The House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet today held Part II in a series of hearings to consider reforms to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) 10 years after it was created by the America Invents Act (AIA). The hearing, titled “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board After 10…
Enlarge / Microsoft is testing a new way to handle taskbars with too many open apps. (credit: Microsoft) We appear to be entering a period of Windows’ development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. To that end, Microsoft continues to add, remove, and…
Enlarge / The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon) This week, Apple released software updates for all of its platforms, including iOS 15.6, iPadOS 15.6, macOS Monterey 12.5, watchOS 8.7, tvOS 15.6, and HomePod software version 15.6. With iOS 16 and its peers just a couple of months away, these updates add no major…
Amazon is trying to deal with fake reviews in its stores. DEPOSIT PHOTOS Amazon announced this week that it is taking legal action against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups dedicated to orchestrating fake reviews in its online store in return for cash or free products. Apparently, these groups recruited individuals to post…
Your Sonos speaker can respond to your voice, if you want it to. Tim Foster / Unsplash With the rise of smart speakers and digital assistants, we’ve all become much more comfortable using our voices to tell our gadgets what to do—whether that’s queueing up songs or asking about the weather forecast. This kind of…
Moderating an online community is hard, often thankless work — and it’s even harder when it happens in a silo. On Twitch, interconnected channels already informally share information on users they’ve prefer to keep out. The company is now formalizing that ad hoc practice with a new tool that lets channels swap ban lists, inviting…
Digit, the bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, will continue to evolve and improve, including the addition of a head and some digits of its very own, according to co-founders Damion Shelton and Jonathan Hurst. Just don’t expect Digit to talk or have digits that look like human hands. Digit, which was introduced in 2019,…
On Tuesday, I covered Arkive’s $9.7 million funding round, a startup that is trying to answer the question: “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?” The company’s founder and CEO Tom McLeod was gracious enough to let me take a closer look at the pitch deck he used to raise their…
For a long-time, distributed work for VCs looked like a split-HQ between two cities in different parts of the world. Now, it may look like “the cloud.” Andreessen Horowitz, a venture firm turned registered investment advisor, says that its “headquarters will be in the cloud” going forward, according to a blog post written by founding…
It took exactly two minutes for today’s TC Sessions: Robotics fulfillment panel to make its first Amazon mention. The retail giant looms over the category like no other. It played a foundational role with the 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems that birthed Amazon Robotics, and remains the 800-pound gorilla looming in the background of any…