Technology news

I'm always amazed by Boston Dynamics. One anecdote I like to share about the company is how the next generation Atlas has 3D printed limbs, with embedded "veins" in the structure to route its hydraulics, which keeps the robot strong while making it vastly lighter and in some sense simpler than the original Atlas. That's just some impressive engineering work on all levels.
Of course, while Boston Dynamics is pretty much at the state of the art when it comes to humanoids, it's probably best known

Many U.S. technology stocks got hit today following the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union — while many financial services companies, foreign stock indexes, commodities, and the British pound getting whopped, as well.
Here’s a roundup of tech stocks’ percentage drops:
Adobe: -4.17%
Alphabet: -3.80%
Amazon: -3.10%
AMD: -6.33%
Apple: -2.72%
Box: -1.48%
Cisco: -5.03%
eBay: -6.92%
EMC: -2.05%
Expedia: -7.41%
Facebook: -2.61%
Hortonworks: -7.34%
HP: -5.37

The past couple weeks haven’t been the best. But it’s Friday afternoon. The weekend is so close, but here you are, still at your desk. You deserve happiness as much as anybody else. So, I have a video for you.
It’s short. It’s sweet. It repeats the oddly comforting sound of a NYC subway train leaving the station. I hope it brings you joy. And if it doesn’t — and if you are of legal drinking age — I might recommend an ice-cold wine spritzer.Continue readi

Your Twitter handle may soon be part of the US visa process. Yesterday, US Customs and Border Patrol entered a new proposal into the federal register, suggesting a new field in which persons entering the country can declare their various social media accounts and screen names. The information wouldn’t be mandatory, but the proposed field would still provide customs officials with an unprecedented window into the online life of travelers. The process already includes fingerprinting, an

Prepare the wallets. The Steam Summer Sale has begun.
This is one of the craziest times of the year for Valve’s digital PC store. From now until July 4, hundreds of games will be available at huge discounts. So many are on sale that it can actually be hard to know which ones you should spend your money on.
To help, we’ve gone through the discounted games and highlighted some of the best deals in the Steam Summer Sale below.
Above: Get too stressed and you may lose all hope.Image Cred

PRESS RELEASE: SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 24, 2016– NextEV announced that it is investing in jobs in the state of California. On Thursday, June 16, 2016, a state board approved a $10 million tax credit for NextEV over the next four years. The California Competes Tax Credit program is to attract and grow business in California. “We are building a team in San Jose and San Francisco and bringing in amazing talent to create a next-generation electric vehicle that w

 Obama encouraged companies to continue hiring workers from diverse backgrounds, citing tech companies’ diversity reports as a step in the right direction. The president also discussed censorship of the internet in Egypt and said international leaders need to welcome free speech rather than attempt to stifle it — even if that speech has negative effects.
“It turns out that… Read More

In the first 176 days of 2016, there have already been 196 mass shootings in America. Just two weeks ago, we witnessed the deadliest mass shooting in US history when a gunman killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Two days after the massacre, the American Medical Association released a statement calling gun violence in America a "public health crisis."
Despite this statement, and similar sentiments or calls-to-action from the National Physicians Alliance, Doc

Speaking at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, U.S. President Barack Obama gave his first speech since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union yesterday.
While the President’s direct comments on Brexit were mild and reassuring — you can read them here — his later commentary on the possibilities of global entrepreneurship rather transparently challenged the blatant xenophobia that appeared during the Brexit campaign.
Here’s an ex

 As you can already tell, this is an electric skateboard. It’s not my first rodeo on one either, and it won’t be my last. But here’s something I learned the past few days: Acton’s budget-friendly electric skateboard has been the least fulfilling of the electric rolling planks I’ve ridden. Summed up, it’s an electric skateboard with a few quirks.
Price as… Read More

We’re happy to announce that GamesBeat University will return to the GamesBeat 2016 event this summer. We’re going to select a mix of sponsored talks and developer talks to air on our livestream during the breaks at our big annual GamesBeat conference on Aug. 1-3 at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes in Los Angeles.
Above: Gordon BellamyImage Credit: Gordon Bellamy
The talks will focus on informational topics for game developers, publishers, and other professio

