techcrunch

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Wordpress VIP Go sites are experience outages (yes, us included)

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.”

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Now you can get the Windows next-word predicting keyboard on your iPhone. Check out Word Flow in this video!

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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. Watch us beat the heck out of each other in Marvel Battlegrounds here. 

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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. Find out more about why this mission got delayed here. 

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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.

Read more here. 

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“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.

Check out the full video here. 

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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.

Find out more here. 

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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.

Find out how it works right here. 

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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.

Read the comprehensive study here and reblog if you know a female founder!

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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.

Check it out right here. 

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We just launched a personalized news recommendations bot on Facebook Messenger. You can activate the bot on our Facebook page. You can subscribe to different topics, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send you news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most. 

Read more about out bot right here. 

We’d love to hear your feedback on the bot, so leave us a comment!

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The Tribeca Film Festival is currently underway in New York City. And while it’s best known for premiering independent feature films and documentaries, the festival is also a showcase for virtual reality and interactive entertainment, particularly at its Storyscapes event.

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Just when you were starting to get used to the way Facebook shows your News Feed, it’s time for another shake-up. This time, the social media mogul is updating the feed to highlight links to sites it thinks you’ll spend more time looking at.

The update is part of Facebook’s “Feed Quality Program,” a much bigger effort to improve everyone’s News Feed experience.

Find out more right here. 

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Scandy is aiming to make it easier to print full-color 3D prints of photographs, from sources such as depth-aware cameras and technology. If you’re shooting 360 photographs taken with the rapidly growing number of 360 cameras, Scandy can make you some really nifty spherical prints. The challenge with 360 photography is, of course, that (most) screens are flat.

Check it out! 

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Well, the Oculus Rift was the best VR headset you could buy for about a week.

The HTC Vive virtual reality headset drops today at a $799 price point just a week after Facebook’s Oculus released its highly-anticipated Rift headset. In comparison, the Vive has kind of flown under the radar outside of developer and VR junkie circles during the past couple years.

Watch our full review through right here. 

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Want to make your Tesla P90D about 20 percent faster? Sure, no worries. Tesla is now allowing P90D buyers who skipped the insane Ludicrous Mode upgrade at the time of purchase to add it to their vehicle for $10,000. The company claims the upgrades will drop the car’s quarter mile time to 10.9 seconds and 0-60 time to 2.8 seconds. For, you know, those times you’re late to your board meeting because of the traffic on Sand Hill Rd.

We drove the P90D around. Check it out. 

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Meet Kuvée, a refillable case that keeps wine fresh for up to 30 days. Kuvée aims to impress your dinner guests with a built-in touchscreen that tells you the history of the wine and also suggests food pairings. Get serving tips, receive personalized wine recommendations, and reorder directly from the device.

The Kuvée system is compatible with select California wines, including Bonny Doon and Pine Ridge.

Check out the full interview with Kuvée CEO Vijay Manwani here.