Technology news

VB LIVE: Every app developer starts out wanting to build an awesome app. But monetizing that awesomeness is often thought about much later, with very mixed results. Join our VB Live event featuring analyst Stewart Rogers and Maximo Cavazzani, CEO of Etermax (aka Trivia Crack) and learn how to cash in on your own version of awesome.
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Every app publisher wants to build an efficient app monetization strategy as strong as Superman, but some haven&rsquo

Louis Cole never set out to show the reality of living in North Korea, as he and his agent have been quick to clarify. But that’s the problem.
Last month, the popular vlogger traveled to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, filming a series of videos that extolled some of the country’s more positive aspects, such as its beaches and water parks. Cole and his crew also made time to film a short music video called "Surfin' in the DPRK," which begins with this short title card:In t

We’ve long associated color with emotion. Intuitively, each of us associates colors with feelings. Brighter colors often signify good moods, while neutrals and grays are typically associated with negative feelings. This simple concept led researchers Andrew Reece (Harvard) and Chris Danforth (University of Vermont) to create an algorithm that attempted to use color — and other bits of information left behind in photos — to help identify depression on Instagram. To st

Take a break from earning those Summer Games loot boxes and learn about some Overwatch trivia.
YouTube channel Did You Know Gaming‘s latest video looks at hit team-based shooter from Blizzard (which already has over 15 million players). You can watch it below and learn more about the game’s development process and how Blizzard created some of its heroes. 
I think it’s especially interesting that Hanzo and Genji were once the same character. I’d love to learn more abo

Ride-hailing company Lyft, the second largest such firm behind Uber, has been making overtures to sell itself recently, according to a report from The New York Times. However, the discussions, which have taken place with a number of companies including Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, Didi Chuxing, and GM, have not been fruitful.
GM is one of Lyft’s biggest investors, putting $500 million into the company earlier this year, is said to have been Lyft’s most serious suitor for, but it neve

Welcome back to The Verge’s weekly musical roundup. I’m Jamieson, and this is the last time I’ll serve as your host. My time at The Verge is ending today, and I’m not going to be curating jams for anyone — save myself, and maybe my parents if they ask — for a while. It’s sad! I’ve loved working here and writing for you, and the decision to move on and pursue a new opportunity wasn’t made easily.
Before trotting off into the sunset and taking

‘No Man’s Sky’ is a game unlike any other. With 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) planets to explore and enough content to keep the average person finding new things well into the billions of years, what is the internet excited about? Dicks, man. Lots of dicks. In a game so infinite its developers report it’d take approximately 584 billion years to explore, there are a near infinite amount of plant and animal species to discover. They might not be the

Chrome apps are dying. Google today announced that it’s planning to phase out support for its browser-based Chrome apps for every single OS except – of course – Chrome OS proper. That means no Chrome apps will be available to download on Windows, Mac or Linux starting the second half of 2017, and in early 2018, existing apps won’t load at all on those platforms. The reason? People just didn’t use them. According to Google: There are two types of Chrome apps: p

New content will make sure that the latest wave of Pokémania doesn’t die any time soon.
The Pokémon Company revealed new pocket monsters today for the upcoming Sun and Moon Nintendo 3DS handheld releases and new cards for the trading card game as part of the opening ceremonies for the 2016 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco. Pokémon is a huge entertainment brand. It makes $2.1 billion a year from games, merchandise, and media. The franch

Two of the biggest trends in television right now are movie reboots and anthology shows, so of course The CW wants to mash them up for an adaptation of the 1980s vampire flick The Lost Boys. Deadline reports that the network is in development on the project, which comes from Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas.
Where the original film took place in the (then-present day) 1980s, Thomas has a much grander vision. Each season would feature the same group of vampires, but would take place in

OPINION: Chatbots are in that awkward pre-adolescent period. We don’t really know what they can do yet, we’re unsure where there fit, and we don’t even know if they have any real usefulness. They have serious potential, and might one day rule the world, but first we have to figure out if they can even speak using a full sentence or engage in an intelligent conversation.
Since this was a big week in automotive technology, especially for Uber and Ford, the nascent quality of chat

Okay friends, bear with us here: some things have happened since we recorded the podcast. For those of you who didn't know, Ryan Lochte claims he was robbed at gunpoint. Brazilian police say otherwise.
In conclusion, don't lie to your mom Here's what we know: on Aug. 14th, initial reports surfaced that Lochte had been robbed in Rio, while he and three friends were out for a night on the town. His mother confirms these reports to USA Today; then Lochte himself gives an account of the alleged robb

