Technology news

As every seasoned Pokémon Go player came to realize last week, the game is a major drain on your phone's battery. You can carry around a portable battery pack to solve this issue and look like a nerd, or you can cop this pokédex battery case and still look like a nerd, but really own up to it.
Sparkfun user Nick Poole has created a 3D-printed pokédex that adds an extra 2600mAh to his Samsung Galaxy S4 (and leaves room for more): Nick Poole Nick PooleAnd the best part of

Christopher Correa, former scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals, has been sentenced to 46 months in jail for hacking into the rival Houston Astros’ email and database systems to see player profiles, draft picks, and other confidential information.
Early this year, Correa pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer, carried out while serving as director of baseball development for the Cardinals. He admitted to having gotten into Astros employees&rsq

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Social media means everything these days. Consider the results

GUEST: Over the past few months, the internet has been buzzing about bots.
Microsoft, Facebook and other major players are opening up their A.I. platforms for developers, and these toolkits are an exciting and important step towards democratizing access to A.I.
For the enterprise, however, the bot frenzy has accelerated a challenge that executives have been facing for the past couple of years. Many enterprise companies understand that they need an A.I. strategy and that the technology will

Microsoft today announced that it has released a new version of the Skype Preview app for people participating in the Windows Insider Program. This doesn’t replace the standard Skype Windows app — it’s just the latest version of a rethinking of Skype that works across all Windows 10 devices as a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.
The new version comes with several improvements, including the ability to share your screen, send files, talk with chatbots, and get real-time tran

Germany’s transport minister is proposing new legislation that would put a number of new requirements on automakers as they roll out autonomous vehicles, according to Reuters.
The proposal is from German transport minister Alexander Dobrindt and it would require that drivers remain seated in front of the steering wheel so they would be able to intervene in an emergency. They wouldn’t be expected to pay attention to traffic, but the fact that the legislation would require the existenc

Have you ever thumbed through vintage postcards at a flee market and come across black-and-white photographs of a town or monument livened with a layer of water color or colored pencil? A new service on Algorithmia uses a deep learning algorithm to accomplish a similar result.
To give it a try, simply paste the URL of a black-and-white image and tap "colorize it." After a few seconds of processing, a comparison of the original and colorized images appears. From our limited experimentation, it se

In what is expected to be its last earnings ever as a public company, Yahoo’s (YHOO) second quarter financial results didn’t disappoint. It announced today that it took in revenue of $1.31 billion and had an earnings per share of $0.09. But perhaps what everyone had been waiting for wasn’t immediately revealed: Who will be buying Yahoo?
By comparison, Wall Street analysts had been expecting Yahoo to bring in $1.08 billion in revenue and an EPS of $0.10.
While the company d

GSM Arena got its hands on what looks to be Sony's next flagship phone, the F8331 (the name will likely be changed before it's released), and the design language looks noticeably different from the Xperia X and Z lines that we've become accustomed to over the past few years.
The F8331 features rounded edges reminiscent of the Lumia 920, a bigger screen than the 5-inch Xperia X devices, and a USB-C port — which would be a first for Sony. Thankfully, it still has a headphone jack, so no extr

The Clinton campaign is trolling her likely White House rival during this week’s Republican National Committee convention, buying anti-Trump filters for Snapchat images captured in downtown Cleveland.Geofilters are those tiny pieces of art that Snapchatters can use to overlay images captured in a certain location. During the 2016 race for the White House, politicians have employed these sponsored filters to playfully knock their opponents and attract the attention of college-age voters.Con

Netflix released its earnings report for the second quarter today. The company was one of 2015's best performing stocks, but has seen its share price stumble in recent months on projections of slower growth. Today it reported $1.97 billion in revenue and net income of $41 million. Adding to worries about its growth, the company added just 1.54 million subscribers, well below its own projections of 2.5 million new customers. The stock is down around 14 percent in after-hours trading.
In its lette

