AI

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing and one of the most impactful media channels today. There’s a growing ad-blocking movement and key demographics are spending less time in front of TVs. Marketers have now realized that their customers trust the recommendations of people they

Ask anyone who runs a fulfillment/warehouse robotics company what companies' top motivation is for embracing automation and they'll probably cite labor shortages or shipping speeds. The looming truth of the matter boils down to one word: Amazon. And while it's true that smaller business

If there's one thing we've learned from some of our favorite YouTube shitty robots, it's that human-robot interaction can be a tricky business. Developing methods to get rigid robotic arms to perform delicate tasks around soft human bodies is easier said than done. This week, a team at

The tectonic shifts to American culture and society due to the pandemic are far from over. One of the more glaring ones is that the U.S. labor market is going absolutely haywire. Millions are unemployed, yet companies — from retail to customer service to airlines — can't find enough workers

Understanding what you will change is most important to achieve a long-lasting and successful robotic process automation transformation. There are three pillars that will be most impacted by the change: people, process and digital workers (also referred to as robots). The interaction of these three

As I mentioned at the close of last week's roundup, the biggest issue in writing this roundup on Wednesday is that sometimes news breaks on Thursday morning. Again, I'm asking the robotics community to try not make any big headlines on Thursdays. That would really help a guy out. Last week,

For years YouTube’s video-recommending algorithm has stood accused of fuelling a grab bag of societal ls by feeding users an AI-amplified diet of hate speech, political extremism and/or conspiracy junk/disinformation for the profiteering motive of trying to keep blions of eyeballs stuck to it

Algorithmic management of gig workers has landed Glovo-owned, on-demand delivery firm Foodinho in trouble in Italy where the country’s data protection authority issued a €2.6 million penalty (~$3M) yesterday after an investigation found a laundry list of problems. The delivery company has b

Yesterday, enterprise computing corporation Zebra Technologies announced its plan to acquire Fetch Robotics. The San Jose-based startup has been a mainstay in warehouse and fulfillment robotics for a number of years, offering a modular system designed to automate companies behind the scenes. The fu

We're fresh off of our big Pittsburgh event, and I'll have more thoughts on that for you next week, once we've crawled through all of the interviews, published profiles and all of that fun stuff. t  I admit that I'm also partly putting that off because there's just a ton of inv

We first covered Traptic back in 2019, when it appeared as a Battlefield finalist on stage at Disrupt SF. Today, the South Bay robotics startup is announcing some major progress. For starters, it began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot early this month. Traptic tells Tech

Zebra Technologies this morning announced its intention to purchased Bay Area-based warehouse robotics firm, Fetch. The $290 million deal finds the enterprise corporation snapping up 95% of the company, in addition to the 5% it already owns. The deal comes as interesting in warehouse and fulfillmen

Lego has worked extremely closely with Apple over the years, experimenting with unreleased iOS tech and demoing it onstage at launch events like WWDC; this has included some pretty heavy tinkering on the augmented reality ARKit platform that they’ve integrated several of their play sets with,

Add Soft Robotics to the long list of automation companies that have seen a boost in investment interest amid the pandemic. The New England-based firm announced this morning a $10 million raise that serves as an extension of the $23 million Series B it announced in January of last year. The extensi