Technology news

So! Money doesn't really make the world go round, but it sure greases the skids in late capitalism. Take Mylan's EpiPen, which has parents and lawmakers up in arms. The injection is meant to halt anaphylactic shock in patients who may have encountered an allergen — so it's a crucial buy for a lot of people in back-to-school season. But its price has been steadily rising since 2007, when it was a little more than $100. Now a package of two pens retails for $609, and most of that price hike

(Reuters) — A federal judge on Friday granted a request by Uber Technologies Inc and its chief executive officer to put a passenger’s price-fixing lawsuit against them on hold, while they appeal his refusal to let them arbitrate the dispute.
Calling his decision a “close call,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said the defendants had not made a “strong showing” that their appeal would likely succeed, though they would face irreparable harm if arbitr

GUEST: Chatbots have become trendy. They are everywhere at the moment, from banks offering their customers a conversational bot to interact with for basic tasks, to the old and funny Cleverbot.
The question that remains, though, is whether or not chatbots are here to stay. Are they a fad, doomed to disappear shortly? Alternatively, are they an entirely new way of experiencing the world, beyond bank transactions and silly existential questions?
A recent study shed some light on what people want f

 Launching with a marketplace for landscaping, snow plowing and other home care and repair services, Plowz & Mowz has raised $1.5 million from the Los Angeles-based startup studio Science and undisclosed angel investors. On the heels of the firm’s successful exit from Dollar Shave Club, Science has turned to the marketplace industry for its next investment. The idea for the… Read More

IBM will hold its first-ever conference for developers who are making bots and virtual assistants with IBM Watson.
Part of the Watson Developer Conference will be two bot competitions. One competition is for a bot to get people around the conference. The other asks developers to create bots that speak to other bots. Why? For funzies, said IBM developer evangelist Zachary Walchuk.
“It’s really meant to be a fun way to get hands on with the technology,” he said. “

Facebook's News Feed team has been reeling since a report earlier this year argued that a team of contractors responsible for the feed's Trending Topics module routinely suppressed news of interest to political conservatives. Facebook denied the report, which was published by Gizmodo and was sourced to a single former contractor on the team. But the company has spent several months doing damage control, rattled by the possibility that conservative users would abandon the site over clai

Facebook’s trending topics is getting an update that involves eliminating the human element when it comes to describing why something merits promotion. The company is now relying on its algorithm and programming to display subjects and topics that Facebook thinks you’ll be interested in.
With this move, it’s easy to think that the company is streamlining its efforts and reducing costs. On the other hand, it’s also a response to outrage heaved at it by critics th

From its modest start as a lowly edible to its meteoric rise as a phallic symbol, the eggplant is undoubtedly a the star of the emoji world. And now it’s going places few emoji (presumably) have ever seen… literally. What started as a joke eventually led creator Jaime Jandler to create the ‘Emojibator’ — a real-life representation of the beloved emoji in vibrator form. Janderl told Cosmopolitan: I wanted to create a culturally relevant and clas

 The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an office under the Department of Homeland Security, put forward a proposal today that would allow the U.S. Government to offer parole (temporary permission to be in the country) to foreign entrepreneurs starting their businesses in the United States. The proposal specifies that a founder can qualify if they started a company in the U.S. in… Read More

Two months ago, the White House first announced its Equal Play Pledge — a plan to end the salary gap between men and women in the private sector. Today, on Women’s Equality Day, 29 new signatures were added to a growing chorus of companies who demand equal pay for both sexes. A total of 29 companies signed the pledge — as announced by the White House today — and committed to conducting company-wide pay analyses annually and review hiring and promotion prac

If it seems like we’re saying the same thing every year, it’s because we are. Again, Apple is weeks away from releasing a new phone without the supply to meet the expected demand. At this point, it’s tradition. This year’s supply shortage is more of the same as recent years and it directly boils down to shortages in the supply chain. Citing sources familiar with the matter, Asian publication Nikkei also details a fair number of “faulty components” that could

GUEST: The upper echelon of chatbots, in terms of A.I.-powered intelligence, virtual assistants (VA) have become a hot topic in customer experience.
Presenting a significant opportunity to increase revenue and cost savings, virtual assistants:
Extend the reach of customer interactions
Reduce live agent workforce needs (But they DON’T eliminate live agents — we still need them to oversee and train the A.I.-powered agents.)
Boost agent productivity and reduce Average Handle Time
Optimi