Google today announced plans to kill off Chrome apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux in early 2018. Chrome extensions and themes will not be affected, while Chrome apps will continue to live on in Chrome OS.
Chrome apps are web applications that run on Google’s browser. There are two types: Hosted apps (first available in December 2010) contain a single manifest file and are limited by webpage security restrictions, while packaged apps (first available in September 2013) have features similar

Google has just announced plans to gradually phase out support for Chrome apps on every platform except for Chrome OS. Starting later this year, new Chrome apps will be available only to Chrome OS users and won't be accessible on Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Existing apps will remain available and can still be updated.) Then, sometime in the second half of 2017, the Chrome Web Store will no longer display Chrome apps at all on those operating systems. And come early 2018, you'll no longer be able t

A few weeks back, we stumbled upon some leaked images of GoPro’s upcoming Hero 5. Today, we’ve got even more to share with you — including a “sick” new feature. The new images seem to corroborate the earlier leak and detail a few new findings. Notably, the Hero 5 is slightly larger than previous iterations. It’s also said to be waterproof out of the case to a depth of 10 feet, but for deeper use it’ll require a “Super Suit” housing (shown be

Apple and Google parent company Alphabet have joined a coalition of more than 30 tech companies and telecoms focused on combating automated phone calls, according to Reuters. Called the "Robocall Strike Force," the group is led by the Federal Communications Commission, which held its first hearing on the subject today in Washington, DC. Robocalls include both prerecorded messages from misleading phone numbers and automated text messages.
The FCC is turning to companies like Apple, Alph

Two volunteer paleontologists have found one of the largest T. Rex skeletons ever.  The new specimen is especially notable because the 2,500-pound skull is mostly intact, making it only the 15th complete skull in the world. It has a cutesy name — "Tufts-Love Rex," after the people who found it — and could tell us more about how dinosaurs grew and ate.
Luke Tufts and Jason Love, paleontology volunteers at Seattle’s Burke Museum, discovered their dinosaur at Montana’s

EXCLUSIVE: Even before Pokémon Go’s launch in July, the mobile gaming industry was seeing growth.
Mobile market insights group Sensor Tower will release its finding for the second quarter of 2016 (April 1 to June 31) next week, but it has given GamesBeat early access to the report. It shows that games remain the most popular app category on both the iOS and Google Play stores, seeing 22 percent growth compared to the previous year.
This is especially good news when you con

Early this morning, Frank Ocean did what we’ve been waiting for him to do for four years now: he released a new album. But it wasn’t the release we were expecting. Instead of the previously announced Boys Don’t Cry (which will reportedly drop this weekend as a separate project, under a new title), Endless is a "surprise" visual album, currently streaming on Apple Music.
Unlike Beyonce’s Lemonade, a visual album that accompanied each song with a distinct act with a di

This week on our flagship audio experience, our cast of tech luminaries Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Paul Miller, and Dan Seifert break down new unlimited data plans and what they really mean for the consumer. Dan also details the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 after reviewing it this week and Dieter and Paul talk about Google, including the new Nexus phone arriving this year and a new operating system Fuchsia.
Halfway through the show we bring back the enlightening Nicola Fumo to give u

Pretty legit images and specs of GoPro’s Hero 5 leaked this morning, and one of the standout features appears to be voice control. Shortly after that we got our hands on an unfinished version of the user manual, which offers even more detail about the camera, including all the things you’re going to be able to do with your voice. The best option? The ability to trigger GoPro’s “highlight tag” feature by simply shouting this phrase to the gnar gods: “That was s

Apple today started rolling out the sixth public beta of iOS 10, the next version of its mobile operating system. The release comes four days after Apple released the fifth public beta, making it the shortest gap so far between public beta releases for iOS 10.
Apple first unveiled iOS 10 at its WWDC conference in June and introduced the initial public beta last month. Apple has not been explicit about what’s changing in these public beta updates, but generally they come with bug fixes and

Call me Chris Plante. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in material reality, I thought I would take about a little and see the internet part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off my collection of Saves the Day records and regulating my video game consumption.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find mysel

Cloud file sharing software company Dropbox today announced that it has appointed a new chief financial officer, Ajay Vashee. He has been at Dropbox since 2012, initially as head of finance and more recently as head of corporate development.
Vashee replaces Vanessa Wittman, who took on the chief financial officer position in February 2015 in place of Sujay Jaswa, who was Dropbox’s first business leader. Prior to arriving at Dropbox, Wittman was senior vice president and chief financial off

