February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Technology

Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution

August 22, 2024
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the…

Want to understand the future of technology? Take a look at this one obscure metal.

August 22, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On a sunny morning in late spring, I found myself carefully examining an array of somewhat unassuming-looking rocks at the American Museum of Natural History.  I’ve gotten to see some cutting-edge technologies…

A new system lets robots sense human touch without artificial skin

August 21, 2024
Even the most capable robots aren’t great at sensing human touch; you typically need a computer science degree or at least a tablet to interact with them effectively. That may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It’s a significant step toward robots that…

How we could turn plastic waste into food

August 21, 2024
In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among…

The Download: future materials shortages, and Google on trial

August 21, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources For nearly as long as we’ve extracted materials from our planet, we’ve been trying to predict how long they will be…

This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources

August 21, 2024
Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth’s surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn’t really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever…

The Download: boosting prosperity with AI, and fighting for a better future

August 20, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How to fine-tune AI for prosperity Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from…

How to fine-tune AI for prosperity

August 20, 2024
When Chad Syverson loads the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website these days looking for the latest data on productivity, he does so with a sense of optimism that he hasn’t felt in ages. The numbers for the last year or so have been generally strong for various financial and business reasons, rebounding from the…

Why you’re about to see a lot more drones in the sky

August 20, 2024
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. If you follow drone news closely—and you’re forgiven if you don’t—you may have noticed over the last few months that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite busy. For decades, the agency had been…