Technology news

GUEST: A lot of people are giddy over the news that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion. Investors are thrilled at the hefty boost in the stock price, while salespeople dream of connecting their Outlook and LinkedIn accounts to make their jobs easier.
Amid all the conversation, there’s one thing that email marketers, particularly those on the B2B side, need to think about: With this purchase, Microsoft just became one of the largest data houses, joining ranks with Acxiom, Dun & B

GUEST: The bot era is here, and the world has already begun to see its transformative potential. But like any technology, there will be bad bots as predictably as good ones. With every advancement, there are people looking to exploit it. Anticipating what they might do is key so that builders, developers, and users can prevent, preempt, and prepare.
Here are the “dark bots” we’re likely to see:
The Stealthy Bot
This is a bot whose ownership is unknown, giving it the freedom to

GUEST: Last week, Apple put the rumors to bed and confirmed that it will introduce paid search ads to the App Store, meaning app makers can pay to have ads for their apps appear at the top of search results. This could be detrimental to many of them. Apple’s App Store has more than 1.5 million apps, which means it’s already very difficult for the majority of apps to be discovered without investing significantly in advertising budgets. The introduction of the ads will just make it wor

Sony chose the right demo to open its press event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week. As soon as Kratos stepped into the light, fans screamed with delight that another God of War game was coming. But this God of War, which isn’t numbered God of War IV, is a new beginning.
Set in the snow-covered forest, the new God of War features Norse mythology. And Kratos has a son, a little boy who is clearly not a god. The demo showed Kratos tak

GUEST: Despite the tremendous technological innovation we’ve witnessed over the past two decades (smartphones, cloud computing, social networks), search interfaces and their underlying mechanics have remained fairly stagnant. The familiar portals of the early naughts are largely what we see today: empty text boxes, user-typed queries and blue-link responses that point users to web pages or documents.
We think of search as being a “state-of-the-art” product — an index that

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Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of Sony’s biggest exclusives coming for the PlayStation 4 in 2017. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo  (E3), we received a briefing on the single-player story behind the title.
John Gonzalez, lead writer on the project at developer Guerrilla Games, said the open-world action role-playing game is set 1,000 years in the future, after a catastrophe has sent humankind back to the Stone Age. Humans are no longer the dominant species. Nature has reclaimed the Ear

GUEST: On my way to work in Bangalore last week (I’m an intern at a chatbot company), I was listening to Radio One, an Indian radio station, when I heard an ad for a competition. At first I didn’t think much of it. Phone-in radio shows are nothing new in India. But then the radio show host said something curious: “WhatsApp us your messages at…”
I realized that, in India, WhatsApp isn’t a feature or an app like Uber or Swiggy but rather a basic utility like In

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We’ve been debating who won the attention war for the week of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big trade show in Los Angeles this week. But ListenFirst figured out that Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the top game based on an analysis of Internet search results this week.
And from Sunday through Thursday, Sony’s trailer promoting a new God of War title received more YouTube engagement than any other video game studio’s videos. However, th

Leaving the European Union would be a “complete disaster for our country”, according to Ed Vaizey, HM Minister of State for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries.
Speaking at an event yesterday at tech members club Runway East, Vaizey shared his views on the impending referendum with a number of technology entrepreneurs and journalists.
The Conservative politician, who is responsible for digital industries, explained how the UK has worked with other EU countries to create r

This week, Tech.eu tracked 9 technology M&A transactions and 68 funding deals (totalling €296 million, about $334 million) in Europe, Turkey and Israel.
Here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:
1) Earlier this year, Twitter invested about $70 million in Berlin-based streaming music service company SoundCloud, the companies unexpectedly announced/confirmed this week.
2) China’s Tencent is reportedly nearing a deal to buy Supercell, the Finn

You can purchase a semi-automatic weapon in under 10 minutes, but it’s the rifle emoji we’re scared of. Unicode, the organization tasked with overseeing the selection of new emoji, decided that a rifle emoji wasn’t in our best interest after trying to decide which potential emoji would make the cut for a proposed Olympic-themed set. I’m not a gun fan so I can’t say I disagree with the decision — nor that I’d care if it were selected — bu