Tag: latest tech innovations

  • Another robotaxi operation heads to Texas and Archer scores $300M for its defense mission

    Another robotaxi operation heads to Texas and Archer scores $300M for its defense mission


    Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

    Raise your hand if you’re exhausted by the firehose of information coming from every direction. Yeah, me too. 

    At TechCrunch, we’re focused on helping readers (that’s you!) become informed; that’s different than blasting information your way. Instead, we work to answer the “Why should I care?” question and provide important context. 

    Take the Department of Transportation’s decision to pause funding for a $5 billion EV charging infrastructure program. As senior reporter Sean O’Kane notes in his coverage, this is more than just the latest attempt from the Trump administration to hack away at federally funded renewable energy projects around the country, which has been a stated priority of the president.

    It also illustrates the growing conflict between Elon Musk’s politics and his car company’s goal of advancing the transition to sustainable energy. Tesla, which Musk runs and is the largest shareholder of, received $31 million in funding from the program. 

    In other how-we-are-keeping-you-informed actions, we also monitor certain topics of interest and provide updates when warranted. Reporter Rebecca Bellan has been keeping track of Tesla’s Dojo program, updating it on the regular. Check it out. 

    A little bird

    blinky cat bird green
    Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

    A little bird reached out to me recently to share this nugget, which was confirmed via a LinkedIn post. Brian Lerner, a former Apple software engineer who spent the past four years at Built Robotics, was hired as director of factory software at Ford. 

    Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com, Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com, or Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com. Or check out these instructions to learn how to contact us via encrypted messaging apps or SecureDrop.

    Deals!

    money the station
    Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

    Dual-use technology — meaning it can be used by civilians and military — attracted quite a bit of investment in 2023 and 2024. This year is shaping up to be even bigger as founders take advantage of President Donald Trump’s platform. 

    Archer Aviation, the developer of electric vertical and take-off vehicles, is the latest company to tweak its mission in order to capture those sweet, sweet dual-use dollars. 

    Archer Aviation, which went public in September 2021 via a special purpose acquisition merger, raised $300 million from institutional investors, including BlackRock and Wellington. The funds will mainly be used to accelerate the work Archer is doing with Anduril to build a hybrid craft (VTOL).

    The raise brings Archer’s total funding to around $3.36 billion. And as reporter Rebecca Bellan noted, this fresh capital comes off the back of a $430 million round in December to fund its new Archer Defense program. 

    Reminder: It wasn’t too long ago that Archer’s go-to-market strategy was an air taxi network across several cities in the U.S. and abroad. 

    Other deals that got my attention …

    Auto Hauler Exchange, the Michigan startup that developed a digital marketplace for vehicle transportation, raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by MHS Capital. Golden Ventures, which led Auto Hauler Exchange’s seed round, also invested in the Series A round.

    Endera, an electric bus manufacturer in Ohio, raised $49 million in equity and debt. The round included a $36 million equity investment led by Magnetar. Pulse Fund also participated. The total also included a $13 million credit facility. 

    GreenSpark Software, a New York City-based startup building software for the metal recycling industry, disclosed last month it raised $9.4 million from investors Zero Infinity Partners, Third Prime, Bienville Capital, and several unnamed strategic investors. We now know that BMW i Ventures is one of them. 

    Innoviz, the lidar company, raised $40 million from institutional investors at a share price of $1.39 — a discount that caused its stock price to fall steeply. As of Wednesday, the company’s stock had fallen 37% since its Friday closing price of $1.59.

    JLR is expanding its U.S. technology hub in Portland with a $180 million investment that will be spread out over the next decade. The hub is developing the next generation of connected cars and what it described as “autonomous driving technologies” in future JLR vehicles. History lesson: JLR opened its tech hub in 2014 and expanded the facility in 2016, 2017, and 2024.

    Revel, the electric shared moped-turned-EV-charging-infrastructure startup, secured a $60 million loan from New York’s clean energy investment fund NY Green Bank to more than triple its current public fast-charging network in New York City. 

    Self Inspection, a startup based in San Diego that has developed an AI-powered vehicle inspection service, raised $3 million in a seed round co-led by Costanoa Ventures and DVx Ventures, the firm run by former Tesla president Jon McNeill. Joining the round was Westlake Financial, which handles more than 1 million vehicle transactions annually.

    Notable reads and other tidbits

    Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

    ADAS

    BYD unveiled “God’s Eye,” an advanced driver-assistance system that will be installed on its entire model lineup, including its $9,600 Seagull hatchback. 

    Tesla won a defamation lawsuit against Zhang Yazhou, who in February 2021 was a passenger in a Tesla Model 3 car that allegedly crashed due to faulty brakes, resulting in a four-day hospital stay for both her parents. Tesla has finally released telemetry data from her car, which apparently showed that the brakes had functioned as intended.

    Autonomous vehicles

    Aurora Innovation is still on track to commercially deploy its autonomous trucks beginning in April 2025, according to its Q4 shareholder letter. Aurora was supposed to launch at the end of 2024 but pushed back the timeline to validate its self-driving technology.

    Lyft plans to bring fully autonomous robotaxis, powered by Mobileye, to its app “as soon as 2026” in Dallas, with more markets to follow. Lyft isn’t spilling details about which carmaker it will partner with; we do know that Marubeni, a Japanese conglomerate with experience managing fleets, will own and finance the Mobileye-equipped vehicles that will show up on the Lyft app.