There are two keys to understanding Deerhoof tucked into The Magic, the San Francisco quartet’s 13th studio album. The first anchors "Criminals of the Dream," the album’s mutating centerpiece: "You can dream, you can dream, I know you can dream / Things aren’t as bad as they seem!" (The sentiment may arrive on the heels of a song called "Life Is Suffering," but it’s delivered with wide-eyed sincerity where the latter’s tossed out with a wink and a shrug.)
The second

Some say that the lithe, curvy Lamborghini Miura is the most beautiful car ever made. The modern-day Aventador, on the other hand — aggressive? Yes. Striking? Sure. But "beautiful, " at least in the traditional sense of the word, might be a stretch.That didn't stop Lamborghini from using the Aventador to help celebrate the Miura's 50th anniversary, though, launching its Aventador Miura Homage edition at the Goodwood Festival of Speed this week. The supercar winks at the Miura with a two-to

The original Watch Dogs had a lot of good ideas, but many of them were buried under a fairly underwhelming shooter. For the sequel, it looks like at least some of that will change: according to Watch Dogs 2 game director Danny Belanger, you can play the entire game without killing anyone.
“The player has the freedom to play the way they want,” he explained on the PlayStation blog. “We don’t want to force you as a player to make a specific choice about how you want to play

Google has started showing lightweight, fast-loading Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in its Google Play Newsstand news and magazine app for Android and iOS.
The launch only applies to free content. “We are exploring extending it for paid content in the future,” Sami Shalabi, head of product and engineering for Google Play Newsstand, wrote yesterday in a blog post.
Previously Google has rolled out AMP pages in Google mobile search, the Google app for iOS, and Google News. Now another G

It’s not often that I squee at a gadget. Something about their reflective metal gives off a sterile vibe.A big-screen TV doesn’t sound my cute alarm, you know? But these lil guys: Dezeen
Major cute alarm alert.Hyerim Shin, a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, wanted to experiment with how to make home appliances cute, so taking inspiration from Japanese kawaii culture, she built a toaster, vacuum, and garbage can. For real, I never thought I’d think a garbage can is

Valentine’s Day 2017 is a long time from now. For fans who have been eagerly awaiting a new Persona — there hasn’t been a new main entry in the cult RPG series since 2008’s Persona 4 on the PS2 — the next game’s oft-delayed release has been a hard one to bear. Persona 5 will finally hit both the PS3 and PS4 on February 14th (September if you’re lucky enough to live in Japan), which means you’ll have a lot of time to kill before your world is consum

Bad news continues for the Lucas Museum. After two years of fighting for permission to build in Chicago, George Lucas said today that he's abandoning those plans and will once again attempt to bring his museum to California.
Chicago's government has been enthusiastic in its support for the Lucas Museum, which is meant to showcase George Lucas' collection of art related to storytelling, particularly with regard to cinema. But construction has been blocked by a lawsuit meant to protect Chicag

Kanye West's live-streamed premiere of The Life of Pablo at Madison Square Garden was a phenomenal success back in February, and he's trying to recapture that magic by hosting a similar event for the premiere of his "Famous" music video tonight in Los Angeles. (I guess Aziz Ansari's magical West-approved fan video just wasn't cutting it anymore.) West is going to play the video for the first time at The Forum tonight at 7PM PT (that's 10PM ET for you East Coast viewers), and he's

Jennifer Stanley isn't psychic, but she has ripped a hole in the space-time continuum. Two years ago, on a whim, she wrote "Wildest Dreams," a 12,000-word piece of fan fiction depicting (with some uncannily accurate details) the budding relationship of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston.
When a British tabloid released a smattering of images of Swift and Hiddleston canoodling on a Rhode Island beach, the internet erupted into flames — and blew up Stanley's phone. Stanley,

Did you think the AMG GT S was the best Mercedes could do against the Porsche 911? Not quite: meet the AMG GT R,an even badder-ass version of the sports coupe that has more power, less weight, and — needless to say — a higher price.Introduced at Mercedes' facility at Brooklands in the UK today, the AMG GT R will produce 577 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque, up from 503hp / 479 lb-ft. and 456hp / 443 lb-ft. in the 2017 AMG GT S and the base AMG GT, respectively. Those 577 horse

Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley can't sleep. You see, they have a problem on their hands, and it's circular and saucy and requires an inordinate amount of human labor to produce. That means inefficiency, which is the enemy of overwrought Medium posts everywhere. It is known by everyday consumers as the pizza, and some tech industry hopefuls think they should be made by robots instead.
One such startup, called Zume and based in Mountain View, CA, has built up a robot pizza-making operation that i

