The experience is familiar to anyone who regularly cooks at home: You’re at the supermarket picking up ingredients for tonight’s dinner, but you simply cannot remember if you already have heavy cream. You do remember buying it, so you skip it at the store and pat yourself on the back for saving a few bucks and not contributing to society's insane food waste problem. Then you get home and discover: Yes, you have heavy cream, but it’s expired. Guess you’re not making that fancy dessert you had planned.

The prospect of a world with self-driving taxis might be about two years away, with a recently-closed venture capital deal for an MIT-born startup. Cambridge's nuTonomy Inc. has landed $16 million in venture funding to invest in testing software for self-driving passenger vehicles, mostly in Singapore to start. Investors include Highland Capital Partners, Fontinalis Partners and Signal Ventures. Total funding to date for the three-year-old startup is now about $20 million. "This field has been moving so quickly and we want to make sure we can move even faster as a startup," said nuTonomy's co-founder and CEO, Karl Iagnemma, in an …

Pizza Hut in Asia plans to begin piloting a new in-store experience later this year that links a humanoid robot to MasterCard’s MasterPass digital wallet via a smartphone, enabling customers to place and pay for orders. MasterCard’s lab in Singapore build the first commerce application for SoftBank Robotics’ humanoid robot named Pepper. The integration with Pepper hopes to lay the groundwork for personalized robot-driven shopping and concierge services, in-aisle checkout and omnichannel services across hotels, banks, airports as well as restaurants and other customer service industries.

It’s post time for the Churchill Downs mobile app. The horse racing venue, which annually hosts the Kentucky Derby, debuted its mobile app at the beginning of the season April 30. The free Android and iOS app allows attendees to order food and drinks for delivery to their seats, purchase general admission tickets, navigate to their seats and read profiles of the competing horses. For the navigation component of the app, Churchill Downs deployed 1,600 beacons around the racetrack. Beacons are small wireless transmitters that can detect nearby smartphones. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) market size is estimated to grow from USD 51.96 Billion in 2015 to USD 147.51 Billion by 2020 with at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of only 23.2 percent, according to a new research report published by Markets and Markets. The report based these numbers off of individual categorizes in the Internet of Things smart cities market, including Solutions (Remote Monitoring, Data Management) Platform (Application & D'evice Management) Application (Building Automation, Energy Management, Transportation). While some industry insiders see that 23.3 percent as generous number, many believe it to be far under the value of …

A class action lawsuit against Fitbit may have grown teeth following the release of a new study which claims the company's popular heart rate trackers are "highly inaccurate." Researchers at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona tested the heart rates of 43 healthy adults with Fitbit's PurePulse heart rate monitors, using the company's Surge watches and Charge HR bands on each wrist. Subjects were then hooked up to a BioHarness device that produced an electrocardiogram (ECG), to record the heart's rhythm against the data being produced by Fitbit's devices.

Unilever’s Maille mustard brand has added a dash of beacon marketing to help it target foodies in Los Angeles and Chicago grocery stores, driving sales at the point of purchase while gaining earned media for the brand’s first digital campaign in the United States. The centuries-old brand is using beacons to reach consumers with an expressed interest in food, including foodie bloggers, while they are grocery shopping via an ad designed to raise awareness of Maille and encourage viewers to look for it in the store. Working with beacon marketing network inMarket, Maille’s content is appearing in applications such as Epicurious, …

Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz lead other automakers in offering easy-to-use connected features, a study shows. However, more needs to be done to make customers aware the technology is on board because 39 percent of drivers are unaware of the connectivity options available to them, according to research from TNS and the BearingPoint Institute. "Our study shows that the German premium OEMs are so far leading the way in terms of the quality and use-ability of their features," Sarah-Jayne Williams, who is a partner at BearingPoint, said in a release. "To really exploit this new era [in connectivity], all OEMs need …

As you’re brushing your teeth in the morning you monitor a digital display mirror that shows all your relevant information for the day: Schedule of appointments, weather and battery levels of all your devices, including your phone and BMW i3 electric car in the garage. As you walk into your kitchen and turn on your coffee machine, that’s the cue your car has been waiting for to turn itself on and begin to warm up. Time to go: With a swipe on your touch-enabled car key, the vehicle detaches from its charging unit, pulls out of the garage and up …

An Internet of Things (IoT) sensor that can measure five different sets of data has been unveiled by beacon technology firm Netclearance. The mBeaconSense sensor can measure temperature, vibration, acceleration, magnetic force and light. It can be set up to record data consistently or record notable spikes in temperature, for example, or if the sensor is moving at a certain speed.