    The Lyft-Mobileye deal got me thinking about Texas. It wasn’t that long ago that California and Arizona were the main hotbeds of robotaxi activity. But Texas is quickly becoming a hub, not just of testing, but also of commercial operations. Austin is one Texas AV hot spot: Tesla is planning to launch its driverless ride-hail service in the city this coming June, and Waymo and Uber are set to launch a service soon. Avride has also set up shop in Austin. Meanwhile, self-driving truck companies Aurora and Kodiak Robotics also have a footprint in Texas. This TechCrunch article from 2023 posed a question that we may finally answer in 2025.  

    May Mobility launched its first fully driverless commercial service in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. May has a different operations strategy than Waymo or Zoox. This isn’t a free-wheeling service that goes anywhere. Instead, it has (for now) eight pre-determined stops. 

    Waymo continues to expand its robotaxi service areas, this time in Los Angeles. The company has added 10 square miles to include Westchester and parts of Inglewood and Crenshaw, giving customers access to popular destinations like SoFi Stadium and HHLA Entertainment.

    Electric vehicles, charging, & batteries

    Mercedes-Benz is taking its EV charging network to Canada, starting with Vancouver this year and then to stations in metro Toronto in 2026. The German automaker has 300 charging stalls in operation and under construction in 11 U.S. states. In total, more than 2,500 charging stalls will be deployed between Canada and the U.S.

    Rivian will sell its commercial electric vans to any U.S. business that wants one — more than a year since ending an exclusivity deal with backer Amazon.

    People

    Jonathan Morrison, an Apple executive, has been picked to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Morrison was chief counsel for NHTSA during Trump’s first term. He was previously president of Auto Advisory Services and director of legal and regulatory affairs at the California New Car Dealers Association. 

    Ride-hailing and gig economy

    Earnings season is here, and the two top ride-hailing companies, Lyft and Uber, have reported their fourth-quarter and full-year earnings. Here’s a quick breakdown:

    Lyft reported record growth and its first full-year GAAP profitability for 2024 with a net income of $22.8 million, compared to a net loss of $340.3 million in 2023. That’s good news, but investors paid more attention to the company’s lower-than-expected guidance for gross bookings in the first quarter. 

    Lyft says Q1 is just a slower season, but the company also anticipates bookings to be negatively affected by the loss of its partnership with Delta, which Uber has snagged. Another interesting tidbit: Lyft’s board authorized $500 million in share buybacks, the company’s first time doing such a program.

    Meanwhile, Uber beat revenue expectations in the fourth quarter, growing its revenue 20% to $11.96 billion. Its adjusted EBITDA was $1.84 billion for Q4 and $6.84 billion for the full year. Still, shares fell after the company reported that it missed analyst expectations on EPS and offered soft guidance.

    The company expects gross bookings to hit between $42 billion and $43.5 billion in Q1, which would be less than the $44.2 billion Uber recorded in Q4 2024. Uber CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah cited currency headwinds and impact from the recent Los Angeles fires and “extreme weather in January.”

    This week’s wheels

    This newsletter is getting long, so no this week’s wheels! Stay tuned for new vehicles in the coming months. 

    What is “This week’s wheels”? It’s a chance to learn about the different transportation products we’re testing, whether it’s an electric or hybrid car, an e-bike, or even a ride in an autonomous vehicle.


  • How to import photos using the Image Capture app on Mac

    How to import photos using the Image Capture app on Mac


    Image Capture is Apple’s image acquisition app for grabbing pictures from your camera or scanner. Here’s how to use it in a variety of settings.

    While Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and the Photos apps in iOS and macOS are the standard for image acquisition and processing today, there’s another way to get images into your Mac: Apple’s Image Capture app.

    Image Capture has been around in macOS for decades and it’s fairly easy to use.

    The reason to use Image Capture in macOS is for ingesting images from third-party cameras and scanners. These include DSLR and compact point-and-shoot cameras, as well as flatbed USB and WiFi scanners or multifunction printers.

    macOS now supports most common drivers for these devices and setting them up is a breeze. Though you can still download and install third-party drivers and apps from device manufacturers.

    Third-party cameras

    macOS and its modern driver subsystem have support for most third-party cameras built-in for use over USB or WiFi. The USB standard includes a class driver for cameras (Base Class 06h Still Image). When you plug a digital camera into your Mac over USB, macOS automatically loads the class driver for you so it can communicate with the device.

    A class driver is a generic software component designed to communicate with an entire class of devices. WiFi camera connections work in a similar manner, but use networking protocols or protocol bridges to connect to the device.

    Some cameras may appear as composite devices since they are actually several devices in one. For example, as a camera and a card reader.

    For the most part, with consumer and pro-grade cameras (and webcams), you don’t need to do anything special: just plug the device in or connect over WiFi and turn it on. For some cameras, you may need to download and install additional software from the manufacturer’s website.

    It’s also a good idea to make sure your camera’s firmware is up to date.

    For some camera brands, such as Canon, you must first disable WiFi on the camera in order for its USB connection to work.

    All USB-compliant still imaging devices have a USB base class ID of “06h”, a subclass of “01h” and a protocol value of “01h”.

    You can also use Image Capture to import videos from most cameras. There’s also a USB video device class.