Netflix now has 83 million subscribers after adding just 160,000 subscribers in the U.S. and 1.52 million abroad last quarter, missing the modest expectations it set back in April.
Netflix predicted it would add about 2 million new subscribers internationally and 500,000 in the U.S. (a total of 84 million) during this past quarter (Q2 2016).
Investors, meanwhile, simply want reassurance that Netflix will continue growing despite increas

Netflix now has 83.18 million subscribers after adding just 160,000 subscribers in the U.S. and 1.52 million abroad last quarter, missing the modest expectations it set back in April. The company blamed its sluggish growth on an unexpected uptick in churn, possibly due to the company’s decision to end grandfathered prices for longtime users.
Three months ago, Netflix predicted it would add about 2 million new subscribers internationally and

Snapchat’s best feature, on a purely shallow level, is its filters. Yes, the fleeting nature of snaps encourages a truer, more authentic documentation of life in real-time than moments carefully curated on Instagram. But girl, look how good you look in that flower crown lens!
Snow is a Korean Snapchat clone (created by Korean company Naver, the developer behind LINE messenger) that rips off Snapchat’s features in virtually every way, down to the dog filters. It’s practically th

Last weekend at Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm announced that the first VR experience from ILM’s xLab, Trials on Tatooine, would be released to the public, along with news of a future David S. Goyer-penned Darth Vader-focused VR experience. Little mention was made, however, of the third known Star Wars VR property: the PlayStation VR exclusive Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission, announced at E3 2016 for a release later this year. Information on what that experience will en

ZTE has announced the latest phone in its ZMax lineup, the ZMax Pro for MetroPCS. The Pro is a phablet with a 6-inch, 1080p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor, 13-megapixel camera, USB Type-C port, and fingerprint scanner. The most interesting part is the Pro price, which is just $99.
Since the ZMax Pro has such a large display, ZTE was able to equip the phone with a 3,400mAh battery. It is also running Android 6.0 Marshmallow with ZTE's customized interface. ZTE says the new phone will

Even with Pokémon Go taking over the digital world of mobile gaming, physical retailer GameStop is still seeing the benefits.
GameStop is seeing brisk sales at its stores that are near important locations in the top-grossing Pokémon Go iOS and Android game, chief executive officer Paul Raines said today during an interview with CNBC. The corporation runs the largest game-focused retail chain in the world, and it has a majority share when it comes to Xbox One and

BuzzFeed has created a chatbot whose job is to keep tabs of, among other things, protests that take place away from the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
The reporter bot announced yesterday was made to supplement work by real live humans, because though the news outlet will have 19 reporters in Cleveland according to Poynter, they can’t be everywhere at once at an event that attracts tens of thousands of people.
BuzzFeed’s reporter bot starts by ask

GUEST: Bots have captured the business public’s eye. Facebook opened up its Messenger platform to bots in April, and, since then, over 11,000 bots have reportedly been published.
To understand the promise of the bot platform better, I decided to write one myself. Over the course of a month, I built a bot that allows a user to search for concerts and sports events in their city. Here are a few lessons I learned.
Lesson 1: Pick a platform that’s easy
When I first started, I had to

Hollywood and games have had a weak bond when it comes to making money from each other. But in the era of mobile games, that is starting to change, said Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive of Los Angeles-based SGN.
That kind of thinking drove SGN’s recent acquisition of TinyCo, which had a close Hollywood connection with games such as Mavel: Avengers Academy. The attitude is a lot different from the past, when Hollywood intellectual property owners just thought of games as minor brand exten

Now that her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian over "Famous" is once again dominating the headlines, it's easy to forget Taylor Swift is also embroiled in a much sillier scandal, one involving the producer Calvin Harris and a songwriting secret. It was revealed last week that Swift co-wrote Harris and Rihanna's hit single "This Is What You Came For" under the pseudonym Nils Sjoberg, a pen name she chose so her contribution (and relationship with Harris, which is now over) wouldn'

