Technology news

Flipkart chief technical officer Peeyush Ranjan doesn’t believe Alexa, the voice-assistant that powers Amazon’s Echo devices, “as it is will work in India,” the executive said on stage at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference.
“The problems that we see over here [in the U.S.] are not what we see in India,” said Ranjan. “The real challenge we’re going to have to solve is bigger than Alexa.”
India’s ecommerce

Paul Feig’s new Ghostbusters won’t be opening in China. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the reboot has been denied approval to screen in China, which could have a major impact on its final box office returns.
China, the world’s second largest film market, is highly restrictive to foreign films: only a select number of movies from outside of the country are approved for a wide release. According to sources quoted by THR, the film wasn’t banned due to supposed bans on

As the internet changes the way influential people speak to their audiences, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States is slowly enforcing its guidelines for how paid content should work on sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat.
But despite laying out those rules, some of the top personalities on YouTube seem ignorant of what’s expected of them.
Earlier this week, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment settled a dispute with the FTC after it failed to adequately disclose

A new bot released today in the Slack App Directory lets you teach, test, and quickly deploy chatbots on Slack as well as on Facebook Messenger, Kik, and other platforms.
ProtoBot was made by Amir Shevat, director of developer relations at Slack.
Shevat gave developers a demo at MobileBeat 2016, a gathering of hundreds of companies and thought leaders in the artificial intelligence and chatbot space. MobileBeat is being held July 12-13 at The Village in San Francisco.
ProtoBo

Former supermodel, America's Next Top Model host, and classic horror movie star Tyra Banks will be one of three mentors on a Shark Tank-esque reality series on NBC, Variety reports.
The show, called Funded, will also feature venture capitalist / MTV reality kingpin / holder of 21 Guinness World Records for skateboarding Rob Dyrdek and branding expert Rohan Oza (best known for his work on Vitamin Water) as the other two mentors. Each episode, one lucky startup will b

Personal finance chatbot maker Kasisto, a spinoff of Siri-maker SRI International, will soon be able to trade stock and help users follow their investment portfolio. The stock trade feature will be available to Kasisto users on Facebook Messenger in the fall.
The news of an integration with TradeIt API was announced today at MobileBeat, a gathering of companies and hundreds of people interested in the rapid impact of artificial intelligence and chatbots.
Last month Kasisto re

Launched just six months ago as a hosting platform and bot development company, Beep Boop today announced that it would focus exclusively on developing and integrating bots for Slack. The shift reflects Slack’s growing importance to the workplace — the team communications app is used by at least 77 of the Fortune 100 companies. It’s also not the first time a nascent startup has altered course in response to a burgeoning market.
Speaking today at Mo

Alcatel has announced that the Idol 4S smartphone will be available to preorder from its website in the US beginning Friday, July 15th. The Idol 4S, which was originally announced at Mobile World Congress in February, comes with a virtual reality headset and has VR content available through an app preloaded on it. The whole kit, which includes the phone, VR headset, case, and tempered glass screen protector, is priced at $349.99 for preorders. The price will go up to $399.99 when it hits ge

It feels a little like the music community is taking one long, collective nap this summer, and that means I'm extremely grateful for today's semi-salacious news involving Taylor Swift, Calvin Harris, and some songwriting subterfuge. TMZ reported this morning that Swift secretly co-wrote Harris and Rihanna's smash hit "This Is What You Came For" under the pseudonym "Nils Sjoberg," and that Swift and Harris chose to keep the collaboration a secret so their relationship wouldn't overshadow the song

Engagement, revenue, loyalty. These are concepts not normally associated with chatbots. For now, we tend to see Facebook Messenger bots as early in the development cycle, still trying to find a niche with users, and offering weather bots that tell us to wear a rain jacket.
The Msg.ai platform seeks to change that. Presenting at MobileBeat 2016 today, The CEO and founder Puneet Mehta revealed how the A.I. engine works within Messenger, other chat programs, and within apps. It&rsquo

Valve is no longer permitting gambling sites to use its technology.
The company, which owns and operates the Steam distribution portal and popular games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, announced today that it is enforcing the rules of its Terms of Service for the application protocol that enabled gambling sites to operate. It will request that all gambling sites, like CSGO Lotto, Skings Gambling, and CS:GO Diamonds, to stop immediately.
Up until now, these sites have used the OpenID

ShareGrid, a marketplace service that allows young urban creators — also (not really) known as Yuccies — to rent insured cameras and production equipment, announced today that it scored its first million round.
Led by MHS Capital* and media production company Archer Gray, ShareGrid hopes that this seed investment will allow it to expand in the United States.
The capital will also be used to launch the startup’s newest feature, ShareGrid Hubs — physical locations in which

The International Space Station is getting an important piece of cargo next week: a new International Docking Adapter, or IDA, that will allow future crewed spacecraft to automatically dock with the station. The large metallic ring, which measures 63 inches in diameter, will eventually be installed on the Harmony module. This is the second IDA to be sent to space, though the first one never actually made it to orbit; it was destroyed when the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying it to the ISS&nb

Koss Porta Pros. The very name of these achingly retro-looking headphones is hallowed among the audio lovers who’ve gotten to hear them. The Porta Pros are about the same age as I am, and they’ve endured because of their inexplicably, illogically awesome sound quality, which belies both their looks and bargain-bin price of $49.99 (which is typically closer to $35 online). And now they are getting a limited edition and you get to decide exactly what it will look like.
Koss has offered

