San Francisco saw its first traffic accident involving an autonomous car earlier this month. It occurred on the afternoon of Jan. 8 when a Nissan Leaf autonomous vehicle operated by Cruise Automation hit a parked Toyota Prius. The car was in manual control mode at the time, but an account of the incident says it started when the automation computer steered the car incorrectly. "The vehicle began moving in its lane to the left, then began correcting to the right at which point the drive decided the take over manual control," the company said in a report to the California …

Machine learning firm Maluuba has raised about $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Emerillon Capital. “Headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, Maluuba started out with the launch of a ‘Siri for Android’ technology,” Vator.tv writes. “Maluuba has always been focused on building out voice search experiences.”

Nest got back to us, saying that the researchers assumed incorrectly what the geo-location data was for, which actually was used for the weather station, not the user’s house: “The authors initially made an incorrect assumption, which we pointed out to them before they presented their report, that the response to the weather update request contains exact location of the customer’s home. In fact, the weather information is provided by an online weather service, and the geolocation coordinates are for their remote weather stations, not our customers’ homes. The only user information that is contained in the requests is zip …

Princeton boffins have looked at the networking behavior of a bunch of Internet of Things kit and found – stop me if you've heard this one – device makers aren't paying attention. The pair, PhD student Sarthak Grover and Center for Information Technology Policy fellow Roya Ensafi, say the devices they tested obey the rules of bad security, like badly-implemented encryption and privacy leaks. Their presentation, here, was given to the Federal Trade Commission's PrivacyCon 2016. As the researchers note, novice programmers abound in the Things market, making novice mistakes, and trying to do things on hardware that can't support security. …

You've heard of the Internet of Things – the generic name given to all the various networked sensors, machines, devices and even buildings in the world – but most of those "things" stay in one place for the most part. The world is primed for an explosion of autonomous ambulatory devices, which led a team of engineers from the University of Waterloo in Canada to draft a conceptual framework for an "Internet of Drones." The authors of a paper on the concept (linked at the bottom of the page) lay out what is essentially a structure for how drone traffic could be …

BMW Group’s new venture BMW Labs portal, which went online yesterday, allows customers the chance to test in advance new services still under development and therefore play an active role in helping to shape the Group’s ConnectedDrive services. The first ConnectedDrive option to be made available via BMW Labs is the integration of the IFTTT (IF This Then That) service into BMW vehicles. IFTTT is a free-of-charge service which allows web applications and intelligent devices on the Internet of Things to be linked together. Users can create statements known as “Recipes”, which allow them free rein to combine “Triggers” with …

Retailer True Religion’s Apple Watch application enables store associates to easily sift through various sizes, styles and colors of jeans to find what a shopper might like and send the image to a monitor so the item can be easily inspected and then purchased via an on-screen bar code. True Religion worked with Aptos Inc. and Formula 3 Group to develop the new endless aisle solution, bringing the retailer’s full range of products into its 1,500 square foot stores. The Apple Watch app, called Band, integrates with the Aptos Enterprise Order Management and Mobile Store Point of Sale solutions, and …

New York City is starting to see its first LinkNYC public Wi-Fi kiosks. The Links, so called, offer up speeds upwards of 300Mbps for free. “For comparison, that’s about thirty times as fast as the internet speeds available to half of all US subscribers,” The Next Web notes. “LinkNYC was acquired last June by a consortium led by Google’s Sidewalk Labs.”

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s last CEO, is cofounding a new fitness-focused startup with Bryan Oki. Oki formerly cofounded and led another fitness platform named Fitify. “Costolo also revealed that he’s joining -- as partner -- venture capital (VC) firm Index Ventures, which has bases in San Francisco and Europe,” Venture Beat reports.    

Microsoft and Facebook have been powering forward with virtual reality technology, but at the same time it has appeared as though Google has been falling behind in this particular category. It has now been revealed that Google is making moves to form its own division that is dedicated to virtual reality tech and computing. As a central component of this effort, it has now named Sundar Pichai – the company’s CEO – as a division head, according to several sources. This represents a massive shift in control positions at the company as it simultaneously indicates that the company has a new intention to …