Technology news

Pokémon Go is sweeping the nation, and along with its growing popularity is a steady stream of bizarre news stories and personal anecdotes of near-death experiences. First there was the Australian police warning users not to physically enter the police station when collecting items, and earlier today Washington's Department of Transportation warned against "pokemoning" while driving. The mobile game's dedicated subreddit is also filling up with reports of personal injury in

 It’s starting to happen like clockwork. Firms are closing new funds almost exactly 24 months to the date from their last fund closing. The newest example? Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), which this morning announced a new, $600 million fund. It last closed two funds — a $650 million early-stage vehicle, and a $200 million co-investment fund to back maturing BCV investments —… Read More

GUEST: Mobile messaging is growing. It has surpassed the popularity of social networking apps. For consumers, mobile messaging has quickly become their communication preference for personal and even business communication. A study found that many employees are using consumer-facing messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp throughout the workday to communicate with colleagues, external partners, stakeholders, and clients. Unfortunately, these consumer-facing apps aren&rsquo

Well, there goes all the memes about Pokemon Go. Just days after its release in Australia, New Zealand, and the US, things have gotten dark with the game. While many players have been sent to random locations like local churches and police stations to find Pokemon, a Wyoming teen ended up finding a dead body floating in a river on Friday morning. “I was trying to get a Pokemon from a natural water resource,” 19-year-old Shayla Wiggins told local news. She climbed

Today we learned the Dallas police used a bomb disposal robot to deliver and detonate an explosion, killing the suspect in last night's shooting. It was surprising, and shocking, and left me with a lot of questions. But, really, there's only one question: is this ethical?
So I spoke to an expert. Ryan Calo is a law professor at the University of Washington, who focuses on robotics law and policy. For years he's been pushing for better and clearer policy around robotics, and exploring the ethical

Until 1904, most ships that encountered trouble at sea effectively vanished. "Ships at sea out of visual range were very much isolated from shore and other ships," writes the Telegraph Office, an online history of Morse code. "A ship could vanish from the high seas, and no one would know until that vessel failed to make a port connection." But by 1904, many ships were equipped with some of the earliest wireless radios. For the first time, they could signal their distress, bringing help from

Of all the ways to apply sunscreen, ‘getting pooped on by a seagull’ does not sound like the best option. Still, that’s what Nivea is banking on with a new, rather ridiculous ad campaign. Here’s the premise: kids apparently don’t like to wear sunscreen, so Nivea partnered with an ad agency to build a seagull drone that hunts and poops out sunscreen onto the unsuspecting children. Never mind the difficulty of actually landing the protective excrement on th

Do you wish to create a chilling music score for your amateur horror film, but you have no musical experience? No problem!
The Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator is a web experiment by Jake Albaugh that allows you to generate different musical scores based on a variety of different inputs. This tool allows users to create a series of arpeggios in a chord progression, resulting in a cycle of haunting, looping notes that rise and fall endlessly.
The results span an incredible range of tone

Sunscreen and I have a love / hate relationship. I know I should love it and wear it because it keeps me skin cancer-free and because I look hella bad with sunburn. I hate sunscreen, though, because it’s messy to put on and it makes me smell like sunscreen, which isn’t a cute smell, unless you like reminding people of the beach. I guess that’s an okay thing to be associated with. Maybe I would unconditionally love sunscreen, though, if I had a machine to apply it for me. Like t

When Apple introduced iOS 7 in the summer of 2013, the software came with the biggest visual overhaul in the mobile OS's history. Alongside flat design icons and a more modern and Jony Ive-inspired approach was one of iOS's much-needed features: Control Center. It was a slide-up tool drawer — enjoyed in similar form by Android users for quite some time — to turn on and off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, access useful stock functions like the flashlight and camera, and quickly change scree

GUEST: One question we often hear in the tech industry is: Will A.I. destroy jobs and ultimately the society in which we live?
The fact that A.I. could one day become smarter than humans is not the main issue here. What people mean when they express this concern is: “Will bots replace us?”
In many countries, the service industry is responsible for most of the GDP, and people feel safe simply knowing that machines couldn’t do what they do — which has been the case for

Facebook Messenger just made it a little bit easier to book an UberPOOL ride. It works like this: Open up a messenger conversation, click on the three-dot menu button, and select ‘Request a Ride’. You’ll then have the option to request a ride just for yourself, or for you and your friend. Request the ride, and you’re good to go. It’s not much different than simply ordering from the Uber app, but it does give you the added benefit of being able to quickly share your

