Items tagged with Texas
When we last left Google Fiber, Google announced that it would be setting up shop in Salt Lake City, Utah. That was in addition to a number of other large U.S. metropolitan areas that were announced earlier in the year including Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Today, Google is proud to announce that it has selected another city that will receive its high-speed fiber Internet service; and its Google’s latest “Fiber” city to date. San Antonio, Texas is home to 1.4 million residents and represents “one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the country,” according to Google. “San Antonio has developed a thriving tech landscape,”...
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Google this week confirmed plans to take its autonomous car project into new territory to see how its self-driving cars handle and react to different challenges than the ones they've already been exposed to. The new location is Austin, Texas, an area that's been friendly to Google's projects, such as its fiber Internet and TV service. Testing has already begun in Austin with a single white Lexus RX 450h SUV. Unlike California and other states that have laws on the books for self-driving vehicles, Austin and Texas as a whole have no such regulations regarding autonomous vehicles, meaning Google didn't have to get permission to begin tests. Even so, Google gave a heads up to Governor Greg Abbot,...
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Tesla isn't having much luck messing with Texas. The electric car maker sells automobiles directly to the public rather than going through dealerships, but in order to do that, it has get lawmakers to repeal existing laws in each state that require automakers to distribute their vehicles through dealers. For the second time in two years, Tesla has failed in its efforts to do that in Texas.The company backed a pair of bills in the legislature that would have allowed it to sidestep dealerships and sell its vehicles directly to consumers in the Lone Star state, which also happens to be the second largest U.S. car market. However, both bills never even made it to the House of Representatives or Senate...
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The RadioShack bankruptcy took a harder turn into ugly territory yesterday with Apple's filing of a complaint in a Delaware court. The move is intended to keep the once-prevalent hardware giant from selling their customer data, joining the states of Texas and Tennessee in their efforts to prevent the company from opening their customer information coffers to the highest bidder. The Apple complaint states that as a condition of the arrangement by which RadioShack was allowed to sell iPhones and iPads in its stores, the retailer would protect the personal data of customers choosing to buy Apple products. Specifically, Apple's complaint states, “The Reseller Agreement between Apple and RadioShack...
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Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk couldn't stop talking about the future of transportation in 2013, and specifically about Hyperloop, an ultra high-speed vacuum transport system that could shuttle you to your destination at a frighteningly fast pace (think in the neighborhood of 800 miles per hour!). Though things have been quiet on the Hyperloop front as of late, Musk is still determined to see the project through, starting with a test track in Texas. There aren't a ton of details to go on at this point, but through a series of Twitter posts, we know that Musk is planning to build a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their prototype pod designs....
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It looks like Apple is trying to drum up some good will and earn brownie points as of late by expanding its manufacturing presence in the U.S. Following a recent announcement that its revamped Mac Pro will be assembled in the Texas, Apple now says it's planning to erect a manufacturing facility further west in Airzona. Mesa is the lucky destination within Arizona where the plant will go. It's expected to create at least 700 jobs during the first year alone, along with 1,300 openings for construction workers. That's 2,000 jobs, more than a third of which are long-term positions. "This new plant will make components for Apple products and it will run on 100 percent renewable energy from day one,"...
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Out of the 130 million smartphones floating around the U.S., can you guess how many of them were assembled stateside? If you said anything higher than "zero," you guessed too many. There's not a single smartphone factory in the U.S., though Motorola is determined to change that and plans to open the first such facility in Fort Worth, Texas. That will be the site where every Moto X smartphone sold the U.S. will be produced, Motorola's Dennis Woodside announced at the AllThingsD conference this week. Image Source: Flickr (Serfs UP ! Roger Sayles) "There were a few reasons why we decided to do this. There are several business advantages to having our Illinois and California-based designers and engineers...
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Have you ever left for vacation and forgot to change the thermostat? Although it may not be worth flying home for, setting the thermostat a few degrees higher while you're away from home can save on cooling costs (especially if you'll be gone for a few days). Thanks to a new offering from TXU Energy, Texans can now use a smartphone to manage and adjust their home's temperature. The new service is available for users of the TXU Energy iThermostat. With the thermostat and new TXU Energy iThermostat mobile website (txu.com/control), you can manage your home's heating and air conditioning. The website is compatible with the latest models of Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, Apple iPad, BlackBerry...
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We keep wondering when we'll finally stop seeing new SSD players on a near-weekly basis -- not that we're hoping that flow stops or anything, but it's definitely getting a little crazy. This week, we've got little-known Texas Memory Systems introducing the very enterprise RanSan-620. Explained as a complete, high-performance, reliable Flash system that delivers up to five terabytes of solid state storage in a single 2U chassis, this here device is for small businesses and affluent individuals who need speed and space -- and lots of both.Designed to handle on-line transaction processing, data warehousing, high-performance data acquisition, batch processing, and video editing (just to name a few),...
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Interesting interview of Texas Instruments' CEO Richard Templeton over at Business Week. He outlines the niche his company has carved out in the chipmaker world, and points to some of the big opportunities out there for chip innovators. While its supply contracts with mobile-phone manufacturers including Nokia and Motorola grab all the headlines, the bulk of Texas Instruments' business comes from chips that are nowhere near as attention-getting. Accounting for about 40% of the company's sales in 2006 are its so-called analog chips. Analog chips measure "real world" inputs—from the temperature in a room or the sound of a voice to the touch of a button—so they can be converted into a digital...
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In an interview with ID's Todd Hollensead, WorthPlaying has discovered that this year's QuakeCon might not be held in Texas as it has since the LAN party's inception. The interview steps through some basic Q&A with some small tidbits of info surfacing regarding some potential previews at E3. However, the most interesting aspect of the interview surely revolves around QuakeCon 2006 and some drastic changes that will be made. First and foremost, the location of the event could be someplace outisde of Texas for the first time in the event's history! There's still a possibility we may move QuakeCon outside of Texas (!) for this year. And before...
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