self

Who needs to bother with a fitting room when you can use a Kinect to model outfits?

Between pitches for mobile payments, new self-checkout machines, and virtual customer service assistants, technology rules the show floor at the 101st Annual National Retail Federation Convention and Expo in New York, taking place this week.

This year it's possible to try on a new dress -- with matching purse, belt and jewelry -- in just a few seconds using a Microsoft Kinect camera. You become a paper doll on the television monitor with FaceCake's Swivel, a virtual dressing room that will … Read more

Is Twitter about to take a page out of Google's playbook?

For months, folks have expected Twitter to make it easier for small and medium-sized companies to advertise by offering a self-serve option for its ad platform. If Twitter was ever going to grow into a gazillion-dollar juggernaut a la Google (and Facebook, for that matter), this was a proverbial no-brainer. But for the longest time, Twitter has played coy about its plans.

When, for example, MediaPost reported in January that Twitter was testing a self-serve ad platform with advertisers and agencies, the company denied anything was imminent. However, … Read more

Can cold weather ruin your car speakers? More of your insights into self-driving cars, recommendations for cheap cars that are fun to drive, and our plans to review the VW GTI.

This week, we check out your thoughts on self-driving cars, why humans can't drive well in the best of conditions, the ultimate car security system, and the price of diesel is tough all over.

The Fitbit electronic pedometer is for people taking baby steps into a fitness.

Since launching the company at a 2008 TechCrunch event, founder James Park says, he has discovered that while Nike and Garmin sell their fitness monitoring products to health and activity nuts, the Fitbit has ended up winning market share with the broad middle of the population, so to speak. "We don't have a very athletic user base," Park says.

The new $99 Fitbit Ultra, launching today, is much the same as the previous product, with one key hardware difference: it has a pressure altimeter, so it can determine when you're climbing stairs (or, in my town, hills).

This is a key metric to track for those trying to improve fitness by walking around, and Park hopes that the Fitbit Ultra will encourage people to climb the equivalent of 10 flights of stairs a day as they're racking up their standard 10,000 steps. The device also measures sleep quality.… Read more

On today's show we're covering an emerging tech trend: The Quantified Self movement, or the collection of data streams about what we do, how we feel, how we move, and so on. Why? That's one of the big questions. The best answer is probably: to live better lives. And today we're talking with two entrepreneurs who are working on a subset of the quantified self movement: body monitoring. Both their companies have the goal of making us more aware of ourselves. Using that knowledge, hopefully, we can live more healthy lives.

Our guests are Monisha Perkash, CEO of Lumoback, which I covered this week from the Demo conference, and Jef Holove of Basis, which I wrote up in July.

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Automotive equipment supplier Valeo put a new twist on its Park4U system at the 2011 International Motor Show in Frankfurt this week. It enabled the system to be controlled from an iPhone.

A Valeo representative stood outside the car, a Volkswagen Sharan, and parked it merely by using an iPhone app. The car, going in reverse, turned its wheel to slot into a narrow, perpendicular parking spot between two other cars.

But this technology is not as futuristic as it looks. The Volkswagen Sharan, a model not available in the United States, can already be had with Valeo's Park4U … Read more

Twenty-two years years after their onscreen debut, Nike is set to finally release the Air Mag 2015 sneakers Marty McFly wore in "Back to the Future II." A few lucky sneakerheads just received an invite to a Nike event scheduled for tomorrow in West Hollywood, Calif., where Nike's head designer Tinker Hatfield will announce the shoe. And yes--it will have power laces.

Nike sent a box of goodies over to the lucky folks at HighSnobiety and NiceKicks to drum up excitement for the announcement, and it's working. Inside they found an iPod shuffle with a message from Dr. Emmett Brown, a preserved bottle of Pepsi from 1985, and a replica pair of the Doc's metal shield glasses.

Last year, Nike patented an early design for a light-up shoe operating on built-in batteries that would also automatically fasten the strap into place. Most speculated that Nike would stick with the "Back to the Future" story arc and keep the original release to 2015, but they may arrive fashionably early.

This trailer showing Marty McFly's closet popped up yesterday and gives a preview of the Air Mag 2015. More pictures of the promotional invite goodies after the jump.… Read more

When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as the rest of us?

Should you have, this morning, been unreasonably detained by aggressive machines, may I tell you that Google's famed, futuristic, liberating, and ultimately superhuman machine, the self-driving Prius, was involved in a fender bender.

What seems evident from shots of the scene is that Google's robot machine ran into the back of another Prius. You might think that it was on robotic autopilot and … Read more