Technology news

On one hand, the donut in this combo looks delicious. The decision to only sprinkle half the donut implies a culinary expertise, because while tasty, sprinkles can quickly overpower chocolate icing. I give this donut a tentative 9.5/10. I say tentative because I’m going purely off looks here; I still need to taste the donut.
On the other hand, that mug looks built to last. On my enjoyment graph, the donut spikes quickly before sinking like a stone in the river of my heart. But a mug, it&rs

VB LIVE: A whopping 75 percent of Zillow Group members are mobile users — and Zillow’s VP of marketing says their UA strategy is the primary driver. Register now for the first in our Masters of Mobile series to find out how Zillow is killing quality user acquisition. Gilt’s Digital Marketing Director will also be on hand.
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“Over three-fourths of our users are using our mobile app,” says Ashley Blackmon, VP of marketing at Zillow Group, th

Apple's iPhone sales continue to decline. Apple just reported its latest Q3 earnings, and the company sold 40.4 million iPhones in the recent quarter, compared to 47.5 million this time last year. That's a 15 percent drop, and a sign that iPhone growth momentum has significantly stalled. The slump in sales means Apple's profit has dropped 27 percent as a result. Last quarter, iPhone sales were also down 16 percent year-over-year. Apple introduced the iPhone SE in March, and it has

GUEST: I spend a lot of my time thinking about the conversational product space, working with several teams building conversational products, talking with tech leaders, and researching the bot landscape.
And yet, when an investor asked me what my favorite consumer use case in the bot space is, I could not come up with a single one I thought would go mainstream soon.
While I struggled to answer that question, I said enterprise use cases are likely to go mainstream in the conversational produ

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!FEATURE: My name is Jeff, and I’ve been monetized.
I’ve spent around $65 in Pokémon Go to make my quest to catch ’em all a little easier. I’ve used that money in a variety of items, and I have some regrets about my personal financial-management skills. But I’ve also learned something about the game&

 With an IPO on the horizon, subprime lender Elevate will have an additional $545 million credit faculty to support its growing customers. Elevate’s niche right now is providing loans to borrowers with creditscores between 575 and 625. As the company expands, it wants to provide loans to customers with even lower credit-scores. Ken Rees, CEO of Elevate, is quick to note that 65 percent… Read More

As the Obama administration nears its final months, the White House has released a framework for handling cyberattacks. The Presidential Policy Directive on United States Cyber Incident Coordination builds on the action plan that Obama laid out earlier this year, and it’s intended to create a clear standard of when and how government agencies will handle incidents. It also comes with a new threat level scale, assigning specific colors and response levels to the danger of a hack.
The cybera

Twitter's latest quarterly earnings report looks, at first glance, like a step up from its previous missteps. The company beat Wall Street expectations on user growth, and its expensive video-streaming deals appear to be a step in the right direction for the company that wants to replace the live television experience. But as with most things Twitter-related, there is a big catch.
In its forward-looking statements for the third fiscal quarter of 2016, Twitter says it expects revenue of abou

Apple just reported earnings for its third quarter of 2016, and managed to beat Wall Street expectations — although expectations had been set fairly low after disappointing earnings last quarter.
Apple reported $42.4 billion in quarterly revenue for its third quarter 2016, and quarterly net income of $7.8 billion ($1.42 per share). That compares to $49.61 billion for this time last year; and a quarterly net income of $10.7 billion in the same quarter last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson

I really did think I knew the whole future of luggage. A rideable suitcase? That seemed to be the pinnacle of innovation. But only a mere five days after discovering the Modobag, it’s being usurped in my mind by the Cowarobot R1, which its manufacturer says is the "world’s first autonomous suitcase." LOL. Cowarobot
The Cowarobot makes me feel happy because I like the idea of something never leaving my side and being programmed to never want to leave my side. True love. The suitcase r

iPhone sales have fallen for the second time in the device’s history, proving the drop in the previous quarter was not just a one-off.
As part of the company’s latest quarterly earnings announcement, Apple revealed today that it sold 40.4 million iPhones, 9.95 million iPads, and 4.25 million Macs during its fiscal third quarter of 2016. These aren’t the results Apple typically delivers at this time of year, but they also aren’t a surprise anymore, given the flat results o