    Camera image acquisition

    When you plug a camera into your Mac and turn it on, macOS should launch Image Capture automatically. If it doesn’t, double-click it in the /Applications folder at the root of your Mac’s Startup Disk to launch it.

    On the left in Image Capture’s main window, you’ll see a “Devices” and “Shared” category. This is where connected devices appear. To access the images on a device, single-click it in the sidebar on the left.

    Slect a camera in the sidebar to see its images and import them.
    The Image Capture window with a camera selected.

    When you do, Image Capture will load thumbnails of all the images on the device. You can scale the thumbnail size in Image Capture by dragging the slider control in the toolbar at the top of the window.

    You can also view the thumbnails in a list or grid view by clicking the toolbar buttons. There are also controls for rotating and deleting images.

    To select where to import images to on your Mac click the Import To: popup menu, then select either one of the standard destinations, a custom folder location, or select Build web page. If you select the web page option, a new folder will be created in your Pictures folder inside your user’s home folder.

    To select which images to import, hold down the Command key, click individual images, and click Download or click the Download All button.

    Image Capture will begin copying the images from your camera to the selected location on your Mac. When finished, navigate to the destination folder to see the downloaded image files.

    Image capture from webcams and even USB-compliant microscopes is roughly the same as for consumer or pro cameras.

    Scanners and multifunction printers

    If you have a flatbed USB scanner or a USB or WiFi multifunction printer, you can use Image Capture to acquire its scanned images.

    A little setup for printers and scanners is needed first: open the System Settings app and click Printers & Scanners->Add Printer, Scanner, or Fax

    This opens the Add Printer window. Click the device you want to add from the list under Name, give the device a location name in the Location: text field, and click Add.

    Adding printers and scanners works over WiFi as well if your device supports AirPlay or Apple’s Bonjour network discovery service. The device must be on the same network as your Mac.

    Multifunction printers also contain scanners built in.
    A multifunction printer with WiFi enabled.

    When adding new printers or scanners, macOS will look for the matching class driver automatically and activate it for the device. If macOS doesn’t find a matching driver, you may need to download one from the device manufacturer’s website and install it, but this is rare.

    Once your device has been added, it will appear in the Printers & Scanners pane in System Settings. To use a printer or scanner click it in the pane.

    System settings interface showing a printer set as default.
    Click a device name in System Settings to open its sheet.

    You can also Control-click a device name in the pane to get a popup menu with options for removing the device, setting it as the default, and resetting the printing system.

    Once your device is installed, click its name in the System Settings app pane, and a new sheet will appear with several controls:

    Computer screen showing printer settings.
    The device sheet showing the Open Scanner button.

    Click Open Scanner… to launch Image Capture for the device. When Image Capture opens it will automatically select the device and start an overview scan.

    This gives you a preview of what’s on the scanner’s bed.

    If your device is a multifunction printer, the sheet also has buttons for seeing its supply levels and sharing it on a network, if your device supports it. If your device is using WiFi or is shared on a network, it appears under the “Shared” section in the sidebar.

    When the overview scan completes, the Image Capture window shows an image of what was scanned on the flatbed. You can drag and make a selection around the image to crop what is scanned.

    Scanner interface with document preview and settings, including scan mode.
    An overview scan showing the scanned image with handles for cropping.

    There are also controls in the window for switching to a document feeder, setting black and white, grayscale, or color, setting resolution, and file name, type, and location. To restart the overview scan click the Overview button.

    Depending on what features your device supports you may also be able to combine multiple scanned pages into one document.

    Once you’re satisfied with the settings, click the Scan button. This starts the full-resolution scan. For very high-resolution scans it may take some time as the scan head moves slowly when recording more pixels.

    When the scan completes, images will be saved at the location and in the format you specified. You can now open the file to view it.

    If you want a simpler interface without all the advanced controls, click the Hide Details button. This switches to a simpler UI with just a few controls: Location, Size, Show Details, and Scan.

    If your device has a document feeder, there’s also a checkbox for that in simple mode.

    After a scan completes, the Scan Results window appears. This window doesn’t do much except show the file, name, and a magnifier icon. If you click the magnifier the file’s location will be revealed in the Finder.

    Click the magnifier to reveal the scan in the Finder.
    Scan Results window.

    Probing the bus

    If you have an Apple Developer account, you can log in to the Apple Developer website and download an older tool called USB Prober. This tool allows you to peek at the USB hardware hierarchy on your Mac (part of the IORegistry) to see details about the specifics of each attached device.

    To see the USB portion of the IORegistry on your Mac in USB Prober, click the IORegistry tab.

    If you’re using macOS Sequoia and want to see the bus logs, you’ll need to install an additional Kernel extension which USB Prober will prompt you to install.

    Each USB device listed can be a hub, a display, or a device. Each device has a company and product ID, a port number, a device descriptor, and a configuration descriptor.

    USB Prober displays all USB devices connected to your Mac.
    Running USB Prober to see all USB devices on a Mac.

    The device descriptor contains most of the info about a specific device. Some USB devices can be composite devices.

    To see all USB hubs and devices connected to your Mac click the Bus Probe tab.

    If you have a camera connected it may be listed as a USB card reader or composite device since some cameras don’t export any USB interface other than storage.

    Image Capture makes it easy to import images from a device into your Mac. Apple was wise to keep the app’s interface simple over the years and not add too much to it.


