Developers and hipsters, it’s time to join together and ditch your web browser to read this article. Kosuke Yoshimura developed a fun little project and shared it on Product Hunt today. TechCrunch-CLI is a command line interface that lets you read TechCrunch articles in text mode.
As my colleague Devin Coldewey suggested, TextCrunch would also be a good alternative name for this project.
I played around with it and I have to say that there’s something fascinating about reading the article I just published in my terminal window.
If you want to install it on your computer, it’s a simple NPM package on Github. If you have a Mac, you can install Node.js and NPM using Homebrew. Or you can spin up a Node.js image on any virtual private server platform out there if you just want to play with it for a few minutes.
By default, the command “$ tc top” loads up the most recent articles. It’s a scrollable list so you can go back quite far in the past with the up/down arrows. When you press enter, you get a text view of the article — links are included in brackets. Sadly, illustrations aren’t magically converted into ASCII art.
You can also type a tag using “$ tc tag <searchTerms...>” to load the most recent articles on a specific topic.
I have to say that reading articles in such a minimalist way is refreshing. Arguably, TechCrunch isn’t the worst website out there. But the web has become too cluttered and you end up loading one bloated web page after another. So if you want to go back to text browsers, here’s your chance.
Source: TechCrunch
Target has grand plans for Shipt, the same-day grocery delivery service it bought a year ago for $550 million. While generally known today as something of an Instacart competitor – essentially Target’s answer to Walmart and Amazon’s grocery delivery businesses – Shipt has expanded to include more of Target’s assortment over the past year. By 2019, the company says Shipt will offer same-day delivery of “all major product categories.”
Today, Shipt offers same-day delivery on more than 55,000 groceries and other essentials, as well as select electronics, toys and other products.
Next year, the delivery service will expand to include all major product categories, Shipt tells TechCrunch.
That means categories like apparel, towels, and more will become available for same-day delivery. The retailer declined to share specific details, like how many additional SKUs would be involved, or when in 2019 this category expansion would begin.
The move could be a potential game-changer for Target, however, which has been revamping its business to better accommodate all the ways people want to shop, both online and off. It has been remodeling its stores to add parking spaces for Drive Up customers – meaning, those who place orders online for same-day pickup from the store. It has updated stores’ layouts so online Order Pickup, self-checkout and grab-and-go grocery essentials are near the front as you walk in.
But one of the challenges Target still faces is that it can be difficult to figure out which merchandise is available via which delivery or pickup method. Even when you search and filter for “in-store” merchandise in Target’s mobile app, you’ll be shown out-of-stock items as well as those you can only order online for shipping to your home.
Meanwhile, a lot of Target’s merchandise – like cold grocery items and clothing – are not available through same-day services like Drive Up or Shipt.
The end result is that you can’t do a full “Target run” that includes all types of merchandise, unless you go into the store. It also likely causes customer confusion, since Drive Up and Shipt offer access to a different assortment of products. Why shouldn’t same-day items be available for both pickup or delivery?
But if Shipt will grow to include all major product categories in 2019, it could become Target customers’ preferred same-day service.
In 2018, Shipt saw massive expansion, following Target’s promise that it – along with Drive Up – would be available nationwide by the 2018 holidays.
The retailer noted in a corporate blog post about Shipt’s one-year anniversary that the delivery service now reaches over 200 million U.S. markets across 46 states – up from the 70 markets where it was live at the time of acquisition. Shipt has also seen its membership numbers triple since joining Target, the retailer says, and it’s hired more than 375 new employees across its Birmingham, Alabama and San Francisco offices.
Shipt will continue expand geographically in 2019, and will expand its Birmingham headquarters’ headcount by the “hundreds,” Target said.
Source: TechCrunch
The ZSpace laptop wants to overhaul education and training by offering affordable access to 3D mixed reality through a bespoke screen and glasses technology that is already supported by a wide array of applications.
The post ZSpace’s laptop brings education to life with its own 3D technology appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Today was supposed to be a historic day with four rocket launches by four different companies. But that’s not going to happen. As of publication, three of the four rocket launches are canceled. The flights were pushed until tomorrow, setting up another and more significant historical event.
If all the rockets currently scheduled launch as planned, there could be five launches within a 24 hour period.