Most Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft players battle complete strangers over the internet. This week, Blizzard wants you to spend more time challenging your buddies.
The digital card game is celebrating an event called Friendly Feud this week. It will allow players to finish Daily Quests by playing against people in their friends list. Normally, you can only complete those quests (which award in-game gold that you can spend on new cards) by playing against strangers in Standard, Wild, Arena,

A new report released today confirms allegations that Russia operated a state-sponsored doping program during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and beyond. The World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned the independent investigation after Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of Russia's anti-doping laboratory, told The New York Times earlier this year that he had covered-up the doping of dozens of Russian Olympic athletes during the 2014 winter games and did so at the direction of Russ

Esports is one of the fastest-growing segments of the gaming industry, and we’ve put together a panel of experts to talk about it at GamesBeat 2016.
During this session, FaceIt chief executive officer Niccolo Maisto, Deep Focus emerging technology director Todd Krieger, and Twitch vice president of esports Andy Swanson will examine the opportunities in the rising market of competitive gaming.
You can register for the event here. Check out the new agenda here.
Above: Niccolo is guiding

SpaceX has released a collection of high-resolution photos of last night's mission to resupply the International Space Station. The images, which were published to the company's Flickr account this morning, show the Falcon 9 rocket taking off and performing its landing in great detail. It was the second time the company has landed one of the Falcon 9 rocket boosters on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida — the other three landings were on a drone ship at sea.Three of the photos (inclu

The fifth and final beta for Android 7.0 Nougat is here. Google is currently pushing out OTA updates for Nexus devices, but you can flash the new build if you're not too keen on waiting.
Since this is the last developer preview before Google releases Nougat later this summer, don't expect too many changes beyond bug fixes and a few usability improvements. Developer Preview 4 already brought the finalized APIs developers need to update their apps, while also removing support for pressur

Six months after showing it off at CES, Acer is releasing the Liquid Jade Primo, a curved Windows 10 handset. Interestingly enough, Microsoft is selling the smartphone with a display dock, keyboard, and mouse for $649 on its website, as it continues to push Continuum. The phone itself is pretty standard fare for a phone in 2016:
5.5-inch AMOLED Full HD display
Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor
32GB of storage (expandable up to 128GB with microSD card)
3GB of RAM
21MP rear camera,

Google today launched the fifth and final release of the Android 7.0 Nougat developer preview. You can start testing your apps against this release by downloading the new preview from developer.android.com/preview. The factory images should arrive shortly for the supported devices: Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus 9 LTE, Nexus Player, General Mobile 4G, and Pixel C.
Google launched the first Android N developer preview in March, the second preview in April, the third preview in May, a

A lot of news and announcements (cough: MobileBeat!) were made in the chatbot world last week, but if you hadn’t heard, one-month old Austin-based startup Conversable had a pretty good week.
Hear about Pizza Hut and Whole Foods new bots announced Tuesday at MobileBeat 2016 in San Francisco? That’s their work.
Earlier in the week, Conversable announced plans to work with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton to create “automated interactive messaging, tools, services, and ex

Samsung has been promising that its Gear S2 would support Samsung Pay ever since it announced the smartwatch (and its variations) in 2015. Now, almost a year later, the company finally appears to be rolling out the NFC payment functionality. Droid-Life spotted an update to the Samsung Gear app that takes Samsung Pay out of its closed beta into a public one. So if you own a Gear S2 — Bluetooth-only, not the 3G version — you can now try using Samsung Pay yourself.
To activate the

Stephen Colbert is filming The Late Show in Cleveland this week for the Republican National Convention, and he just gave Donald Trump a good reason to put him on his long list of banned journalists. Colbert, in costume as Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games, appears to have sneaked onto the stage without permission to mock the Republican convention and Trump himself. "Look, I'm not supposed to be here," Colbert said, as a security guard pushed him off the stage, "but let's be honest, ne