  • Alien: Rogue Incursion Meta Quest 3 review: Brilliant gameplay marred by one big problem

    Alien: Rogue Incursion Meta Quest 3 review: Brilliant gameplay marred by one big problem


    Alien: Rogue Incursion is one of the finest examples of how to cleverly adapt a famous movie IP into a VR game — that is if you can get past the poor performance and even worse visual quality. It’s the latest Meta Quest 3 game from veteran VR developer Survios, known best for the Creed series of VR and non-VR games, plus a handful of VR classics like Raw Data and Sprint Vector.

    AC thVRsday

    AC thVRsday logo

    In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.

    While the game was released on PC VR and the PSVR 2 on December 19, 2024, the Meta Quest 3 version was delayed two months, almost certainly to remake most of the game’s visual assets to fit better on Quest. Aside from lower-quality assets when compared to the PlayStation or PC releases, Survios also tweaked the lighting in many areas to work better for the Quest 3’s screens and power.


  • Rate Your Tablets at Home or Work to WIN

    Rate Your Tablets at Home or Work to WIN


    Take the Tablets Survey


    Take other PCMag surveys. Each completed survey is a chance to win a $250 Amazon gift card.


    OFFICIAL SWEEPSTAKES RULES

    NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Readers’ Choice Sweepstakes (the “Sweepstakes”) is governed by these official rules (the “Sweepstakes Rules”). The Sweepstakes begins on December 6, 2024, at 12:00 AM ET and ends on March 2, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET (the “Sweepstakes Period”).

    SPONSOR: Ziff Davis, LLC, with an address of 360 Park Ave South, Floor 17, New York, NY 10010 (the “Sponsor”).

    ELIGIBILITY: This Sweepstakes is open to individuals who are eighteen (18) years of age or older at the time of entry who are legal residents of the fifty (50) United States of America or the District of Columbia. By entering the Sweepstakes as described in these Sweepstakes Rules, entrants represent and warrant that they are complying with these Sweepstakes Rules (including, without limitation, all eligibility requirements), and that they agree to abide by and be bound by all the rules and terms and conditions stated herein and all decisions of Sponsor, which shall be final and binding.

    All previous winners of any sweepstakes sponsored by Sponsor during the nine (9) month period prior to the Selection Date are not eligible to enter. Any individuals (including, but not limited to, employees, consultants, independent contractors and interns) who have, within the past six (6) months, held employment with or performed services for Sponsor or any organizations affiliated with the sponsorship, fulfillment, administration, prize support, advertisement or promotion of the Sweepstakes (“Employees”) are not eligible to enter or win. Immediate Family Members and Household Members are also not eligible to enter or win. “Immediate Family Members” means parents, step-parents, legal guardians, children, step-children, siblings, step-siblings, or spouses of an Employee. “Household Members” means those individuals who share the same residence with an Employee at least three (3) months a year.

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    One (1) $250 Amazon.com gift code via email, valued at approximately two hundred fifty dollars ($250).

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  • High altitude and hard falls: how I mastered skiing at 40

    High altitude and hard falls: how I mastered skiing at 40


    You might think that someone like me, who did everything from 100-mile ultramarathons in Mongolia and bikepacking through Wales to trail running in the Dolomites and eFoiling in the South of England, must have mastered the art of skiing. After all, I turned 40 last year, which is plenty of time to tick something like skiing off the bucket list.

    Well, that’s not the case. I’ve never skied before, partially because we never had the money to go on ski trips when I was young, and it hasn’t come up later in life. So imagine my excitement when Helly Hansen approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: did I want to learn to ski in Verbier?


  • Edge AI has significant business potential – here’s why

    Edge AI has significant business potential – here’s why



    The rapid evolution of tech, and especially AI, has brought us to the era of edge computing, an approach in which data is processed closer to its source rather than relying entirely on distant cloud servers.

    At the forefront of this trend is ‘edge AI’, where AI models and algorithms are deployed on local devices to deliver immediate insights and actions. The approach is being fueled by advancements in efficient large language models (LLMs) such as DeepSeek, as well as small language models, so-called tiny AI, and the integration of neural processing units (NPUs) in modern hardware.


  • Best desktop PC computer deals for February 2025

    Best desktop PC computer deals for February 2025




  • Fast break AI: How Databricks helped the Pacers slash ML costs 12,000X% while speeding up insights

    Fast break AI: How Databricks helped the Pacers slash ML costs 12,000X% while speeding up insights


    Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More


    Stats might be everything in basketball — but for Pacers Sports and Entertainment (PS&E), data about fans is just as valuable. 

    Yet while the parent company of the Indianapolis Pacers (NBA), the Indiana Fever (WNBA) and the Indiana Mad Ants (NBA G League) was pumping untold amounts of it into a $100,000-a-year machine learning (ML) platform to generate predictive models around such factors as pricing and ticket demand, the insights weren’t coming fast enough. 

    Jared Chavez, manager of data engineering and strategy, set out to change that, making the move to Databricks on Salesforce a year-and-a-half ago. 

    Now? His team is performing the same range of predictive projects with careful compute configurations to gain critical insights into fan behavior — for just $8 a year. It’s a jaw-dropping, seemingly unthinkable decrease Chavez credits largely to his team’s ability to reduce ML compute to near-infinitesimal amounts.  

    “We’re very good at optimizing our compute and figuring out exactly how far we can push down the limit to get our models to run,” he told VentureBeat. “That’s really what we’ve been known for with Databricks.” 

