SoftBank is buying robotics firms Boston Dynamics and Schaft from Alphabet Here’s a surprise turn of events: SoftBank — maker of the friendly Pepper robot and a major M&A player in the tech world — has just announced that it is acquiring two more robotics companies from Google owner Alphabet as part of its own deeper move into the field: it is buying Big Dog developer Boston Dynamics and the secre

Sources tell us that Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform that hosts data science and machine learning competitions. Details about the transaction remain somewhat vague, but given that Google is hosting its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco this week, the official announcement could come as early as tomorrow. Reached by phone, Kaggle co-founder CEO Anthony Goldbloom declined to deny that th

Panoramio, the location-centric photo sharing service Google acquired in 2007, will show its last image on November 4. For the longest time, Google used Panoramio to augment its Google Maps and Google Earth services with crowdsourced imagery. Now that the company has integrated photo uploads into the Google Maps mobile apps and launched its Local Guides program, Panoramio clearly isn’t a priority

A DIY Raspberry Pi Hack Lets You Build The Smallest Gaming Cabinet In The World A hacker called [Sprite_tm] AKA Jeroen Domburg built his own teeny, tiny Raspberry Pi-based MAME cabinet using some laser-cut plexiglass, some custom controls, and a eeny, weenie 2.4-inch TFT display. The best part? The cabinet even has a small OLED marquee at the top that shows the current game in play. The instructio

Charts: Facebook’s IPO In Historical Context And Its Share Price Over Time Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise about $16 billion at the final price of $38 a share. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. Here’s how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data. Then

Google Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter, Launches Its Knowledge Graph Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by