Head, tail, knees and trees (knees and trees)

Robotics roundup: Computer vision funding, a smart knee brace and I, Groot Brian Heater @bheater / 11 hours Some fun ones this week, so let’s get all of those pesky business transactions out of the way first, shall we? I mean, not that tens of millions of dollars changing hands for future robotics technology is […]

ReleaseHub nabs $2.7M seed to give developers on-demand environments

Every developer relies on environments like testing, staging and production as they build software, but building them can be a time-consuming operation. ReleaseHub, an early stage startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, wants to change that by providing a service to make environments available on demand. Today, the company announced […]

Smartphone shipments jumped 27% globally in Q1

More good news from a smartphone market currently rebounding from the far reaching impacts of the pandemic. New numbers from Canalys put global shipments for Q1 2021 at 27% above where they were the same time last year. The industry was hit early and hit hard by Covid-19. The first quarter saw company running into […]

New business models, big opportunity: Financial services

More motivated than ever, organizations in all industries are ready to cut expenses that lack a clear return on investment. So it’s no surprise that survey respondents highlight computing projects—all highly measurable— as priorities in their 2021 plans. Among financial services institutions, 62% are looking to ramp up tech investments, and another 62% expect to […]

Computer vision in AI: The data needed to succeed

Developing the capacity to annotate massive volumes of data while maintaining quality is a function of the model development lifecycle that enterprises often underestimate. It’s resource intensive and requires specialized expertise. At the heart of any successful machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) initiative is a commitment to high-quality training data and a pathway to quality data […]

The gig is up on 21st-century exploitation

Rebecca Dixon Contributor Today’s app-based or “gig” economy is frequently dressed up in talk about “modern innovation” and the “21st century of work.” This facade is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Precarious, contingent work is nothing new — we’ve always had jobs that are low-paying, insecure and dismissed as “unskilled.” Due to systemic racism and […]