Technology news

GUEST: In one of the year’s most telegraphed tech reveals, Facebook announced in April that it was opening its Messenger APIs so brands could deploy chatbots to create rich, automated customer engagement on the app. But barely 24 hours passed before users discovered that the first chatbots on Messenger could not understand some simple questions, were slow to respond, and did not interact in much of a conversational manner. In other words, they were more chatbust than chatbot.
Weather app P

Google appears to be planning a manufacturing run for another new first-party Chromebook Pixel laptop.
The company published a job posting last month entitled “Quality Engineer, Chromebook Pixel.” The person selected for the job will be based in Shanghai and will be expected to “drive design of experiments and collect SPC [statistical process control] data to enable evaluation, qualification, and verification cost-effectively in manufacturing quality across functional teams,&rd

Huawei's MateBook, a Windows 2-in-1 tablet, will be launching in the United States in the near future for $699. For that price, you get a convertible Windows 10 machine featuring a 12.9-inch display (2160x1440 resolution), Intel's Skylake Core M processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage.
The MateBook made its debut back at Mobile World Congress in February, and we were impressed during our initial hands-on. Huawei's battery life claims are certainly impressive: 9 hours of video playback.

GUEST: I’m anti-GPS and anti-Google Maps. I don’t read paper maps very well, and I hate asking for directions. If these traits were coupled with a good sense of direction, I’d get around just fine. Unfortunately, they’re not.
Yet while I’m in the navigationally-challenged minority on today’s Waze-clogged roads, on the web I fit right in. I’m one of lost majority. The reason? Even on some of the most valuable, most well-planned real estate on the web

Anton Yelchin, who starred in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek films as Chekov, died early Sunday at the age of 27. Yelchin was involved in a freak accident that led to him being "pinned by his own car," according to TMZ. Yelchin's publicist has since confirmed his passing, saying "His family requests you respect their privacy at this time."
Friends discovered the young actor's body after Yelchin was several hours late for a scheduled rehearsal on Saturday night. "They went to his San Fernando V

This week, we noticed an interesting trend emerge here at Verge Science: we wrote a lot about frogs and a lot about space. Well, we wrote two stories about frogs, but that’s way above the frog story average for a typical week, which usually hovers around zero. Because of this week’s affinity for Kermit and microgravity, it didn’t take us long to ask a very natural question: have frogs ever been to space? Continue reading…

My favorite demo from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was the Days Gone gameplay demo at the close of the Sony press conference. I saw it again later in a small group session with the developers from Bend Studio. Sure, it was yet another post-apocalypse game, but this one stood out above the rest.
The demo worked well because it felt like it was a scripted scene featuring lead character Deacon St. John as he tried to battle on the run with a horde of zombie-like creatures, dubbed Fre

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will soon either veto or sign into law a bill that makes it illegal to advertise entire unoccupied apartments for short-term rentals on Airbnb. Despite loud objections from Airbnb and Silicon Valley investors like Ashton Kutcher and Paul Graham, the New York State Senate passed the bill on Friday, the latest development in a complicated relationship between Airbnb and its biggest market. Now the measure is headed to Cuomo's desk. The bill prohibits online apar

GUEST: Now that the VC crunch and tech bubble in Silicon Valley has been holding startups hostage, it’s time to stop overlooking the startup revolution that has been quietly taking place across the Atlantic.
While Europe continues to lag behind its louder and more belligerent neighbor in the volume of VC investments (in 2015, VCs invested 5.4x more money in the US than in Europe), it’s also the home to 16 of the world’s fastest growing unicorns, including Sweden-based Spotify,

GUEST: Facebook, Adobe, Autodesk and Planet Labs all have started creative residency programs in the last year, but these kinds of programs aren’t a new invention.
Artist-in-residence programs started over a century ago and ranged from making studio space in offices to placing painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians at universities.
Art has always been an important part of innovation. It actually helps Nobel Prize winners (and everyone else)&n

At Sony’s press event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Activision showed off its hands-on combat for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Fans have been skeptical that the sci-fi space combat would work, but Activision’s Infinity Ward studio showed that it could create combat scenes that feel like a part of the Call of Duty series, which has led to more than $15 billion in sales over more than a decade.
In the battle that Activision showed, you are in Geneva, Switzerland, after

This morning, Blue Origin launched and landed its New Shepard rocket for the fourth time — and we got to watch the entire thing live. It was the first ever live broadcast of a Blue Origin test flight, showing the vehicle’s ascent to the edge of space and then its subsequent fall and touchdown back on Earth. The flight was originally scheduled to take place at 10:15AM ET, but was pushed back to 10:36AM ET due to particularly hot weather at the launch pad in West Texas. Once the vehicl

