Technical

Technology has come a long way in 2021. There’s widespread mRNA vaccines ! An asteroid-deflecting space mission! A very powerful laptop with a very controversial notch! But it’s unfortunately easier to think about the cringiest moments of the year than it is to remember times when we marveled at indoor farming robots .  So hop aboard the choo-choo- cheugy train. We promise, this isn’t just a list of things Elon Musk tweeted in 2021. Facebook is so Meta Facebook changes its corporate branding to Meta The biggest and most eye-wateringly silly rebrand of the year is uncontested: Facebook, one of the most recognizable names in the world, changed its name to Meta in order to distract from unflaggingly awful decisions and the irreparable harm it has caused countless people focus on the “metaverse,” something no one asked for and certainly no one wanted Facebook of all companies to take the lead on. Block this out Square is changing its name to Block Meta’s n...

New Zealand, a country of 5 million people in the South Pacific, has witnessed a shifting tech startup landscape over the last couple of years. While some major global companies like Xero, Rocket Lab, LanzaTech and Seequent have shined a spotlight on New Zealand’s startup scene, the country historically hasn’t had access to much venture capital. As a country with an economy that primarily exports agricultural products, the New Zealand startup world has usually relied on funding from a community of high-net-worth individuals and family offices who probably made their millions through real estate or farming. In March last year, the New Zealand government launched Elevate, an NZD $300 million fund of funds program that’s been providing millions to local VCs to invest into the startup community to fill the early-stage capital gap. At the same time, foreign investors have been flooding onto the scene, attracted to the small country that has a reputation for producing great companies. Foun...

Just when we thought things couldn’t get more unexpected than a pandemic that shut down the world in 2020, 2021 entered the chat. As we started to navigate a “new normal,” we also started challenging the systems around us with advancements in crypto, web3, the metaverse and so much more. When looking at our top-performing stories of the year, a lot stood out. Some stories were to be expected, like product launches and major outages (ahem, Facebook ). Others were deep analyses and interviews on different sectors of the industry. It was hard to narrow down a top 10. Instead of spitting out a list of TechCrunch’s top-performing stories, we asked our staff to vote on their favorite stories of the year, added evergreen content and our top TC+ articles for a well-rounded 2021 list. Enjoy! Staff picks 1. Air conditioning is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. It’s also killing the 21st What started as a small Twitter Spaces interview with about 180 listeners quickly (a...

This is always a strange week — that liminal space between the Christmas holiday and New Year. Romjul — or “Dead Week” — as they call it in Norway (thanks Haje). It’s a time for quiet and reflection on the year that was for some — and CES embargoes for others. We’re currently focused on the latter, while trying to stay mindful of the former here at Actuator HQ. We devoted much of the past few weeks to rounding up some of the year’s key trends in the space: delivery, warehouse/fulfillment and food prep. We’ve also spoken to a number of key people in the industry, including CMU robotics head Matthew Johnson-Roberson and Boston Dynamics CEO Rob Playter , OpenRobotics CEO Brian Gerkey and iRobot CEO Colin Angle . Image Credits: Paul Marotta/Getty Images for TechCrunch This week we’ve asked MIT CSAIL Director Daniela Rus to weigh in on the matter. She’s really gone above and beyond in her responses for this last Actuator of 2021, so I’m going to let her kick things off. What was th...

Two more auto giants have added their names to the growing list of big companies opting out of an in-person CES with less than a week remaining before kickoff. Yesterday, Mercedes confirmed that it would be skipping the physical event. “As the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and guests are our highest priority,” the company said in a statement . “Due to the large group of participants and the different country-specific regulations, a solid, safe and harmless planning for all participants is unfortunately not be feasible in the current situation. We deeply regret this decision but consider it necessary.” Today, BMW followed suit, issuing a media release , announcing a shift to a virtual press conference. The carmaker’s statement was short and sweet, noting, “For many years, the BMW Group has been presenting innovations at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Due to the pandemic situation, the BMW Group will move all planned media activities at CES...

This year was rife with ransomware . 2021 witnessed the attack on IT software company Kaseya that knocked 1,500 organizations offline, the CD Projekt Red hack that saw threat actors make off with source code for games including Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, and several high-profile attacks targeting big-name tech companies, from Olympus to Fujitsu  and Panasonic . It was also the year that hackers seized global attention by targeting critical infrastructure, hacking American oil pipeline system Colonial Pipeline , meat-processing giant JBS and Iowa New Cooperative, an alliance of farmers that sells corn and soy, to name just a few. After the attacks led to prolonged shutdowns, inflated oil prices and ran the risk of food shortages, the U.S. government began to take notice — after years of inaction — and scored some rare wins in what once seemed like an unwinnable battle against the ransomware epidemic. It began in April when the Department of Justice formed the Ransomwar...

The future of lidar is uncertain unless, as Voyant hopes to do, its price and size are reduced to fractions of their current values. As long as lidars are sandwich-sized devices that cost thousands, they won’t be ubiquitous — so Voyant has raised some cash to bring its smaller, cheaper, more easily manufactured, yet still highly capable lidar to production. When I wrote up the company’s seed round back in 2019 , the goal was more or less to shrink lidar down from sandwich to fingernail size using silicon photonics. But the real challenge faced by nearly every lidar company is getting the price down. Between a strong laser, capable receptor, and a mechanical or optical means of directing the beam, it just isn’t easy making something cheap enough that, like an LED or touchscreen, you can easily put several of them in a vehicle that costs less than $30K. CEO Peter Stern joined the company just as COVID was getting started, and they were looking for a way to turn a promising prototype de...

Consumer electronics are a bad metric for gauging the passage of time. And, frankly, Consumer Electronics Shows are considerably worse. I’ve attended well into the double digits of CES and have largely experienced them in similar manner: as a week-long flurry of news and shiny gadgets, filing news from trailers, press centers, hotel rooms and convention center hallway floors in a sometimes quixotic attempt to define the year’s trends. The halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and its many satellite Expo Halls and hotel suites are thick with the ghosts of good intentions and forced obsolescence. That’s the nature of the category. Some of the devices that have become our daily drivers over the past decade debuted at CES, but more often than not, devices come and go — if they ever end up making it to store shelves in the first place. CES 2022 will be a strange one — a fact that has more to do with extenuating global circumstances than anything happening on the show floor (though, la...

For the last two years, many of us have only been able to see our elderly relatives through screens, watching them grow older, trading physical distance for their safety. More than anything else, the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of aging people. The tech community—founders, investors, journalists—all need to pay more attention to “age-tech.” “Age-tech” isn’t a niche sector, and aging populations aren’t limited to a few countries. According to a recent World Health Organization report , 1 in 6 people will be aged 60 years or over by 2030, while the number of people aged 80 years or over is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050 to 426 million. “While this shift in distribution of a country’s population toward older ages—known as population aging—started in high-income countries (for example Japan 30% of the population is already over 60 years old), it is now low- and middle-income countries that are experiencing the greatest change,” the report said. “By 2050, two-th...