Category: Hardware
$100M donation powers decade-long moonshot to create solar satellites that beam power to Earth
It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred…
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Embodied AI, superintelligence and the master algorithm
What will take us from potential to reality in the next 18 months? Chris Nicholson 7 hours Chris Nicholson Contributor More posts by this contributor UPDATED: Machine learning can fix Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even America Superintelligence, roughly defined as an AI algorithm that can solve all problems better than…
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Google is building its own chip for the Pixel 6
Google just dumped a whole bunch of news about its upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone. Maybe the company was looking to get out in front of August 11’s big Samsung event — or perhaps it’s just hoping to keep people interested in the months leading up to a big fall announcement…
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China roundup: Keep down internet upstarts, cultivate hard tech
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The tech industry in China has had quite a turbulent week. The government is upending its $100 billion private education…
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Another banner quarter as Chromebook shipments grow 75% YOY
Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn’t quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the…
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Amazon’s Fire TV Cube now supports Zoom calls on your TV
Late last year, Amazon launched support for two-way calling that worked with its Fire TV Cube devices. The feature allowed consumers to make and receive calls from their connected TV to any other Alexa device with a screen. Today, the company is expanding this system to enable support for two-way…
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