A rocket launch is the perfect way to kick off Father’s Day. Lucky for you, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos’ other company, Blue Origin, is launching its New Shepard rocket into space today.
This is the fourth time the rocket has launched — it’s reusable, just like the rocket from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. But what’s different is that this is the first time that New Origin is broadcasting the launch live, rather than showing footage after the fact. You can

GUEST: After my recent coverage of virtual reality startups in the Netherlands, a wave of curiosity splashed into my inbox with people asking for insights about the secret sauce the government and private sector have in their hands. What is the formula that has allowed the country to catapult onto the center stage of the global startup scene in these past few years?
The answer, in my opinion, relates strongly to the Dutch brand of enthusiastic practicality. They aren’t a culture known for

The text messages began arriving last month. "Facebook is starting to get a little Skynet on me," my friend Matt said. The text message included a screenshot of the birthdays feed from his notifications. "Help Casey Newton Celebrate His Birthday," blared a bolded message at the top of the feed. Above it, ethnically diverse cartoon characters attempted to wrangle some birthday candles onto an oversized donut. "If you're getting together June 19, invite friends by making an event," Facebook said.

Tired of dragging around beach chairs and giving yourself Louis Armstrong cheeks while blowing up various inflatables? From the beach to the backyard, music festivals to movie nights in the park, the Loungr Inflatable Chair is the new comfort craze. An ultra portable, sturdy ripstop nylon design allows it to inflate by simply swooping it through the air, offering instant couch-comfort support for your chill time with friends and family. For a limited time, TNW Deals is taking 22 percent off the

Nix Hydra is on a roll with its Egg! mobile game. The female-run company launched Egg! last week, and it has been downloaded more than 2 million times on the Apple iOS app store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore.
The pet-care title is the third game from Los Angeles-based Nix Hydra, which two young women out of college started and now has 35 employees.
“We are thrilled with the success of our launch,” said Lina Chen, CEO of Nix Hydra, in a statement. &ldq

The most innovative thing Apple did with their Photo app recently was the addition of a ‘Selfie’ filter. You can find the folder in your Photos app, and yeah, it is filled with Selfies. Apart from that Apple still thinks we use photography as we did it 30 years ago: we go on a trip, take a bunch of photo’s then struggle with how to show our friends these photos when we get back from our trip. Well, I’ve got news for you Apple; that’s maybe 1% of photography, a

(Reuters) – A soyuz capsule bringing back three astronauts from the International Space Station, including the first to represent the British government, made a safe parachute landing on the steppe near the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan on Saturday.
The crew, which included a Russian and an American as well as Britain’s Tim Peake, left the space station about three hours earlier after spending half a year in Earth’s orbit.
Above: A Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft capsule carrying Int

(Reuters) – High school student David Dworken spent 10 to 15 hours between classes on his laptop, hacking U.S. Defense Department websites.
Instead of getting into trouble, the 18-year-old who graduated this week was one of two people praised by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon on Friday for finding vulnerabilities before U.S. adversaries did.
“We know that state-sponsored actors and black-hat hackers want to challenge and exploit our networks … what we didn&rsq

GUEST: Data from VBProfiles shows that Q1 2016 saw the largest amount of investments in the VR landscape in the last five quarters. Compared to the same period of time last year, the budding industry has seen four additional investments and almost $588M more in funding — an increase of over 120 percent.  (Disclosure: VB Profiles is a cooperative effort between VentureBeat and Spoke Intelligence.)
Now, adding sizzle to the Q1 VR investment high, the Virtual Reality Company (VRC) announ

The new app Public is betting that people will read and share group chats. In an interview with Variety, Public CEO Avner Ronen predicted that while “chat has never been a spectator sport,” messaging apps will become a place to watch people communicate.
“We believe that, in addition to audio and video, messaging could become a third medium for broadcasting conversations,” Avner Ronen said upon launching the Public app and website. Prior to Public, Rone

OPINION: History may anoint 2016 as the dawn of the modular smartphone era. Headline after headline breathlessly crowns handsets like the LG G5 and Motorola Moto Z as the first to offer users some degree of hardware customization. But is this a false narrative, one which confuses true modularity with sets of functionality-enhancing accessories? Or do these devices simply offer proof that the very first modular phones won’t achieve the lofty expectations set by Motorola’s (now Google&

GUEST: Several years ago, we had a television network client who, the morning after their show aired, would eagerly ask, “How did I do last night?” What she meant was: How did the network’s shows perform the previous evening?
But answering that basic question wasn’t so simple a few years ago. Why? Because inherent in that one simple question were a bunch of others that unraveled into a complicated narrative exercise. And, of course, what she really wanted, after all that