    PS&E cuts OpEx by 98%

    In addition to its three basketball teams, the Indianapolis-based PS&E operates a Pacers Gaming esports business, hosts March Madness games and runs a busy, 300-plus day event business through the Gainbridge Fieldhouse arena (concerts, comedy shows, rodeos, other sporting events). Further, the company just last month announced plans to build a $78 million Indiana Fever Sports Performance Center, which will be connected by skybridge to the arena and a parking garage (expected to open in 2027). 

    All this makes for a mind-boggling amount of data — and data sprawl. From a data infrastructure standpoint, Chavez pointed out that, up until two years ago, the organization hosted two completely independent warehouses built on Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Different teams across the business all used their own form of analytics, and tooling and skill sets varied wildly. 

    While Azure Synapse did a great job connecting to external platforms, it was cost-prohibitive for an organization of PS&E’s size, he explained. Also, integrating the company’s ML platform with Microsoft Azure Data Studio led to fragmentation. 

    To address these problems, Chavez switched over to Databricks AutoML and the Databricks Machine Learning Workspace in August 2023. The initial focus was to configure, train and deploy models around ticket pricing and game demand. 

    Both technical and non-technical users immediately found the platforms helpful, Chavez noted, and they quickly sped up the ML process (and plummeted costs). 

    “It dramatically improves response times for my marketing team, because they don’t have to know how to code,” said Chavez. It’s all buttons for them, and all that data comes back down to Databricks as unified records.”

    Further, his team organized the company’s 60-some-odd systems into Salesforce Data Cloud. Now, he reports that they have 440X more data in storage and 8X more data sources in production. 

    PS&E today operates at just under 2% of its previous annual OPEX costs. “We saved hundreds of thousands a year just on operations,” said Chavez. “We reinvested it into customer data enrichment. We reinvested into better tooling for not just my team, but the analytics units around the company.” 

    Continued refinement, deep understanding of data

    How did his team get compute so staggeringly low? Databricks has continually refined cluster configurations, enhanced connectivity options to schemas and integrated model outputs back into PS&E’s data tables, Chavez explained. The powerful ML engine is “continuously enriching, refining, merging and predicting” on PS&E’s customer records across every system and revenue stream. 

    This leads to better-informed predictions with each iteration — and in fact, the occasional AutoML model sometimes makes it straight to production without any further tweaking from his team, Chavez reported. 

    “Truthfully, it’s just knowing the size of the data going in, but also roughly how long it is going to take to train,” said Chavez. He added: “It’s on the smallest cluster size you could possibly run, it might just be a memory-optimized cluster, but it’s just knowing Apache Spark fairly well and knowing which way we could store and read the data fairly optimally.”

    Who’s most likely to buy season tickets?

    One way Chavez’ team is using data, AI and ML is in propensity scoring for season tickets packages. As he put it: “We sell an ungodly number of them.”

    The goal is to determine which customer characteristics influence where they choose to sit. Chavez explained that his team is geo-locating addresses they have on file to make correlations between demographics, income levels and travel distances. They’re also analyzing users’ purchase histories across retail, food and beverage, mobile app engagement and other events they might attend on PS&E’s campus. 

    Further, they’re pulling in data from Stubhub, Seat Geek and other vendors outside of Ticketmaster to evaluate price points and determine how well inventories are moving. This can all be married with everything they know about a given customer to figure out where they’re going to sit, Chavez explained. 

    Armed with that data, they could then, for instance, upsell a given customer from Section 201 to section 101 center court. “Now we’re able to not only resell his seat in the higher deck, we can also sell another smaller package on the same seats he purchased in the mid-season, using the same characteristics for another person,” said Chavez. 

    Similarly, data can be used to enhance sponsorships, which are critical to any sports franchise. 

    “Of course, they want to align with organizations who overlap with theirs,” said Chavez. “So can we better enrich? Can we better predict? Can we do custom segmentation?”

    Ideally, the goal is an interface where any user could ask questions like: ‘Give me a section of the Pacers fan base in their mid-to-late 20s with disposable income.’ Going even further: ‘Look for those that make more than $100K a year and have an interest in luxury vehicles.’ The interface could then bring back a percentage that overlap with sponsor data. 

    “When our partnership teams are trying to close these deals, they can, on-demand, just pull information without having to rely on an analytics team to do it for them,” said Chavez. 

    To further support this goal, his team is looking to build out a data clean room, or a secure environment that allows for the sharing of sensitive data. This can be particularly helpful with sponsors, as well as collaborations with other teams and the NCAA (which is headquartered in Indianapolis). 

    “The name of the game for us right now is response time, whether that’s customer facing or internal,’ said Chavez. “Can we dramatically lessen the required knowledge to cut up information and sort through it using AI?”

    Data collection and AI to understand traffic patterns, improve signage

    Another area of focus for Chavez’s team is examining where people are at any given time across PS&E’s campus  (which comprises a three-tier arena with an outdoor plaza). Chavez explained that data capture capabilities are in place throughout its network infrastructure via WiFi access points. 

    “When you walk into the arena, you are pinging off all of them, even if you don’t log into them, because your phone’s checking for WiFi,” he said. “I can see where you’re moving. I don’t know who you are, but I can see where you’re moving.” 

    This can eventually help guide people around the arena — say, if someone wants to buy a pretzel and is looking for a concession stand — and help his team determine where to position food and merchandise kiosks. 