Originally, today, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Arianespace, and ULA were supposed to launch their respective rockets. Rocket Tuesday, people were calling it. And for good reason as, if successful, it would have been a historic event. But then Arianespace canceled their flight due to high-altitude winds. And then Blue Origin scrubbed its launch because of the rocket’s ground infrastructure. And then seven minutes before SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was set to launch, an onboard computer triggered an abort, causing the rocket to stand down for the day.
ULA’s Delta IV Heavy launch is still on the books for later today, and if successful, could mark the start of a fantastic day of rocket launches.
Source: TechCrunch
Alongside powerful graphics cards, Nvidia may have more mobile GPUs to show off at next year’s CES show in January. The MX250 has been spotted in a listing for an HP laptop, potentially replacing the entry-level MX150.
The post Leaked HP laptop listing sports entry-level Nvidia MX250 GPU appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Hayneedle, the home furnishings retailer that joined Walmart by way of an acquisition by Jet back in 2016, is now serving as the testing grounds for Walmart’s own in-house visual search technology. Built in collaboration between Hayneedle and Walmart Labs, the new technology has been slowly scaling up on Hayneedle over the course of the year.
Hayneedle had been offering visual search on its mobile app since 2017, but it was doing so through a partnership with third-party vendor Slyce.
To use the feature, customers take an image of a piece of furniture they like by snapping a photo in someone’s home or in a retail showroom, for example, or even taking a photo of a page in a magazine. The app then uses that image to find similar products from Hayneedle.com – much like how visual search works on other sites, like Pinterest or Google Shopping.
Walmart says it sees the potential in visual search because of how it can better guide customers to products, even when they don’t know what they’re looking for by name.
“We’re continually focused on improving the customer experience,” says Shelley Huff, Vice President of Home, Walmart U.S. eCommerce and President of Hayneedle. “And I think in the home industry that’s particularly challenging just with the breadth of offering of the products, and the fact that the majority of customers don’t really know what they’re looking for in terms of home furnishings. It requires, in many cases, a large level of inspiration,” she continues.
“If we look at how we can enable that shopping experience…and give them more confidence in their purchases and their ability to find products, visual search place and incredible role,” Huff says.
Visual search can also help the retailer with downstream effects, like reducing returns and boosting overall ratings for products, leading to more customer satisfaction with their purchases, she notes.
Walmart had been working on its own visual search technology before Hayneedle, but was having trouble launching it at Walmart’s scale. That’s where Hayneedle comes in.
After its acquisition by Jet, Hayneedle discovered there were a lot of technologies – including those in the realms of machine learning and A.I. – that it could take advantage of from Walmart and Walmart Labs. It could also launch these more quickly and easily because it’s a smaller organization from an engineering perspective.
In the case of visual search, Hayneedle partnered with a team at Walmart Labs, which worked on the backend machine learning pieces for the new platform. On its side, Hayneedle provided the site’s product catalog of over a million SKUs, and trained the system. It then integrated the visual search technology with its own site.
The relationship proved to be mutually beneficial, explains Hayneedle’s Head of Engineering, Benjamin Dekarske.
“We don’t have the dedicated core technologists that Walmart has with Labs, and Walmart gains from Hayneedle a platform [for visual search] that they don’t have to scale to Walmart’s scale – they can try it out at Hayneedle’s scale, then learn from and grow from there,” he says.
This was also the first time the Walmart Labs team worked with one of Walmart’s acquisitions, in terms of collaborating on the development of new technology together, rather than porting over technology from one place to another.
While visual search had already been in use at Hayneedle via Slyce, Hayneedle’s test of Walmart’s own visual search technology began this March.
It has since been running A/B tests between the two technologies to compare performance and results between the two, says Dekarske. The company continues to have an agreement with Slyce, but it has been shifting more of Hayneedle’s visual search results to its internally-sourced effort over time.
Walmart won’t say if it’s preparing to end its contract with Slyce, as a decision hasn’t been formally made.
Visual search is not the only technology Hayneedle is testing that’s meant to one day scale up to Walmart.com after testing on a smaller site. However, the others in the works are not necessarily customer-facing, and include efforts around customer profiling, segmentation, and those focused on improving operations.
This isn’t the only area where Walmart has visual search in use. The retailer just snapped up another e-commerce site, Art.com, that offers its own visual search technology.
It’s now preparing to look at Art.com’s implementation, the company says, to further refine its existing efforts.