Jason Dressen leads an average life. He's happily married with a teenage son, teaches physics at a local college, and generally gets by, until one night he's kidnapped and drugged. Before he slips into unconsciousness, his kidnapper asks him if he's happy. When he wakes up, he's surrounded by people in hazmat suits, and his entire life is gone: he isn't a college professor, isn't married, and works on a top secret project dealing with multiple universes.
Blake Crouch's new novel Dark Matter will

Apple today disclosed that it made a $7.79 billion profit, or $1.42 in earnings per diluted share, on $42.35 billion in revenue in the third quarter of its 2016 fiscal year, which ended on June 25. Apple beat on earnings and sales — analysts had expected $1.38 in earnings per share on $42.09 billion in sales.
Apple’s guidance for this quarter was $41-43 billion in revenue. This is the second consecutive quarter in which revenue and consequently earnings per share were down year over

Twitter (TWTR) has released the financial results for Q2 2016, revealing that it brought on board 3 million new users. The company also generated $602 million in revenue with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.13. As an aside, this quarter marks the one-year anniversary of Jack Dorsey resuming control (granted, at the time, he was the interim chief executive).
For those interested in what Wall Street was expecting, analysts estimated Twitter would have $606.77 million in revenue and an

I joined Twitter on a lark in the summer of 2007. My art gig at the Onion News Network had a hurry-up-and-wait rhythm to it: rush to construct and dress a set, then loiter around the craft table until a PA needed me to make a prop or repair a broken flat. I'd heard of Twitter from a co-worker, and it seemed like a fine distraction. My membership and interest lasted a week.
Over the following nine years, I've rejoined Twitter, leveraged its connections for survival as freelance writer, made frien

For 72 episodes, What’s Tech has invited guests to explain technology and its cultural periphery — from drones and fan fiction to ASMR and biohacking. We were bound to make a podcast about podcasts eventually. This was inevitable.
For this momentous occasion, our guest is Alex Goldman, co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Reply All. After you listen, visit Reply All’s publisher Gimlet Media, which is responsible for a number of the best examples of the podcasting form.
Subsc

Apple and CBS today announced that it has agreed to exclusively license the Carpool Karaoke series, which was originally part of The Late Late Show With James Corden on CBS. CBS Television Studios will produce the show along with Fulwell 73, and it will appear on Apple Music. There will be 16 weekly episodes of the show, according to a statement.
This is the next step Apple is taking to bring original media content to Apple Music, which has more than 15 million paying subscribers.
“We love

(Reuters) — China’s Le Holdings Co, also known as LeEco, said on Tuesday it would buy U.S. consumer electronics company Vizio for $2 billion.
Irvine, California-based Vizio makes affordable flat screen televisions, soundbars and LCD monitors. Founded in 2002, the company is now one of the largest manufacturers of TV sets in the United States.
Vizio, which filed for an initial public offering last year, generated sales of $1.3 billion in the first six months of 2015, according to IPO

Today I did two things I do nearly every day. 1) I bought something using a credit card, and 2) I complained about something on Twitter. But today, the complaint on Twitter was related to payments, and now my replies are blowing up. They’re blowing up because I said a very obvious thing: in the past couple of months, buying something with a credit card in America has become an absolutely awful experience.
Tell me if this looks familiar:
US rollout of chip payments has been awful. Every poi

GUEST: Bots are officially everywhere — they’re available to assist with almost every part of our lives, from shopping and gift-giving to news-tracking and political decision-making. They can even tell us what to make for dinner.
The thing that seems odd to me, though, is that the entire bot conversation has been focused on A.I., machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP). This makes me question whether we’re looking at bots the wrong way.
Having been in the b