    Similarly, location data can help determine optimal spots for signage, Chavez explained. One interesting way to identify signage impression counts is placing vision gradients at spots equivalent to average fan height. 

    “Then let’s calculate how well somebody would have seen this walking through with the number of people around them,” said Chavez. “So I can tell my sponsor you got 5,000 impressions on this, and 1,200 of them were pretty good.” 

    Similarly, when fans are in their seats, they are surrounded by signs and digital displays. Location data can help determine the quality (and amount) of impressions based on the angle of where they’re sitting. As Chavez noted: “If this ad was only on the screen for 10 seconds in the third quarter, who would have seen it?”

    Once PS&E has adequate locational data to help answer these types of questions, his team plans to work with Indiana University’s VR lab to model the entire campus. “Then we’re just going to have a very fun sandbox to go run around in and answer all these 3D space questions that have been bugging me for the last two years,” said Chavez. 



  • Statcounter’s Windows market-share data is not accurate or reliable, and I can prove it

    Statcounter’s Windows market-share data is not accurate or reliable, and I can prove it


    Statcounter stories

    ZDNET

    It happens like clockwork, around the first of each month. Sites that focus on technology churn out nearly identical articles, all based on a chart like this one, prepared by the good folks at Statcounter Global Stats.  

    statcounter-windows-version-ww-monthly-202312-202501.png

    Every month, tech bloggers try to turn a chart like this one into a story, but most of them miss what’s actually happening.

    Statcounter GS

    I saw that chart in dozens of posts this month, along with detailed explanations of what the author thought the underlying data points mean. Sometimes the authors of these posts even convince an industry analyst to share their thoughts. It’s stereotypical horserace coverage.

    Also: How to upgrade your ‘incompatible’ Windows 10 PC to Windows 11 in 2025

    This month, the challenge for every pundit was to explain why Windows 10 (the purple line at the top) appears to be suddenly collapsing in popularity and why Windows 11 (the blue line in the middle) has regained its mojo.  

    Here’s a small sampling of some of the stories that the Statcounter “Windows market share” report inspired.

    statcounter-stories-feb-2025

    At the start of every month, stories like these appear, all based on the same charts.

    Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET

    My favorite quote from this batch is from Forbes, which made this bold assertion: “The January stats are now out, and according to Statcounter, the Windows 11 upgrade trend has now un-reversed itself … some 40 million hold-outs have suddenly upgraded their PCs in the last 31 days.”

    Also: Don’t ignore Microsoft’s February Patch Tuesday – it’s a big one

    Inevitably, these posts try to answer the question, “Why did this happen?” But maybe a better question is, “Did this happen?” followed by “Are you sure?” and “Why doesn’t any of this data make sense?”

    Because here’s the reality: Statcounter’s “market share” reports are a great excuse for tech bloggers to crank out a story each month, but they bear only the most casual relation to the real world, and most of those month-to-month spikes are simply statistical noise.

    Let me show you what I mean with another chart, which I created using data I downloaded from Statcounter’s site. For this one, I changed the parameters to include data from January 2022 through January 2025, covering only the United States. After plugging that data into Excel, I created a line chart like the ones they publish, but I made two changes. First, I added third-order polynomial trendlines for the Windows 10 and Windows 11 data points to show the general direction of those monthly figures over time. Then, I added a shadow on either side of that trendline to indicate a likely margin of error.

    statcounter-data-remixed

    Adding a trendline helps to smooth out the statistical fluctuations and reveals the real patterns in this data.

    Chart by Ed Bott/ZDNET; data from Statcounter GS

    Well, that tells a very different story, doesn’t it?

    At the sites that use Statcounter’s web analytics service, pageviews from PCs running Windows 10 are steadily declining, while pageviews from PCs running Windows 11 are steadily increasing. And those trends have been consistent over time, despite some fluctuations in the data.

    You’ll notice that description doesn’t mention “market share.” Statcounter’s data counts pageviews, not visits, or sessions, or individual devices.

    Also: Microsoft has a big Windows 10 problem, and it’s running out of time to solve it

    And make no mistake about it, those monthly fluctuations really are just noise. Look at the teal-colored line for Windows 8.x versions from January 2024. Do you really think that 10 or 20 million people fired up their old Windows 8 devices on New Year’s Day, used them for a few weeks, and then put them all back in the closet? That’s unlikely.

    None of those other monthly spikes mean anything either. Did millions of people uninstall Windows 11 in December 2024 and then change their mind a month later? Of course not. The data is just messy!

    Now, let me be crystal clear here: I don’t blame the Statcounter folks for taking advantage of an irresistible opportunity to generate publicity. I do, however, want to have a serious talk with every journalist and analyst who relies on Statcounter’s charts without questioning the underlying data behind them, because those numbers can’t stand up to even the mildest questioning.

    Who is Statcounter?

    Statcounter is a web analytics company based in Ireland. It was founded in 1999, during the Web 1.0 era, with a simple business model of counting “hits” to websites using a tracking pixel that clients embedded on their pages. If you’re a website owner, adding Statcounter’s tracking technology to your site can give you valuable information about your visitors.

    It was a good business for a long time, but over the years the company’s customer base has shrunk. In 2009, it boasted that 3 million customers were using its service. By 2022, its own pages acknowledged that the customer base had been cut in half, to 1.5 million websites.