I’m here at MobileBeat 2016 covering the latest innovations in technology. The annual event is as close as you can come to a groupthink around one topic with industry insiders in the tech space.
The theme of the show this year has to do with bots, artificial intelligence, and messaging. I’ve paid attention to all of the themes that have developed during the first day of the two-day event. Some of these themes are groundbreaking, while others are a bit more subtle but still impor

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced new functionality for its Database Migration Service, a tool for moving data from on-premises databases into AWS. Now organizations will be able to continuously port data into the Amazon cloud.
“Before today, replicating data was a one-shot hit, it was a one-shot migration,” said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy at AWS, at the AWS Santa Clara Summit in California. The service can now work wit

What do Budapest and Austin have in common? Both are cities that have been abandoned by Uber after their governments passed laws seen as onerous by the famously prickly ride-hailing service.Uber is suspending its service in Hungary after the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban passed a new law to block internet access to “illegal dispatch services,” according to Reuters. The measure, which passed in June, came after months of protests by taxi drivers against Uber in

Think about the people you’ve known the longest and best: your siblings, your summer camp acquaintances, the crew you met in undergrad and stuck with as you became adults. Do you ever find yourself connecting with them on some subconscious level? Maybe you hear a joke someone’s going to make in your head a nanosecond before they actually make it.
When you spend a lot of time in someone’s company, it can pay unexpected, spooky dividends. That’s a big part of the appeal of

Inside a 350,000-square-foot building in the hills of Prineville, OR, slotted inside a nondescript server rack, is one of Facebook’s most valuable artificial intelligence tools. It’s called Big Sur, and it’s a hardware system for training software to improve itself over time. It uses enormous amounts of data, funneled in from all over the world, and taps into the building’s extraordinary computing power to accelerate a process that once took months down to a matter of hou

While Pokémon Go rakes in millions of dollars with its augmented reality action, the company responsible for the tech behind the game is raising money to help build the future of AR and VR gaming.
Unity Technologies has raised $181 million in a Series C funding round. The company, which makes the Unity game-development toolkit of the same name, will use the cash to expand the capabilities of its software when it comes to VR and AR applications. Investment firm DFJ Growth led the

We’re delighted to announce an exciting fireside chat for the AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) day at GamesBeat 2016 to address what the environment for investing in VR startups in the near-term and the opportunity for a VR mass market. Check out the new agenda here.
Above: Rikard Streiber, senior vice president of virtual reality at HTC.Image Credit: HTC
You can register for the event here.
Our newest speaker is Rikard Steiber, senior vice president of virtual reality at HTC

Few spaces are safe from computers anymore. We’ve got them in our refrigerators, in our beds, and on our bikes. I would say all these spaces should be sacred so as to make relaxing while eating, sleeping, and biking easier, but whatever, I've clearly lost this war. Now, Garmin is improving its bike computer game. Its Edge 820 and Edge Explorer 820 are 2.3-inch display computers that pair with an iPhone or Android to display calls and texts. It’s also got this nifty feature

When you arrive in a foreign city for the first time, how would you like to learn about the best nearby restaurants, scenic strolls, or the jazz band that assembles every Saturday at dusk in a centuries-old plaza? From a trusted local or from a bot on your smartphone? For Airbnb, the answer is obvious: the trusted local.
Speaking today at MobileBeat 2016, Joe Zadeh, vice president of product at Airbnb, stated that only humans — in this case, Airbnb hosts — can provide authe

Microsoft’s grand vision for the Kinect clearly hasn’t gone according to plan. The few Xbox One games that supported the device for motion or voice controls were mostly forgettable, while the Kinect also largely failed to catch on as a way to navigate the console’s myriad menus. With the upcoming closure of Xbox Fitness, and the fact that the new Xbox One S gets rid of the dedicated Kinect port entirely, it’s safe to say the device is no longer a major focus for Microsoft

If you've ever been at a large event like a music festival, you're probably aware of just how awful cell service can get as hundreds or thousands of people all try Instagramming from the same spot. AT&T thinks it might have a solution.
In a blog post today, AT&T floated the idea of building cell extensions into drones and flying them in to handle high demand. It imagines using these drones for "large events or even rapid disaster response," the latter of which is really the more importan

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant has become better at understanding what people are saying and, by extension, it’s doing a better job of completing the goals or tasks that people are trying to accomplish when they interact with Alexa through the Amazon Echo speaker or other smart devices.
Specifically, the error rate for goal completion has gone down by a factor of two since Alexa launched on the Echo in November 2014, said Rohit Prasad, vice president of Alexa Machine Learning and Spe

The Harry Potter film series might be long over, but recent trademark filings from Warner Bros. shows that the film company could be planning for the franchise beyond the upcoming Fantastic Beasts trilogy, with the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
The story of Harry Potter is coming back this summer, in the form of a play opening this month in London’s West End. Billed as the eighth installment of the saga, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child picks up the protagonist's

Pokémon Go is family friendly entertainment, while also being the latest popular video game about life after the apocalypse and nature’s inevitable reclamation of our planet. At least, that’s my theory.
Unlike the series of roleplaying games that precede it, Pokémon Go doesn’t bother with dialogue and story. Why are we fighting one another? Why have we been forced to take one of three sides in a war for territory? Why is it that our world and the game’s worl