Spotify is apparently punishing artists who decide to make their albums exclusives on other streaming services when they first drop. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Spotify is making these artists' music more difficult to find on their service by burying them in search results and refusing to put their tracks on featured playlists. This has been in practice for about a year, according to Bloomberg's sources, and affects artists who have given exclusives to both Apple Music and Tid

Twitter is planning on battling its long-standing harassment issues with a keyword filter, according to Bloomberg. The filter – a result of consulting with anti-harrasment groups – will let users block out specific words (think racial slurs, misogynistic terms, etc.) or entire hashtags. The company has previously provided tools to let you report abusers, but this would be the first time you can prevent harassment without having to actually see it first. While filtering hashtags 

Apple has released the seventh public beta of its forthcoming mobile operating system, iOS 10. The update arrives just one week after the release of the company’s sixth public beta, and less than two weeks after the fifth public beta. To quote BGR, “this is getting a little bit ridiculous.”
If you’re into relentless beta updates that just might render your device (or a favorite app) useless, you can join Apple’s beta program here. And if you’ve

Nintendo is taking more control of the retail side of the supply chain in Japan.
The Mario publisher revealed that it is acquiring the distribution company Jesnet, which was already responsible for getting Nintendo products to consumers in Japan. Nintendo is purchasing 70 percent of Jesnet’s shares for $46.5 million from its former parent company, Ajioka Co., and is turning the distribution specialist into one of its subsidiaries.
This will give Nintendo full control over the producti

The fight between Spotify and Apple Music has been heating up for some time, but today things just got ugly — childish even. Citing sources familiar with Spotify strategy, Bloomberg today detailed Spotify’s push to punish artists that release music as an Apple exclusive. Lately, the “exclusive” game has been heating up as popular artists like Kanye West and Taylor Swift release music on other platforms with an exclusivity window. Once the window expires, it com

Now all of your Facebook friends can share in your Overwatch frustrations as Ana wastes another ultimate on Lucio.
Blizzard Streaming is now live in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. It allows people using Blizzard’s Battle.net client to easily stream gameplay to Facebook. It’s compatible with Blizzard hits like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Diablo III, and StarCraft II. Blizzard noted in a press release that global access is c

Apple has a lot of money.
On most days, it’s the largest company in the world by market cap, and a surprising amount of that money is already in the bank. At the close of Q1 this year, the company had $55 billion in easily accessible cash along with another $178 billion in long-term securities that could be cashed in if the need arose. With the core business already at its peak, there’s no obvious place to put that money, which is why it’s so easy for Tim Cook to pour cash

Back in June Blizzard announced a collaboration with Facebook which would allow players to easily stream any of the developer’s games through Facebook Live. Today, the feature is finally going live.
Starting today the live-streaming capability will be available in every Blizzard game in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, with a complete global rollout expected “soon.” It’s currently only available to PC gamers, but Mac support is also in the works.

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we went to the Pokémon World Championships, we reviewed Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, and we look at some impressively powerful gaming laptops.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: What Pokémon Go has done for augmented reality
8 GamesBeat University videos that teach you about the game business
Inspired by Pokémon Go, school teacher’s book hunting game is a hit in 

Spotify is getting a small but useful update for informing you of your favorite artist’s latest moves: you can now view concerts right from individual artist pages. To be clear, the company has featured concert dates in its ‘On Tour’ section since 2013, but I’d argue a simple list of tour dates on an artist’s own page is more intuitive. It makes it easier to stumble upon a concert date for an artist you’re actively listening to than having to specif

Yesterday Apple released an emergency fix to try to stamp out the so-called ‘Trident’ vulnerabilities. The multiple-headed monster exposed your device through not one, but three distinct vulnerabilities. Once accessed, these sensitive areas of iOS acted as an opportunity to remotely jailbreak an iOS device through a program called ‘Pegasus.’ Created by NSO Group — an Israeli cyberwarfare firm — the Pegasus vulnerability could potentially affect any

The Galaxy Note 7 is this year’s best new phone, edging out Samsung’s own S7 Edge, and easily the most talked-about new device of the summer. But with great fame comes great scrutiny, and this week has seen the Note 7 subjected to allegations of having "embarrassing real-world performance." Well, I’ve been using the Note 7, out here in real-world Europe, as my main phone for 10 glorious days now, and I’m here to tell you that the benchmarks lie. This phone doesn’t h