    Also: How to do a clean install of Windows 11: See which option is best for you and why

    W3Techs, which tracks companies in this space, reported that 0.9% of all websites were using Statcounter’s services in 2019. By January 2024, that number had shrunk to 0.5%, and when I checked again in January 2025, the number was down again, to 0.4%.

    None of that decline should be surprising. Google Analytics dominates this space today, and other big players, like Meta Pixel, WordPress Jetpack, and Adobe Analytics, have also stolen share from tiny firms like Statcounter.

    Where do Statcounter’s numbers come from?

    Statcounter’s customer base consists of a lot of small websites and a few medium-sized ones. The Statcounter Global Stats reports aggregate all the pageviews from those sites, with details about the visitors, including the hardware type, operating system, and browser, as collected by that tracking.

    Also: If your Windows 10 PC can’t be upgraded, you have 5 options before time runs out

    Statcounter’s data collection has declined dramatically in the last decade. A decade ago, the company’s FAQ page reported that it measured more than 17 billion pageviews in a typical month. By 2022 (the last numbers that Statcounter has provided on the current FAQ page), that number was down to 5 billion a month.

    Statcounter represents a tiny sliver of actual traffic on the web, mostly from fairly esoteric websites that have chosen to embed the Statcounter tracking code on their websites, like Futbin.com, Filmyzilla.com.fj, Ask.com, and Kernel.org. They can’t count traffic from the most popular sites on the web, like Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia.

    Also: Can you still get a Windows 10 upgrade for free in 2025? Short answer: Maybe

    It’s like trying to do a survey of consumer behavior without including Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, Target, CVS, or any Kroger grocery store. By leaving out those giants, your sample becomes quirky and almost certainly not representative of the greater market.

    More importantly, Statcounter measures only pageviews, not visits or sessions. If I go to a site that uses the Statcounter service and visit five pages on my Windows 11 PC, and you load 10 pages with your Windows 10 PC, the results in Statcounter’s “market share” report will show that Windows 10 is twice as popular as Windows 11. You see the problem here, I presume.

    Of course, that assumes all those pageviews are even counted. On my Windows 11 PC, where I use Microsoft Edge with its tracking protection set to Strict, Statcounter’s tracking code is automatically blocked. Oops.

    So, what’s the real story?

    The data from Statcounter tells a perfectly valid story about how people use websites that belong to its customers. But it says nothing about the “market share” for Windows PCs.

    It does show, in the most general terms, that traffic to those sites from Windows 10 PCs is declining slowly and that traffic from PCs running Windows 11 appears to be increasing slowly as well. Do those numbers map to the population of PCs worldwide? Probably not, although no one can say for sure.

    Also: How to clear the cache on your Windows 11 PC (and why it makes such a big difference)

    We do know that there are a very large number of PCs running Windows 10 that are not eligible to upgrade to Windows 11. That number will probably still be very large in October 2025, when support for Windows 10 ends. Someone with access to Microsoft’s telemetry servers could probably give you a pretty good estimate of how many devices are in each population, but they’re not talking.

    The rest of us, unfortunately, are left to guess. And if you want to make a wager based on data from Statcounter, go right ahead. Just don’t put any serious money on that bet.




  • Back in theaters, Parasite is the perfect thriller for our post-Luigi world

    Back in theaters, Parasite is the perfect thriller for our post-Luigi world


    Song Kang-ho grimaces behind a steering wheel as Cho Yeo-jeong talks obliviously on the phone in the backseat in a still from the movie Parasite.
    Cho Yeo-jeong and Song Kang-ho in Parasite Neon / Neon

    Five years after it took the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Awards, and the global box office by storm, Parasite is back on the big screen. That’s a pretty short amount of time to commemorate with an anniversary rerelease. Then again, it’s been a long five years, hasn’t it? Oh, how the world has changed since the halcyon days of 2019 — “the last f***ing year for cinema,” to quote Quentin Tarantino, whose Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood premiered within hours of Bong Joon-ho’s darkly ingenious class-warfare caper. In retrospect, Parasite winning Best Picture on Oscar night a few months later really did feel like the final joyous surprise of an old era — a last gasp before COVID closed theaters and changed everything.

    Watching the film today, via its current IMAX victory lap or from the comfort of your own home, actually emphasizes the ways things haven’t changed so much these past five years. Or maybe it’s just that the tensions and resentments Parasite dramatized back then have fully exploded to the surface of the culture, as surely as they simmer to a boil in the climax of the movie. Like Mr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), people are fed up. Does his shocking act of violence look so shocking these days? You might think suddenly of a real, more premeditated crime that just stirred the media into a frenzy and sent a jolt of understanding through the public — a murder with a motive so clear, the killer etched it on the bullets.

    Yes, the time is right for a Parasite encore. It’s very much a movie for the moment, a tale of rage and desperation fit for our post-Luigi Mangione world. At the same time, there’s no mistaking this South Korean award-winner — more acclaimed, perhaps, than any film that’s come in its wake — for a simple eat-the-rich parable. Not with Bong at the reins. The sheer slipperiness of his demented take on upstairs-downstairs drama is what elevates it beyond mere timeliness.