Navigating the corridors and alleys of cities can often make a person feel small, but video games are here to make you feel big again.
Mobile publisher Storm8 wants to give players control over city streets, business, and housing in its new Dream City: Metropolis game that launched July 7 on iOS and Android. In this app, gamers take on the role of a tycoon who must revitalize their town. Dream City is entering a $36.9 billion mobile gaming market that is not short on builder-style game

I’ve always really loved high-resolution time lapses: there’s something really cool about seeing cities or the night sky fly across my computer screen in gorgeous detail. There’s a new time lapse by photographer Joe Capra of Scientifantastic that puts every one that I’ve seen to shame.
Using a 100 megapixel Phase One XF IQ3 camera, Capra shot the time lapse footage of Los Angeles in 12k resolution. The resulting film was beautiful in and of itself, but because he was work

Since I Left You, the 2000 LP that turned The Avalanches into minor musical legends, is an outlier in almost every respect. It’s a lengthy album, one that stretches out over an hour, but its seamless track-to-track glide makes it easy for the listener to get lost within the larger whole. The hundreds — or is it thousands? — of samples that make it up span the majority of the 20th century, but the finished product isn’t attached to any specific musical time period or scene

Microsoft today announced new capabilities for chatbots that work inside Skype that are built with Microsoft’s Bot Framework.
Most prominently, Skype chatbots can now now be part of group chats and respond to messages from multiple users in a single chat, potentially making interaction with the Skype bot framework much more like the group experience on Slack. Also, it’s now possible for chatbots to use cards in order to share images, images with buttons, receipts, and carou

Climbing sea temperatures along the coast of Australia has led to massive deterioration of underwater kelp forests, New Scientist reports. In a study published in Science this week, researchers at University of Western Australia in Perth found a correlation between rising temperatures in the Indian Ocean and changes in kelp populations. Last year, the researchers found no signs of kelp recovery in the area following a record-breaking 2011 heatwave. Continue reading…

For a little while now, YouTube has been working on an online TV service for people who aren't interested in subscribing to cable — and now The Information reports that deals are starting to come together. While it sounds like nothing is finalized, ESPN, ABC, and CBS are "firmly expected" to be available through the service.
Other major broadcasters are expected to get involved, too. The Information reports, however, that YouTube may choose to pass on smaller networks, like HGTV, inst

 DIY Co., the education tech startup led by Vimeo designer and co-founder Zach Klein, has launched a new online learning platform for kids called JAM.com. The company also quietly closed a $4 million round of venture funding led by Learn Capital, joined by Spark Capital, at the end of 2015 to support the development of JAM, Klein told TechCrunch. Courses on DIY’s new site JAM were… Read More

A team lead by astronomers at University of California-Santa Cruz has found strong evidence of water clouds outside of the solar system for the first time.
"Our spectrum shows that WISE 0855 is dominated by water vapor and clouds, with an overall appearance that is strikingly similar to Jupiter," Andrew Skemer, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics, said in a statement on the university's website.
WISE 0855 is a brown dwarf, or failed star, that is 7.2 light-years from Earth

In the early hours of Friday morning, police officers in Texas took what is thought to have been unprecedented action for US law enforcement. Using a bomb disposal robot, they killed the suspect in last night's shooting in Dallas after negotiations with the individual broke down. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters. "Other options would have expose

Pocket monster are capable of amazing feats, like rallying investment in a game publisher.
Nintendo’s stock price is up 9 percent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange following the release of the location-based mobile game Pokémon Go. The iOS and Android app debuted Wednesday evening in the United States, and it has fans outside walking around looking for digital creatures to catch on a GPS-powered world map. The free download shot to No. 1 on the top-grossing chart in less than a

VB LIVE: In the first of our series, “Games Growth and Monetization,” mobile strategy powerhouses from EA, Pocket Gems and Google reveal the surprising strategies that make a game launch sizzle instead of fizzle.
Missed it? Access this VB Live event on demand right here.
“Users are everywhere,” says Google’s Alex Valle, product manager for mobile ads. “Users are researching, users are engaging all over the Internet, all over the world, all over offline channel

Here’s a thing I didn’t really expect to write: I’m finding that I enjoy Google’s apps more on iOS than I do on Android. Or more specifically: I think that there’s more interesting innovation coming out of Google’s iOS app teams than on Android — at least for the moment.
Back in May, my colleague Ben Popper talked about how Google’s apps on iOS were so good that he saw little reason to switch over to Android, despite the fact that he spends so much

This week on The Vergecast, the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern joins Nilay, Paul, and Dieter to talk about the iOS 10 beta. How many ways can you send iMessages? All the ways. Every. Single. Way. Plus, we discuss Siri, Sierra, Alexa, and make a heroic attempt to talk about BlackBerry. Really, we tried. Also, Paul expresses his deep and abiding love for double-finned, hyper-fast removable storage. Can't blame him for that.
03:12 Apple battery case
06:08 Apple news08:10 Live Pho

