Brian Heater
Samsung is the best at big. Big, brash, bold, kitchen sink phones. The company that mainstreamed the phablet a dozen years ago has never given up on big dreams about big phones. Last year, the company took a risk — sunsetting the beloved Note line. While I stand...
The age-old question in my industry is, “Where are we in a given hype cycle?” For now, crypto news cycle dominance has, thankfully, died now, largely through its own self-destructive tendencies. FTX obviously served as the most prominent recent example of what happens when the tech community believes...
This morning, OnePlus made a pair of big announcements: the OnePlus 11 smartphone and the Buds Pro 2. All in all, a good morning for the Oppo-owned phone maker after months of teasing the products. But as the company is looking to reassert itself under new ownership and...
One could make a very reasonable argument that FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts) is as much a thought experiment as it is a research project. Certainly it butts up against similar questions around art and creativity as AI projects like DALL-E and ChatGPT — though...
Here’s an interesting comment from MIT’s Alfonso Parra Rubio, “Treating soft versus hard robotics is a false dichotomy.” For, I suppose, obvious reasons, thinking around technology tends to be a bit…binary. Certainly we’ve traditionally regarded soft robots as being something that exists in direct opposition to their more...
There’s no denying that the robotics startup world has taken a hit during the ongoing economic downturn. Recent numbers prove what we’ve all suspected for some time. But two things are true: 1) The lull is temporary; and 2) While robotics isn’t recession-proof, construction might as well be.
This...
A lot has happened in the half-year since we caught up with Ayanna Howard, dean of the Ohio State University’s College of Engineering — not all of it good. The broader economic slowdown has been deeply felt by the robotics industry, across the board, from the smallest startups...
Common wisdom in digital photography says that megapixels aren’t everything. They matter to an extent, but smartphone makers have a long history of leaning too heavily on those numbers as a kind of shorthand for camera quality. In other words, they play an important role but need to...
Before they were robots, they were “androids” or “automatons.” The word “robot” is commonly accepted as having arrived in English through — of all places — a Czech play. “R.U.R.” made its public debut in Prague 102 years ago, yesterday. It would arrive in the States a year...
There was a brief, beautiful moment for a few months in 2021 when it felt like robotic investments might be immune from broader market forces. We all fundamentally and implicitly understood this to not be the case, but it was a nice moment nevertheless.
Truth is, there was a...