    Parasite [Official Trailer] – In Theaters October 11, 2019

    The title alone is provocative in its potential double meaning. Who are the parasites in this story of a destitute family, the Kims, that latches itself to the payroll teat of a wealthy family, the Parks? It’s less a trick question than a Rorschach test. Parasite’s huge success the world over could reflect a certain universal frustration, the kind that the murder of a CEO just illuminated like a black light. Or it could be chalked up to people seeing what they want to see in the master-servant relationship that develops between these economically entwined clans. To win the top prize on Hollywood’s biggest night, the film had to have spoken to people who saw a kind of horror movie about the dangers of opening your house to the help.

    Bong leaves us to sort through our biases. He’s too shrewd a dramatist to reduce his characters to emblems of their social station — to divide our sympathies by tax bracket alone. The Parks are not cartoon fat cats. They are clueless and easily manipulated, in the case of Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong), or snobbishly condescending, in the case of Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun), who prefers those he hires respect professional boundaries and not “cross the line.” Their most odious offense is rudely fixating on odor. They are awful in the casual, everyday way that the wealthy can be. They are recognizably human, not blatant guillotine fodder.

    Likewise, the Kims are not cardboard saints — the noble working-class heroes a more self-righteous parable might position upon a pedestal. They are, at times, bluntly and hilariously underhanded. They lie and steal and screw over other people for a shot at the cash the Parks thoughtlessly splurge on luxury and convenience and creature comforts. Parasite says that desperate times call for desperate measures. Every transgression in the movie is a scramble to survive. “Money is an iron,” as Mrs. Kim (Jang Hye-jin) says. It smooths out the difficulties of life — and with them, the challenges to our moral compasses.

    The Kim family gathers around a pizza box in a still from the movie Parasite.
    Parasite Neon / Neon

    No one widely familiar with Bong’s work could confuse Parasite for a pro-elite cautionary tale, even if its narrative wickedly toys with the Saltburn-like fears of a ruling class paranoid that the Great Unwashed are coming for them. Rarely one for didactic screeds, the writer-director has spent most of his career smuggling his class politics onto screens under cover of rollicking genre scenarios. Take The Host, which savages American imperialism and corporate disregard for public safety in the form of a primo kaiju movie of original Gojira vintage. Or Snowpiercer, which takes late-stage capitalism to its logical endpoint, with all that remains of civilization stuffed aboard a train endlessly looping a ravaged planet. It’s arranged like a social ladder turned on its side, the poor in the back, the rich in the front.

    Parasite flips that hierarchical structure vertically again: Here, privilege is a matter of altitude — a theme established right from the subterranean opening shot. The film is one of Bong’s most purely entertaining Trojan horses. That, maybe more than its politics, might account for its enduring popularity and for its ability to smash the language barriers that traditionally keep films not in English off the box-office charts and out of the Academy’s winner circle. For a while, it almost plays like an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist movie where the “score” is gainful employment. And the twists arrive with dizzying force, Bong opening his satirical scenario up into the realm of perverse farce (no doors are slammed, but tables are scurried under) and downright Hitchcockian thrills. Parasite remains about as fun as any movie this ultimately, witheringly downbeat can be.

    The Parks aren’t the real villains of the film. They’re but a symptom of an unjust system. Capitalism is a zero sum game in Parasite. It keeps the 99% divided, fighting over the same crumbs, scrambling for the same tiny wedge of the pie. Most of the violence in the movie is between the Kims and the family of the housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun) they muscle out of a job. Only in the climax, when all hell breaks loose at that party, do the Parks experience any kind of reckoning. And it’s hard to call that a victory, regardless of where your sympathies lie. After all, Mr. Kim’s actions don’t even radicalize his son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), who remains seduced by a fantasy of upward mobility, dreaming of keeping up with the Joneses (or Parks).

    Choi Woo-shik looks out of a window longingly, his reflection staring back at him, in a still from the movie Parasite.
    Choi Woo-shik in Parasite Neon / Neon

    Since 2019, Parasite’s finger hasn’t left the pulse of an economically lopsided world. The Kims don’t see the big picture of their misadventure — namely, that they’re trying to win a rigged game on an uneven playing field, and that they’re trapped in a system designed to keep them literally and figuratively down. But the audience might see that picture more clearly than ever. After all, Parasite has returned to theaters at a time when newsfeeds are filled with daily reminders of the unjust disparity of life under capitalism. It remains a crazed crowdpleaser for an exploited world, building madcap complications around its social conscience… never mind the inconvenient truth that every ticket bought puts a few extra dollars in the pockets of the Friedkins, a family whose wealth makes the Parks look like the Kims.

    All that said, you have to wonder if the pointedly unsubtle Parasite might actually be a little too subtle for 2025. In a key scene, the Kims sit around, drinking the Park family’s liquor, enjoying the mirage of a life within the household they serve. “She’s rich, but still nice,” Mr. Kim says of his employer, to which his wife replies, with a snort: “She’s rich, therefore she’s nice.” Right now, though, the mask of niceness the obscenely monied often wear has slipped. As these words are written, and maybe as you read them, the world’s richest man is waging war on the middle and lower class in broad daylight — unlawfully destroying public services, hurting American workers to line his own pockets, slashing cancer research for kids. Him and his kind are monsters too broad for the broadest of satires, the kind Bong would be embarrassed to put in a movie. They’re parasites in the truest sense.

    Parasite is currently playing on select IMAX screens, streaming on Netflix, and available to rent or purchase from digital services owned by wealthy men who don’t care about you. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.