Technology news

We’re living through a fascinating era of rapid change for the blockbuster movie model. America producers, eager to get their $200 million movies into the lucrative Chinese market, are increasingly looking for Chinese production partners, shooting in Chinese locations, and adding China-friendly characters and plotlines to American movies, even including extra scenes just for the Chinese cuts of films. But simultaneously, China and other countries are moving toward the blockbuster model th

Fitbithas a new fitness tracker, but it’s one that you can’t buy in stores.
The company quietly uncorked the Inspire on Friday, releasing its first product that is available only to corporate employees and health insurance members. The idea is to offer a fully subsidized wearable that helps the company dig deeper into the corporate and business worlds.
The new devices are available as a wristband with the option of a clip. The basic tracker’s features are pretty standard a

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 2019 just might be the year that smartphones get fun again. After years of similar form factors and slight upgrades, the mobile industry’s back is against the wall.
For the first time ever, sales are down, owning to economic factors and slower upgrade cycles. Most people who want good phones have had access to them for a while, and smartphone makers are providing fewer compelling reasons to buy new ones.
With their backs against the w

Freshman Congresswomen and meme queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is headed to Netflix. The streaming service said this week that it has snapped up ‘Knock Down the House,’ a Sundance award-winning documentary profiling the campaigns of four female progressive candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, in the 2018 midterm election.
The documentary raised money via a Kickstarter campaign last year and it grabbed the Festival Favorite Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, beating 1

It’s not often that you hear about a startup from Singapore with ambitions to expand to the U.S, but that’s exactly the goal for event booking service Delegate.
Founded in August 2015, the company aims to be a one-stop shop for booking an event, that covers corporate and professional functions, celebrations like weddings and more personal events such as birthdays or get-togethers.
Beyond the essential step of securing a venue, Delegate’splatform covers a range of diff

Marvel’s next big superhero movie is Captain Marvel, and unlike most of the franchise’s films, this one’s set in the 1990s. Accordingly, Marvel has launched a website that fits the timeframe, a throwback to web design of the era, complete with awkward animations, fonts, and colors.The result is absolutely delightful. The website taps into the nostalgia for the 1990s that we’ve seen in the film’s trailers, and features a ton of components that were mainstays of the

At first glance, the mysterious space rock that NASA’s New Horizons zoomed by on New Year’s day looked like a lumpy snowman, or maybe a misshapen space peanut. Now, a new set of photos reveal that the space rock is flatter than initially thought — more pancake, really, than peanut.The space rock, called 2014 MU69, is located 4.1 billion miles away from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, a massive stretch of frigid objects that orbit the Sun at the edges of the Solar System. During its

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributorWhere seed and early-stage funding is growing, contracting or holding steady Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools
For years, decades even, startup names have been getting weirder. This isn’t a scientific verdict, but it is how things have seemed to someone who spends a lot of hours perusing this stuff.
Startups have had a long run of branding themselves with creative misspellings, animal

Westworld ended its second season last June, leaving viewers with plenty of questions about what would come next when the show returns for its third season. Those fans are going to have to wait a bit: the HBO series likely won’t return until next year.That timeline makes sense: show debuted in October 2016, while its second season began in April 2018. Speaking at the Television Critics Association press tour yesterday, HBO’s President of Programming Casey Bloys told TheWrap that pro

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, but you still have a little bit of time to make your gift purchases. If you’ve been striking out on gift ideas, we’ve put together a list of suitable options for even the most particular valentine. This week’s best deals might provide some inspiration, too.Apple’s latest iPad with 128GB of storage dropped significantly in price on Amazon, from $429 to $329, which is this model’s lowest price yet. For most people, th

In recent years, Chinese science fiction has grown in popularity among English-speaking audiences, urged on by blockbuster books like Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. Liu isn’t the only such writer whose works are available in English — this year will see several new translations from Chinese science fiction authors hitting bookstores. One of the best science fiction authors working in China now is joining them — Xia Jia (pen name of Wang Yao), who is getting a transl

Earlier this week, a member of the Texas state legislature introduced a bill that would make it a crime for a telecommunications company, like Verizon or AT&T, to throttle internet service in declared disaster areas, according to KUT News.This Texas bill, HB 1426, doesn’t go any further to codify net neutrality rules, only prohibiting carriers from restricting internet access in disaster areas. It does not ban behaviors like throttling in any other scenarios.Over 100 other bills regar

Earlier this week, a member of the Texas state legislature introduced a bill that would make it a crime for a telecommunications company, like Verizon or AT&T, to throttle internet service in declared disaster areas, according to KUT News.This Texas bill, HB 1426, doesn’t go any further to codify net neutrality rules, only prohibiting carriers from restricting internet access in disaster areas. It does not ban behaviors like throttling in any other scenarios.Over 100 other bills regar

