You might have notice something funny if you visited TechCrunch dot com this morning (aside form the usual dryly hilarious tech commentary, that is). Our site, along with others, was hit by a major issue to WordPress’s VIP Go platform. For now, you’ll have to settle for a potted plant in place of our normal elucidating commentary. At least the image is reasonably zen.
We, like the rest of the impacted sites, are investigating the issue at present.
The company offered a comment to TechCrunch this morning, noting, “We’re currently experiencing issues affecting sites hosted on the VIP Go platform. This is affecting multiple sites. Our team is working swiftly to resolve this across all affected sites.” Essentially the same thing it posted to its own service site this morning.
The issues are impacting other large sites as well, including 9to5 Mac, which noted that it has “reverted to default Wordpress theme until the issue is resolved.”
Disney launches Marvel Battlegrounds, a new four-player superhero fighting game built on top of their Disney Infinity platform. TechCrunch got an early peek… and things got intense.
NASA announced that it will send its next lander to Mars, known as the InSight Mars lander, in May of 2018. InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport, is an international mission designed to help us understand how rocky planets, like Mars and the Earth, formed and evolved.
Technology destroying jobs is something most Americans accept will happen within their lifetimes, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, just not to their own jobs — which most believe won’t change significantly in the next 50 years.
“Drones are hard to use but they have potential, so we want to remove cost and friction from commercial use of drones,” says Airmada CEO Dan Danay, the ex-Israeli Naval Officer and Sloan School of Business grad. The solution is to use small drones to deliver small things at a fraction of the cost and let the launch boats continue to deliver larger items.
A list containing hundreds of Spotify account credentials – including emails, usernames, passwords, account type and other details – has popped up on the website Pastebin, in what appears to be a possible security breach. Spotify says that it “has not been hacked” and its “user records are secure.” According to many of the users we spoke to so far, this issue occurred last week.
University of Florida held the world’s first brain-controlled drone race. While the drones didn’t exactly zoom by, 16 pilots used their brainwaves to fly drones down a 10-yard indoor course.
We looked at the top 100 venture firms globally to study women in venture capital and their impact on female founders. We found that 7% of partners at top 100 venture firms are women. Between 2010 and 2015, 10 percent of venture dollars globally, a total of $31.5 billion, funded startups that reported at least one female founder.
LeEco wheels out its own self-driving electric concept car. CEO Jia Yueting hailed it on his phone using voice recognition, a nod to the company’s plan to market the LeSEE as a sort of futuristic, autonomous taxi.
The company announced a top speed of 130 MPH, an exterior display on the front of the car, a foldaway steering wheel, back-of-seat displays and isolated music playback.