Source: TechCrunch
As Uber continues to expand the footprint of JUMP bikes, it’s aiming to make the fleet of bikes smarter and easier to unlock, ride and charge. At Uber’s Pier 70 offices in San Francisco, JUMP Head of Product Nick Foley showed off the new bikes, which are aesthetically similar but should improve unit economics thanks to self-diagnostic capabilities and swappable batteries. These bikes, Foley said, have been years in the making.
The 4G-enabled bikes also ditch the clunky rear keypad for a sleek front screen, swap the U-lock for a retractable cable lock, and now have a phone mount for turn-by-turn navigation. JUMP is gearing up to widely deploy these bikes in January, but there are already some on the streets of San Francisco.
To the rider, the most obvious difference will be the interface on the front where you scan a QR code or tap your phone or RFID card to unlock the bike.
“We did a lot of research about how people were interacting with the bike and streamlined the whole interaction flow to be a lot simpler,” Foley said.
Riders will also notice the absence of a steel U-lock bar in exchange for the retractable cable. Riders may also notice the swappable batteries, which will help with vehicle availability, but this feature is especially useful to Uber and its unit economics for JUMP bikes.
“That is a major improvement to system utilization, the operating system, fleet uptime and all of the most critical metrics about how businesses are performing with running a shared fleet,” Foley said. “Swappable batteries mean you don’t have to take vehicles back to wherever you charge a bike or scooter, and that’s good for the business.”
Also, this custom-engineered battery sends diagnostic information to the central unit, which lives near the bike’s handlebars, and then sends that to JUMP’s cloud. That central unit can also monitor the motor system, locking system and drive system, and then send that information to the cloud. From there, the bike can self-diagnose many issues and ultimately reduce the amount of time these bikes spend in warehouses awaiting repairs.
“It’s by building this whole platform to be highly intelligent, that we’re able to more efficiently operate these vehicles,” Foley said. “And some things that previously are users might have had to report to us, we can now self-diagnose. And we can actually update the drive parameters — like how the bike responds to pedaling — in real time. It can also do things, like, if you a move a bike between geographies where the speed limit is 20 miles per hour to 15 miles per hour, it’ll automatically pull down new settings from the cloud and operate in a way that the city says it’s supposed to operate.”
Since JUMP first launched in San Francisco earlier this year, people have ridden millions of miles on the bikes, which have since expanded to dozens of cities. Version one of these bikes were relatively durable, but Foley said these new ones should last for several years — give or take a few component changes.
“We saw more aggressive abuse than expected in certain areas,” Foley said. “But one of the major things has been putting bikes in and out of vans. That’s been a really tough moment for bicycles because they’re getting thrown all over the place, so swappable batteries are really going to extend the lifespan.”
It’s worth noting that as JUMP deploys version two of its bikes, it’s not going to sunset the hardware from version one. Instead, JUMP plans to simply upgrade the hardware with the new lock module and new system intelligence.
Meanwhile, Uber also operates an electric scooter service under the JUMP brand. In October, Uber deployed JUMP scooters in Santa Monica, along with bikes, in Santa Monica, Calif.
“The most exciting thing about all the pieces of technology that exists is that they’re all fundamentally valuable, whether on a bicycle or a scooter,” Foley said. “And so we’re building scooter hardware that leverages a lot of these pieces of technology.”
Foley said there’s more to come next year, but said the motor system, tracking and user interface are universal pieces of technology that JUMP can bring to its scooters. And as Uber gets closer to its Q1 2019 initial public offering, improving its unit economics across all of its businesses is going to be key.
Source: TechCrunch
It sold 3 million copies in 11 days in the US.
Source: CNET
Here’s a look at what global automakers are bringing to the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Source: CNET
SpaceX is raising $500 million at a valuation of $30.5 billion, according to a WSJ report citing people familiar with the matter. The company is said to be raising the capital in part to help fund its ambitious Starlink internet service project.
According to the announced plan, SpaceX intends to launch 11,000 satellites to plaster the globe with internet connectivity. So far, SpaceX has launched just two prototype satellites even though earlier reports stated SpaceX, at one time, projected it would have 400 satellites in orbit by the end of 2018.
If this funding goes through, it will bring SpaceX’s total amount raised to about $2.5 billion of equity funding, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Last month, SpaceX raised $250 million through a high-yield loan sale.
The WSJ reports that for this equity round SpaceX turned to existing investors and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co, a large investor in Musk’s Tesla. The report stats that SpaceX and the investors have agreed to the financing terms but the money has yet to be sent.
Source: TechCrunch