The US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a new proposal Friday to require heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses to include speed-limiting devices. If approved, all newly manufactured trucks, buses, and passenger vehicles weighing more than 26,000 pounds would be required to come equipped with devices limiting their speeds to 60–68 mph. That would cover big rigs, dump trucks, refuse haulers, many buses, and other large work truc

August 26, 1920. The day women around America were finally given the right to vote. The day women became equal… allegedly. 51 years later, August 26th became officially known as Women’s Equality Day. Because saying we’re equal is almost as good as actually being equal. So how far have we actually come? From the Rio Olympics to the US presidential election, I’d say not very far…. You won bronze at the Olympics? Meh. Too bad you don’t play foot

Dell has released a new 24-inch gaming monitor, a smaller and slightly improved version of the 27-inch gaming display that was released last year — the first for the company. The two monitors are very similar: both feature 2560 x 1440 QHD resolution, 1000:1 contrast ratio, a DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4, four USB 3.0 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.The big difference between the two monitors (besides screen size) is the refresh rate. The 24-inch monitor features a 165Hz

Twitter is reportedly working on a feature that will let users block certain keywords in order to fight abuse, reports Bloomberg. According to anonymous sources, Twitter has been discussing the tool internally for about a year, although it’s unclear when or if it might be put into place. Bloomberg compares the keyword filtering to a feature recently added by Instagram, which lets users block comments containing certain words from appearing on their posts. But where that would outright remo

Wow. Tech rivalries are known for their twists and turns, but today Netflix has done something truly surprising: it admitted it's nothing more than a ripoff of North Korean rival, Manbang, changing its Twitter bio to say as much.
You may have seen reports earlier this week that the Hermit kingdom has developed its own "Netflix ripoff" — a set-top box that delivers TV content on-demand over the internet. But looking at the evidence, it's clear that it's actually Manbang that's the

A hawk hunting for house pets in the kempt lawns of suburbia sounds like the making of an urban legend, but the tale has, in recent decades, become a staple of local news. In 2011 a hawk plucked two small dogs from their Boston neighborhood and dropped them from the sky, inflicting serious injuries. A different hawk nabbed a Pomeranian from its home in Beech Island, South Carolina back in 2013; the 10-year-old rescue didn’t survive. And then there’s the case of the great horned owl,

For NBC, this year’s Olympic Games coverage was more than just a series of household rating points: it was a moment of truth in a fast-changing media world. To say the network won silver in prime-time television ratings would be kind: no matter which article you read, it points out that ratings were down by double digits at different points throughout the games. To say the network took home the gold in streaming video would also be an overstatement: online viewership was up, but the online

This week, we published Ryan Bradley’s engrossing feature All Queens Must Die. In popular lingo, the story is a “longread.” Many people have had time to enjoy this deep dive that begins with the annihilation of an ant colony and expands to the power and purpose of nature conservation. But other people, for whatever reason, may have held off because they’d prefer listening to the tale.
Good news: this week’s feature is available as a half-hour recording on SoundCloud

President Barack Obama will expand the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean to over 580,000 square miles from 140,000 square miles. The sanctuary, which contains thousands of marine species, stretches across the Midway Atoll and Hawaii, and will become the world’s largest protected marine area, The New York Times reports.Obama will travel to Midway Atoll next week to mark the vast expansion. First, he will address the Pacific Island Conferen

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will get cozy with Jupiter this weekend, as the vehicle makes its closest approach to the gas giant early Saturday morning at 8:51AM ET. Juno, which is in orbit around Jupiter, will come within 2,500 miles of the planet’s clouds — the closest the probe will get during its mission. It will also be the first time that Juno passes by Jupiter with all of its instruments turned on, meaning NASA is about to get a bunch of juicy new data. Continue reading&h

Kate Spade introduced new fitness trackers and a smartwatch to the world this week. They’re "cute," in the words of multiple magazines. I agree. They are cute. One fitness band has a cat design and another is described as a mother-of-pearl bangle. Dang that’s fancy. The bangle also comes with the words "seize the day" inscribed on it. All the connected devices pair with Kate Spade’s iOS / Android app to collect fitness and sleep data. The wearables will also somehow show phone