The National Transportation Safety Board today issued the preliminary report of its investigation into the May 7th accident which involved a Tesla Model S operating in Autopilot mode. The crash resulted in the death of the driver, Joshua Brown, who was 40 years old. The agency found that Brown’s car was traveling nine miles over the posted speed limit at the time of the crash, and the report also includes the first officially released images of the accident.
Brown’s car was trav

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!In this episode, Stewart starts off by razzing Travis about his new Twitter verification. Twitter recently opened up an application process to help the right people — not just the Wright people — get verified, and it goes to show if they will verify Travis, they will verify anyone. Well, except Stewart.
And while we aren’t goin

AMD has announced a new graphics card that incorporates an SSD for the first time. The Radeon Pro SSG features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots allowing you to add up to 1TB of NAND flash memory directly to the graphics card. This will allow large datasets to be worked on locally without having to use system memory, which should provide a much faster experience during heavy rendering work.
The Radeon Pro SSG was demoed at the Siggraph computer graphics conference rendering raw 8K video smoothly at 30 fram

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!Clash Royale earned an extra $1.5 million in revenue after launching its new tournament function, which adds a new level of competition to the popular mobile game. This is according to market research firm Newzoo.
This was compared to the two weeks before the new mode launched. It also achieved 1 million extra downloads. Clash Royale is one

Chinese electronics firm LeEco is buying American TV manufacturer Vizio for $2 billion. The acquisition was announced during a press event this morning in Los Angeles, giving LeEco an instant foothold in the US television market. Under the deal, Vizio will be operated as an independent subsidiary, with the company's current management team staying in place and working out of its offices in Southern California. Vizio's data business, Inscape, will be spun out into a privately held company, with L

EXCLUSIVE: The lunch preorder startup Allset now allows people to use its service to book a table through a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, the company announced today.
Allset allows people to eat at high-end, fast-casual, and other types of restaurants within 5 minutes of arrival.
“One of our missions is to reclaim the lunch break and bring people from offices back into the restaurants for lunch,” said founder Stas Matviyenko. “That means people who use Allset enjoy better

EXCLUSIVE: The lunch pre-order startup Allset now allows people to use its service to book a table through a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, the company announced today.
Allset allows people to eat at high-end, fast-casual, and other types of restaurants within 5 minutes of arrival.
“One of our missions is to reclaim the lunch break and bring people from offices back into the restaurants for lunch,” said founder Stas Matviyenko. “That means people who use Allset enjoy bette

Apple’s anticipated removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack has drawn plenty of ire and consternation, and rightly so. Along with the jack-less Moto Z and LeEco’s 2016 lineup, the next iPhone is expected to be in the vanguard of a new generation of phones that lack a slot for the most universal of audio connectors. But there will be workarounds.
One pretty good idea will be to buy a Bluetooth receiver, such as the one I just stumbled upon from Noble Audio. These are the guys that made th

We're living in the Age of the Robocall. The spam calls reached an all-time high this year and FTC complaints increased 50 percent year-over-year. We have apps to help combat these calls on our phones, but for those of us who'd rather not receive them at all, we've been out of luck. Telecoms haven't put any protections in place to keep the calls at bay on the network level. Also, third-party apps aren't the most ideal solution.
While we wait for robocalls to be blocked before they ever

Last week's episode ended on a To Be Continued, with JoJo popping a squat on a tarmac at the rose ceremony to sob deeply at Luke's confession of love. A totally normal reaction to have when someone tells you they love you! But to be fair to our girl JoJo, nothing about this show is normal, nor makes any sense.
Despite telling her exactly what she wanted to hear, Luke gets sent home anyway. At this point JoJo has shown her ineptitude at making sound / reasonable decisions time and time again

Nest's app has run into some sort of problem today that's causing it to lose control of some thermostats and smoke detectors. The error is causing Nest Thermostats and Nest Protects to appear offline within the app, leaving them out of owners' remote control.
While the app is unable to remotely control those devices right now, Nest tells The Verge that they should otherwise continue to function, sticking to existing schedules and adjusting to changes made manually inside the home. Nest says