 Are we living in a simulation? For whatever reason, this is a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. It all more or less started when Tesla Motors CEO (and soon to be SolarCity CEO — check one off for the simulation argument there) Elon Musk made a claim at the Code Conference that there’s such a high chance that we’re living in a simulation that it’s more likely we… Read More

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! We’re still posting stories from last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, including interviews with the director of the new God of War, Cory Barlog. Also, Mighty No. 9 has a rough start, and Overwatch makes a ton of money in digital sales.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Shooters. Zombies. Pirates. Gods. My picks for the best games of E3
GamesBeat’s E3 Non-Awards: Most hectic mul

There’s a signature Taika Waititi stare — a kind of blank, baffled look the New Zealand writer-director's characters get when they’re frustrated. His characters share a deliberate sort of pettiness, not just a smallness of drive, but a smallness in the impotent, baffled way they greet obstacles. They’re all modest strivers, stymied by the littlest things, and dealing with frustration by refusing to adapt. And they’re usually hilarious. The juvenile adult protagonist

Just a month after it introduced them, Oculus VR has reversed security updates introduced to its Oculus Home platform.
Following the initial update’s arrival in late May, users discovered that a popular hack known as ReVive had been blocked. The program allowed a handful of VR games designed to be exclusive to the Oculus Rift, including launch title Lucky’s Tale, to now be played on the HTC Vive. The new update, however, introduced a headset check that wasn’t intended to break

Harry Styles is the second member of UK boy band One Direction to land a solo recording contract, following Zayn Malik's contract with RCA Records last July.
While Malik officially left the band three months prior to signing, Harry Styles is still technically a member of One Direction. Rumors of solo careers were swirling even before One Direction announced its "temporary hiatus" in January of this year, but Styles is the first to put pen to paper Billboard reports. He's signed with Co

An important question to ask about any new product is: who is this for? There are a lot of gadgets out there these days, and many of them solve very specific problems shared by very particular groups of people. But sometimes it's really hard to answer that question. Sometimes you can't even begin to imagine who would spend X on Y. This morning was one of those times, because ArcaSpace — a private space company that builds rockets and spacecraft — announced a tiny, square, e

Earlier this year, HTC was essentially confirmed as the maker of the next generation of Nexus phones — codenamed at Google as Marlin and Sailfish. Now, Android Police is following up on its initial report with rumors of what we can expect to see built into the Sailfish. We’ve got:
5-inch, 1080p display
Quad-core 2.0GHz 64-bit processor4GB RAM, 32GB storage
2770 mAh battery
12-megapixel rear camera
8-megapixel front camera
USB-C port
Fingerprint scanner
Top-mounted head

Oculus has reversed course on a controversial recent decision: blocking owners of HTC Vive headsets from buying and playing exclusive Rift games.
Earlier today, the creators of Revive — a system that enables games from Oculus’ store on the Vive — noted that Oculus had seemingly removed a new copy protection check it added to games last month, which checked to see if a Rift was present before playing a game. Oculus also confirmed the news to The Verge. "We continually revise our

London-based FX studio The Mill released a video this week showing off its latest creation: the Blackbird, an adjustable car rig that can mimic any model vehicle for advertisers. With the appearance of a murdered-out dune buggy, the Blackbird uses 360-degree cameras and an adjustable suspension to transform its chassis into any length or width required. And with an overlay of CGI, the vehicle can become any type of car it wants.
The Mill says it created the Blackbird to address the "bi

Independence Day: Resurgence has been labeled by the broad critic community as an abomination. It’s been called lazy, nonsensical, and joyless. I voluntarily saw the sequel, 20 years in the making, last night, and none of the words match what I saw.
The movie certainly isn’t lazy. Like so many recent summer blockbusters, it’s overstuffed with plot. But unlike its contemporaries, it condenses the story to a long, but comparatively brief two hours. It hustles like a Saturday morn

Samsung has already made a Batman edition of its Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, so it should come as no surprise that the company is working on an Olympic edition of its flagship device, according to SamMobile. The site reports that the device is currently under development, which we've also heard from our own sources. A photo of the device has also been leaked courtesy of Evan Blass (formerly known as @evleaks).
There are also a pair of Olympic apps being developed, according to SamMobi