi-room music streaming feature now supports Spotify and SiriusXM
Just in time for all of those ridiculous holiday playlists, Amazon’s added two key players to the Echo’s multi-room streaming feature. Spotify and SiriusXM now join the ranks of TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Pandora and, naturally, Amazon’s own Music Unlimited service. The feature, which hit the smart speakers over the summer, makes it possible to stream songs to multiple Echos on… Read More
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Here’s what people were Googling in 2017
There are few metrics in the world that offer as much insight into our society as Google’s annual “Year in Search.” More than any of the other year-end download and streaming roundups, Google’s offers a clear snapshot of the things that captured our imaginations and baffled us during what felt like a particularly turbulent year. Read More
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Trump signs bill reinstating the FAA’s drone registration requirement
Back in late-2015, the FAA introduced new rules requiring owners of small drones to submit their devices to a database and attach a registration code to the side of the product. In May of this year, a judge in the D.C. Circuit shot down the rule, and the FAA began the process of returning the registration fee. Now the registry is back on, courtesy of a bill signed into law by President Trump. Read More
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Storify’s standalone service is shutting down next year
Storify’s eventual shuttering has been a long time coming. The social timeline curation service was acquired by commenting platform Livefyre back in 2013, which, in turn, was picked up by Adobe in May of last year. In a pithily worded note on its homepage today, the service announced that it will cease to exist as a standalone offering starting next year. The process of disappearing from… Read More
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Apple’s iMac Pro arrives December 14, starting at $4,999
It seems like forever ago that Apple first teased the iMac Pro, the souped up, professional grade version of its all-in-one. Announced back at WWDC, the company promised the computer would arrive sometime in December, and in spite a few months of near radio silence on that front, it looks like it’s about to deliver. The dark gray desktop will be available in a matter of days, on… Read More
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Apple GymKit is coming to a treadmill near you
It’s been half a decade since Apple transitioned to the lighting connector, and still I regularly see the long-retired iPod 30-pin cable flopping off treadmill dashboards at gyms all around the country. It’s impossible to say how any of this will look five years from now, but at the very least, Apple’s new GymKit offering is certainly more refined than most of what’s… Read More
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Popular podcast ‘Welcome to Night Vale’ scores an FX development deal
With narrative podcasting on the rise, it’s no surprise that TV execs have begun looking at the medium as a resource for new shows. If there is a surprise in all of this, it’s that Welcome to Night Vale didn’t get picked up sooner. The podcast has developed an organic fan base through platforms like Twitter, several touring shows, spin-off podcasts and two novels. Read More
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