Today Facebook has followed through on its promise to open source the design of the Surround 360, its 17-camera array designed to capture video in 360 degrees. The company has also made available the stitching software used to piece together those types of videos. The goal is to encourage camera makers and videographers to shoot more footage in the experimental format — and, of course, share it on Facebook.
The Surround 360 was first announced during Facebook’s F8 developer conferenc

EXCLUSIVE: Koding, a startup with technology for operating a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) for collaborative programming across devices, is announcing today that it’s open-sourcing its core technology and making it a part of GitLab, the open-source source-code repository service.
With the push of a green button on GitLab repository pages, developers will be able to run any software on GitLab, with all the necessary dependencies already in place. “It almost feel

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!Microsoft has a new Xbox One controller, and I just got one with a custom Michigan Wolverines paint job that has my khaki pants feeling tight.
At the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show last month, Microsoft revealed its slim Xbox One S console and the revised Xbox One S controller. While the Xbox One S won’t ship until August 2,

Every Apple quarterly earnings report receives an almost absurd amount of scrutiny and analysis and hype as journalists and analysts scour every punctuation mark for new insight into the world’s most valuable tech company.
For that reason, it seems like the stakes are always epic, even if they really aren’t.
This time around, with Apple about to drop its third quarter earnings report today, the stakes are still not epic. But they are certainly higher for Apple than they have been for

There’s still some time left before Europe’s Rosetta mission comes to an end in September, but it’s already time to say goodbye to the mission’s Philae lander — the first spacecraft ever to touch down on a comet. Tomorrow at 5AM ET, the European Space Agency will switch off the Electrical Support System Processor Unit (ESS) on the Rosetta spacecraft, which is currently orbiting around the comet that Philae landed on. The ESS is the system Rosetta uses to c

Twitter may finally have found the feature that gets people excited about its service again: night mode. Twitter is launching a night mode feature on Android today that switches most of the interface from white to a really deep blue. It looks nice, and I have no doubt that a lot of people will use it, because everyone seems to love a good night mode.
The implementation is as basic as possible. There's just a toggle in the app's slide out menu that lets you turn night mode on and off — ther

Back in April Nintendo announced some big news: the company's next home console, code-named NX, will be launching globally in March 2017. That's a quick turnaround from the Wii U, which launched in November 2012. However, even though it's releasing in less than a year, we know very little about what the NX actually is. Nintendo has been very quiet about what the device will be, but thanks to a number of reports and rumors, we can at least piece together some details on the Wii U's successor

On the heels of Verizon’s $4.8 billion deal to acquire Yahoo, the telecom company emphasized during an earnings call today that it wants to create a mobile video giant to compete with Google and Facebook.
With many of its legacy network businesses slowing or declining, Verizon has been in search of other ways to restart revenue growth. The company reported second quarter earnings that fell short of analysts’ estimates and has been describing 2016 as a “transitional year&rd

LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired PointDrive, a provider of sales presentation tools, as part of efforts to empower more salespeople across its professional social network. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but most of the PointDrive team will be joining LinkedIn’s engineering, product, and sales teams.
When the deal closes sometime this year, the soon-to-be Microsoft-owned company said that it’ll “continue to honor the agreements PointDrive has i

Loyalty rewards and marketing automation company Flok said today that its app and web platform will now let small business owners create their own chatbots.
Flok artificial intelligence already automates chat with customers who have the Flok app when they’re inside the store or to encourage return visits.
Flok bots can help a business do things like send push notifications, suggest an online review, or share perks with loyal customers. A business owner ca

I’ve worked for months to recruit, and sometimes re-recruit, 93 speakers for GamesBeat 2016, our game conference that runs August 1-3 at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes in Los Angeles.
Above: Mike Capps, strategic advisor at Solid Fog and former president of Epic Games.Image Credit: Mike Capps
Check out the agenda for GamesBeat 2016 here. Make sure you look at the speakers for AR/VR day and for each day. Also, check the tab on our various pricing options for the c