Did anyone else listen to season one of StartUp, Alex Blumberg’s OG Gimlet podcast? I did, and I felt like a proud mom this week reading stories of the major, first-of-its-kind Spotify acquisition of his podcast production company, Gimlet. Spotifyalso bought Anchor, a podcast monetization platform, signaling a new era for the podcasting industry.
On top of that, Himalaya Media, a free podcast app I’d never heard of until this week, raised a whopping $100 million in venture capit

UPDATE: Feb. 25, 2021, 5:10 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect recent pricing changes.
UPDATE: June 29, 2020, 12:51 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect the length of Noom's free trial. 
UPDATE: Sept. 29, 2020, 4:02 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect the cost of the trial.
UPDATE: Jan. 6, 2021, 4:12 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect that the 14-day trial is now free.
Finding the best weight loss program — one that actually works and you w

I’ve worked in UX for the better part of a decade. From now on, I plan to remove the word “user” and any associated terms—like “UX” and “user experience”—from my vocabulary. It’ll take time. I’ll start by trying to avoid using them in conversations at work. I’ll erase them from my LinkedIn profile. I’ll find new ways to describe my job when making small talk. I will experiment and look for something better. I don

Is facial recognition accurate? Can it be hacked? These are just some of the questions being raised by lawmakers, civil libertarians, and privacy advocates in the wake of an ACLU report released last summer that claimed Amazon’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, misidentified 28 members of congress as criminals. Rekognition is a general-purpose, application programming interface (API) developers can use to build applications that can detect and analyze scenes, objects, faces, and

Even in these dark online times, there are places on the internet that manage to shine through and offer us some form of digital redemption; places where we yearn to stay and build new forms of community.
Amazon Live is not one of those places. 
The QVC-like streaming media service — soft-launched on Amazon's mobile apps, in stealth mode on the web, and first discovered by TechCrunch — offers a carousel of teeth-whitened enthusiasts detailing all the ways a featured product will

The popularity of Juul and its high-nicotine pods is driving up nicotine levels across the vaping industry in what Stanford researchers are calling a “nicotine arms race,” according to a new study. The findings back up suspicions that Juul’s competitors are watching the vaping giant closely to capitalize on the largely unregulated multi-billion-dollar e-cigarette market.Researchers with Stanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising investigated the nicotine levels t

Has Jeff Bezos' impressive exposure of Pecker finally broken the curse of Weiner? 
Oh yes, we all laugh at the double entendres in the news that the Amazon founder has accused the National Enquirer's owner of blackmailing him over compromising selfies. But it's a grim gallows chuckle, because we live in the decade of the dick pic — an age where one man's inability to keep it in his pants, and the technology that enabled him, literally changed the course of history by helping elevate D

If you’re craving a truly different sound with which to slay the crew this weekend, look no further than System Beeps, a new album by shiru8bit — though you may have to drag your old 486 out of storage to play it. Yes, this album runs in MS-DOS and its music is produced entirely through the PC speaker — you know, the one that can only beep.
Now, chiptunes aren’t anything new. But the more popular ones tend to imitate the sounds found in classic computers and consoles like

The facts that climate change is real and music relieves stress are the only two things scientists, by-and-large, seem to be in complete agreement on. That’s why we’re here to convince you to stop throwing plastic in the ocean and start playing a musical instrument. Step one: stop throwing plastic in the ocean. Moving on. Research shows that learning to play a musical instrument lowers stress, reduces anxiety, aids in developing problem-solving skills, stimulates the imagination, an

We knew the upcoming Captain Marvel took place in the '90s. We did not know that the movie's official website would be a full-on meta blast to the past of the early world wide web.
You won't have to fire up your dial-up connection, but you will want to look out for pop ups of that old lady Brie Larson's Carol Danvers punched in the face in the first trailer. 
SEE ALSO: 'Captain Marvel' powers on in a cool new trailer
Complete with animated web art, references to Y2K, eye-bleeding amounts of

Maybe you've never heard of the H.R. 1 bill, but chances are you've seen the viral video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing what she's called the "Corruption Game."
On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing about H.R. 1., also known as For the People Act of 2019, which would do things like establish automatic voter registration nationwide, make Election Day a federal holiday, and reform a corrupt campaign finance system. Ocasio-Cortez exposed the problems in

Facebook has acquired GrokStyle, a shopping startup that uses AI to help you buy furniture and other items for the home.
The move, which was reported by Bloomberg, is the latest sign yet that the social network is looking to push deeper into e-commerce in 2019.
Facebook spokesperson Vanessa Chan confirmed the acquisition saying, "We are excited to welcome GrokStyle to Facebook. Their team and technology will contribute to our AI capabilities.”
SEE ALSO: LOL, bye: Facebook’s teen meme

According to a Hollywood Reporter exclusive, Warner Bros. is making plans for a spin-off to its billion-dollar hit Aquaman — in the form of a modestly budgeted horror movie with none of the original main cast involved. The film, set around the underwater kingdom known as The Trench, would be produced by Aquaman’s director, James Wan, and its co-producer, Peter Safran, who has a long production history on horror films like The Conjuring and many of its spin-offs.
Details are limited,