Earlier today I wrote about some leaked images of GoPro’s upcoming Hero 5, as well as some specs that came from an allegedly leaked user manual for the camera. Now we’ve actually gotten our hands on a PDF file of that manual. While most of the feature specs were already covered by this Reddit thread, one thing stuck out: information about GoPro’s upcoming cloud service, which will be called GoPro Plus.The name GoPro Plus actually leaked on Reddit a little more than a month ago

A backpack with a full desktop computer in it might sound like a slightly silly idea, but as we’ve written before, it’s actually an incredibly useful invention for VR. Alienware, Zotac, and MSI have all shown off self-contained backpacks that can be used with the HTC Vive, and companies like The Void have created their own “backtops” for location-based entertainment. Of all these, though, none is as distinctive-looking as HP’s Omen backpack — part of its new O

The Chin Men Theater in southern Taiwan’s Tainan is bringing a little bit of the spectacle and style of the classic movie-going experience into the modern age. The three-story theater is a favorite among the city’s residents, even though it mostly plays second-run films that have recently left the area’s big theater chains.
The big draw is the marquee covered in hand-painted movie posters, currently winning hearts on Reddit. The theater pays local artist Yan Jhen-fa about 670 U

Automatic is back with a new version of its connected car adapter, and this time it doesn't need to be connected to your phone over Bluetooth to work. The Automatic Pro comes with free 3G connectivity for five years, and can track your vehicles location and status anywhere you go. It can send you alerts when your car starts or parks (no more wandering around the parking lot) track your fill-ups, tell you why your check engine light is on, and even features IFTTT support.The Automatic Pro also co

Apple is simplifying the branding of its retail chain by completely getting rid of the "Store" part of Apple Store. From now on, the company's stores will simply go by "Apple" followed by the location of that specific store. For example, only a couple days ago, Apple opened the doors to Apple World Trade Center — not Apple Store, World Trade Center — inside the stunning Oculus / Westfield Mall in lower Manhattan. This is the 10th Apple store in New York City alone. One thing that's n

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, Overwatch gets a new map, Nintendo has a strong sales month, and we went hands-on with upcoming Ubisoft games like Watch Dogs 2 and For Honor.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Why Donald Trump should play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Hearthstone’s One Night in Karazhan guide: How to beat The Opera
Why Nintendo isn’t likely to use AMD’s top Zen chip design — and

(Reuters) — More than 30 major technology companies are joining the U.S. government to crack down on automated, prerecorded telephone calls that regulators have labeled a “scourge.”
AT&T, Google parent Alphabet, Apple, Verizon and Comcast are among the members of the “Robocall Strike Force,” which will work with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The group was holding its first meeting with the FCC on Friday.
The strike force will report to the commissi

Pandora's long awaited real subscription music service is almost here. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is in the process of finalizing agreements with record labels for an on-demand music service that would challenge Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Tidal, and other services. Pandora's interest in shifting to a premium offering was made clear when the company acquired the failed Rdio service late last year.
According to the Journal, Pandora will run with a thre

PRESS RELEASE: COLOGNE, Germany–(BUSINESS WIRE)–August 19, 2016– “Youzu Interactive’s expansion into Europe and the world is based on the power of cooperation,” said Wanqin Liu. “We are looking forward to creating new benchmarks in global game development and publishing, starting with League of Angels II.” Youzu Interactive Vice President Wanqin Liu addressed media from different countries regarding Youzu and BP’s joint promotion of League of

It seems that we can’t get enough intel on the venture capitalists who are investing in augmented reality and virtual reality. And there are plenty of panels where VCs talk about investing in AR and VR, which could be a $120 billion industry by 2020, according to Digi-Capital.
The most recent panel I viewed included a collection of early stage VCs and accelerator investors. The speakers included Jeff Wasson of Boost VC, Greg Castle of Anorak Ventures, and Tipatat Chennavasin of The Venture

Just a few weeks after a short instructional video appeared to give us our first look at GoPro’s upcoming Hero 5, a slew of new images have made it onto the internet that appear to show the camera in greater detail. Mashable has rounded them all up, after they were posted to (and subsequently pulled from) Japanese blog Nokishita, as well as camera blog Mirrorless Rumors. In addition, information that appears to be from the Hero 5 manual was posted to Reddit, which hints at what sorts of fe