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, the anticipated Pokémon Go releases, and it’s already making us late for work. We also talked with Blizzard about Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: The high tide for powerful storytelling in games
Chinese gamers are about to embrace the television alongside smartphones and PC
Pokémon Go made me late for work
GamesBea

ESPN is planning to skip TV providers and sell "a package of live programming" directly to consumers over the web, according to a new report from The Information. But the over-the-top offering won't include NBA, NFL, or any other big-league content; rather, ESPN will stick to "niche" leagues and select college sports for the streaming package.
The hugely popular sports network has conducted experiments like this before. In 2015, ESPN let online viewers purchase access to its extensive

Pokémon trainers have always had to deal with hardships like tough gym leaders, that meddling Team Rocket, and finding rare legendary creatures. But now you can add a new obstacle to the list: overloaded servers.
Pokémon Go is continuing to experience intermittent outages as the game has gone down repeatedly since its debut earlier this week. Many players were getting a screen that confirms the location-based monster-catching app’s servers are overloaded, and others

Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.
Spanish game studio MercurySteam Entertainment has been making console and PC games since the early 2000s. Its credits include the failed American McGee Presents: Scrapland to the successful Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series.
Now the Madrid company cofounded by Enric Alvarez is striking out on its own with the independently created Raiders of the Broken Planet. The title is a narrative-based adventu

Word arrived yesterday of a major change to the Star Trek universe: John Cho’s character Hikaru Sulu will be gay in the upcoming film, Star Trek Beyond. The news excited fans, eager to see a new progressive milestone for a franchise built atop social consciousness. Just as quickly though, things got complicated:  George Takei, the actor who originated the role of Sulu, announced he wasn’t happy with the change.
"I think it’s really unfortunate." - George TakeiAfter the sto

Early into the investigations behind the shooting of Philando Castile, a black man who was killed by a Minnesota cop during a traffic stop, many speculated that the responsible policeman was Asian American. In the viral video shot by Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, she described the cop as Asian male. Minnesota Department of Public Safety later identified him as Jeronimo Yanez, though did not specify his ethnicity. Fearing the potential parallels to how the Chin

If it weren’t for a panic attack, the title track of Shura’s debut full-length album, Nothing’s Real (out today), wouldn’t have been written. In a recent interview with The Fader, the British musician said she was inspired to write "Nothing’s Real" — a synthy, "Like a Prayer"-ish dance track — after going to the hospital one night for chest pains. "I was scared — I was genuinely scared," she said. "I had an insight into how I might react if I

For all of its promises to help and enrich our lives, wearable tech is often very needy. Smartwatches constantly ping us asking for our attention; fitness trackers want us to get up and move around; and everything needs to be charged all the time. It’s no surprise many fitness trackers end up in a drawer after just a few months, destined to track the non-activity of whatever other trinkets are there with them.In response to these criticisms, a few companies have released wearable devices t

We heard rumors earlier this month that Samsung’s Galaxy J2 would have a glowing notification ring around its camera, and now we can confirm that yes, it's happening. Samsung unveiled its J2 and J Max today. Only the J2 has the glowing ring. Here are the J2’s phone specs, if you care about anything other than Smart Glow.
5-inch AMOLED display
Spreadtrum SC8830 quad-core 1.5GHz processor
1.5GB of RAM, 8GB of storage
8-megapixel rear-facing camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera
2,600

Finally, you can set your artificial intelligence creations free in Minecraft. Microsoft has announced a public release for Project Malmo, the company’s system for testing AI software in Minecraft — and for the first time, anyone can join in.
Microsoft first made the system available to researchers in March under the name AIX, but this release marks the first time the code has been freely available to the public. The code is all available under an open-source license on Github,

Google announced last month that its Play Store will start notifying users of pertinent apps they might want to download based off their location. App developers will need beacons to trigger those notifications, and Estimote’s location beacons are one possible choice for them. Though those beacons were released only a few months ago, they're already being updated to include programmable NFC. Now they can be used for cardless payments or for prompting people to download an ap

This weekend the Ultimate Fighting Championship is celebrating it’s 200th pay-per-view fight card, a massive event that will put more UFC champions into the cage in one night than ever before. But the fights aren’t the only thing fans will be tuning in to see. It’s also been widely reported that the company will use the event to announce its parent company, Zuffa LLC, has been acquired for more than $4 billion. That’s a whopping increase from the $2 million the company so