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ll be hosting the official Mr. Robot Digital Aftershow every week, in partnership with USA Network. Every week after the show, Emily Yoshida, Russell Brandom, and I will be breaking down the episode, looking at the tech and hacks involved, talking to guests from the cast and crew, and taking questions and feedback from fans on Twitter and (of course) our very own Mr. Robot IRC channel. What is Mr. Robot? It’s the groundbreaking USA show ab

Boomer is a Bengal cat who lives in Australia with an owner who is apparently pretty good with a GoPro. He has time for a lot of things, like skimboarding, relaxing by the ocean with his best friend, Didga, and enjoying his local swing set. One thing he doesn't have time for is random dogs, and therefore he skateboards right past them without a glance.This isn't to say that Boomer never has time for dogs. He likes them fine when they're serving as necessary props for his gymnastics rou

The next season of Game of Thrones will officially debut later than usual and with fewer episodes. HBO now confirms that season seven will air next summer with seven episodes, three fewer than the usual 10.
"Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing," said HBO programming president Casey Bloys

The internet has been totally devoured by the latest chapter in the long-running feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West, an interpersonal conflict that stretches back all the way to the halcyon days of 2009. When West’s wife Kim Kardashian posted a series of Snapchat videos capturing a recorded conversation between Swift and West about his controversial song "Famous," it spawned more questions than any piece of video this side of the Game of Thrones finale. Is there any part of the conve

Yesterday, news broke that Donald Trump had hand-selected Scott Baio to speak at the Republican Nation Convention. The news spread like wildfire across the Facebook streams belonging to the generation that knows who Scott Baio is. But what about the rest of us. Must our streams run dry?
I say no. We are a scrappy generation, one that takes the crappyinheritance of previous generations and turns it into a semi-literary post-punk commentary on the indignity of life. When life gives us Baio, we mak

Forget about blocks and castles. Minecraft players are going to need to craft an escape plan later this month.
Telltale Games revealed today that the seventh episode for Minecraft: Story Mode releases on July 26 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Mac, and mobile. The new episode is Access Denied. Minecraft is one of the best-selling games of all time, moving more than 106 million copies. While the original game focuses on open-world discovery and building, Story Mode injec

Oh, Canada. Pokémon Go does not stand on guard for thee.
The online servers for mobile megahit Pokémon Go are once again having serious issues, and it’s coming as the country of Canada is getting the chance to download the app from the official App Store and Google Play markets for the first time today. After more than a week of availability in the United States, Canadians are finally able to go out and catch Beartic, Sawsbuck, and other pocket monsters you wou

Furniture has largely avoided the smart home revolution, but robotic furniture is coming, and it may be the ultimate space-saver for anyone with an apartment or small home. Designer Yves Béhar has collaborated with Ori, a company spun off from MIT Media Lab's CityHome project, to create a line of architectural robot units that can be used in place of the furniture in your home.Ori uses modular mechatronics to offer full-scale bedroom, living room, and offices in one unit. From retrac

Microsoft today announced the launch of Microsoft Stream, a new service that people can use to upload and share videos with their work colleagues.
The new service, which is becoming available today in preview, will eventually converge with the existing Office 365 Video service so that the experience is consistent whether or not companies are using Office 365, James Phillips, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s business intelligence products group, wrote in a blog post. But for the mom

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is one of the biggest games coming this summer, debuting on the consoles and the PC on August 23. It’s an ambitious game that is coming a full five years after the previous title, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
It continues one of the more riveting themes from science fiction, about drawing the line between androids and humans, and which of these really have the most humanity. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes place in the year 2029, two years after the events of Hum

Hashtag creator and Uber developer experience lead Chris Messina took the stage at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2016 conference to talk about the evolution of “conversational commerce” — the trend where brands are attempting to chat with consumers like friends via messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and technologies like artificial intelligence. You can watch the full talk below.
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