Hasta La Gadget!

Many had a lot of hopes for the Essential Phone. This is because Essential was founded by Andy Rubin who helped create Android, so who better to create an Android phone than one of the creators of Android, right? Unfortunately the device wasn’t the smashing success many had hoped for, and now it looks like things are looking a tad bleak for the company.

A report from Bloomberg has confirmed that Essential has laid off about 30% of its workforce. An Essential spokeswoman has verified this in a statement that reads, “This has been a difficult decision to make. We are very sorry for the impact on our colleagues who are leaving the company and are doing everything we can to help them with their future careers. We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product.”

It is unclear what this will mean for the company moving forward, but based on the statement it seems that the company still has plans for future products. Earlier this year there was a report in which it claimed that the Essential Phone 2 was cancelled and that the company could be thinking of selling themselves off.

Rubin had responded to the reports back then by saying that the company had multiple products in the works, and that by cancelling the Essential Phone 2 it does not mean that they are done. In any case it remains to be seen what products the company might come up with in the future.

Essential Has Cut 30% Of Its Staff , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

In the connected future will anyone truly own any thing? Banksy’s artworld shocker performance piece, earlier this month, when a canvas of his went under the hammer at Sothebys in London, suggests not.

Immediately the Girl with Balloon canvas sold — for a cool ~$1.1M (£860,000) — it proceeded to self-destruct, via a shredder built into the frame, leaving a roomful of designer glasses paired with a lot of shock and awe, before facial muscles twisted afresh as new calculations kicked in.

As we reported at the time, the anonymous artist had spent years planning this particular prank. Yet the stunt immediately inflated the value of the canvas — some suggested by as much as 50% — despite the work itself being half shredded, with just a heart-shaped balloon left in clear view.

The damaged canvas even instantly got a new title: Love Is in the Bin.

Thereby undermining what might otherwise be interpreted as a grand Banksy gesture critiquing the acquisitive, money-loving bent of the art world. After all, street art is his big thing.

However it turns out that the shredder malfunctioned. And had in fact been intended to send the whole canvas into the bin the second after it sold.

Or, at least, so the prankster says — via a ‘director’s cut’ video posted to his YouTube channel yesterday (and given the title: ‘Shred the love’, which is presumably what he wanted the resulting frame-sans-canvas to be called).

“In rehearsals it worked every time…” runs a caption towards the end of the video, before footage of a complete shredding is shown…

The video also appears shows how the canvas was triggered to get to work cutting.

After the hammer goes down the video cuts to a close-up shot of a pair of man’s hands pressing a button on a box with a blinking red LED — presumably sending a wireless signal to shreddy to get to work…

The suggestion, also from the video (which appears to show close up shots of some of the reactions of people in the room watching the shredding taking place in real time), is that the man — possibly Banksy himself — attended the auction in person and waited for the exact moment to manually trigger the self-destruct mechanism.

There are certainly lots of low power, short range radio technologies that could have been used for such a trigger scenario. Although the artwork itself was apparently gifted to its previous owner by Banksy all the way back in 2006. So the built-in shredder, batteries and radio seemingly had to sit waiting for their one-time public use for 12 years. Unless, well, Banksy snuck into the friend’s house to swap out batteries periodically.

Whatever the exact workings of the mechanism underpinning the stunt, the act is of course the point.

It’s almost as if Banksy is trying to warn us that technology is eroding ownership, concentrating power and shifting agents of control.

Google’s third-gen Pixel phones are now out so, naturally, it’s time to tear them down. The Pixel 3 XL unsurprisingly got first dibs because of how it’s a wee bit more interesting compared to its smaller sibling. THat’s not to say the Pixel 3 has no interesting stories to share. In fact, it has a very interesting one discovered by … Continue reading

Spotify’s been busy announcing a bunch of new features this week, including an app for Google’s Wear OS and better direct uploads for artists — and it’s made some changes to Spotify Premium, too. Starting today, subscribers can enjoy streamlined nav…

#CEATEC2018 – The construction site can be a dangerous place due to all the heavy materials being used, and where slipping up on safety can result in disastrous consequences. We’re sure that eventually there will be a day when we can construct buildings 100% safely, but in the meantime Japanese company Komatsu might have a way to help.

The company, specializing in heavy machinery used for construction, took the wraps off a self-driving construction vehicle at CEATEC 2018. The company is looking to build vehicles such as crawler dump vehicles and excavators that are self-driving. This will help solve several problems in the construction industry.

This includes being able to mitigate the shortage of construction workers, and it can also help to make construction sites safer as self-driving vehicles can negate some of the mistakes that human drivers make. At the moment self-driving technology is something that many companies are looking into, even Apple who seems to be quite invested and interested in the technology.

This isn’t the first time Komatsu has explored the idea of self-driving industrial vehicles. Several years ago they debuted a robotic mining truck that did away with the need for a human driver, so it’s not surprising that they are looking to expand their lineup.

Komatsu Unveils Self-Driving Construction Vehicles , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.