Technology news

An Iranian para-cyclist died Saturday after a crash during a race at the Rio Paralympics. 
Bahman Golbarnezhad, 48, was involved in a crash in a mountainous part of his race's course. He received treatment at the side of the road and was on his way to the Paralympics' athlete hospital when he went into cardiac arrest, the International Paralympic Committee said. He was rushed to a Rio hospital where he died soon after arriving. 
“This is truly heartbreaking news and the thoughts

If a movie catches your eye on Facebook, you might soon be able to buy tickets without ever leaving the app. Facebook has partnered with Fandango to begin selling movie tickets right on a film's Facebook page. It's starting this weekend in the US with just a few titles, including The Magnificent Seven, Storks, and Kevin Hart: What Now?, according to The New York Times. It'll presumably roll out wider if the integration turns out to be something people actually use. Continue reading&hel

With the tech IPO market still rolling in the gutter, tech companies looking for exits have begun to shift their focus toward being acquired.
There has been a wave of big deals this quarter that seems to indicate a lot of activity around M&A. But to get a better sense of what’s really going on, I talked recently with Todson Page, technology deals leader at PwC U.S.
PwC puts out one of the most closely watched quarterly reports on M&A. The report for the second quarter&nbs

GUEST: If you haven’t heard of WebVR yet, it’s time to take notice.
It’s a relatively new product that lets you access virtual reality through a browser, bypassing the need to download heavy VR applications.
You don’t pay to access WebVR. It’s a free JavaScript API — developed as an open-source project — that runs straight out of a web browser, which is all you need to load it up on your laptop or mobile and get started.
Because WebVR doesn’t need

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been hinting at Apple's interest in augmented and virtual reality all year, and it seems that interest continues to grow. Business Insider spotted two people who were hired by Apple over the summer after working at a pair of the biggest names in field: one at Oculus VR, the other at Magic Leap.
The two hires don't mean much on their own, but they suggest that Apple is continuing to invest in AR and VR research with the goal of eventually putting out a product. In Janu

Pulpstream has an interesting ambition to get rid of paper-based forms at enterprises and replace them with employee-created digital processes that require zero coding experience to build.
Above: If someone is hurt, you can show where by circling the area with your finger in a Pulpstream form.Image Credit: Pulpstream
This idea comes from the most enthusiastic CEO that I met at Techcrunch Disrupt this week, Pankaj Malviya, the head of Pulpstream. He was introducing a new platform that enables emp

The binary bandit has only 10 things on their mind: 0s and 1s.
For those of you still reading after that unbearably awful joke (I'm sorry, I really am), there's an incredible crime spree going on in Philadelphia that you should know about. Someone — possibly multiple someones — has been stealing 0s and 1s from the address numbers on the front of buildings. The thieves have hit up at least a dozen houses, according to CBS Philly.
It's a super weird crime. The going theory se

Video game industry lawyers will converge on Montreal in November to discuss legal issues such as privacy, esports regulations, and fair use rights for augmented reality and virtual reality.
The Video Game Bar Association (VGBA) will hold a one-day Canadian Summit as part of the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) 2016 event on November 14. I attended the event last year and was impressed with the breadth of topics discussed.
MIGS runs November 13 to November 14 at the Palais des

Microsoft plans to close Skype's London office and lay off most of the nearly 400 people employed there, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft confirmed the layoffs to an extent, telling the Times that it has "made the decision to unify some engineering positions, potentially putting at risk a number of globally focused Skype and Yammer roles."
Skype will still maintain offices throughout the world, including in Redmond, Palo Alto, Vancouver, and several locations in Europe. But

Here's something that could be a little frustrating come winter: the iPhone 7's home button doesn't seem to work with most gloves. It turns out, Apple's new home button works more like a touchscreen than a button, requiring direct skin contact in order to know that it's being pressed.
Relay FM co-founder Myke Hurley first drew attention to the issue. He suspects it's the Touch ID ring that's responsible for detecting if the button is actually being touched. "No sensor connection, no click,"

It's been a crazy week in the entertainment world. In case you missed it, we've been at TIFF all week reporting back on the best films. There's been a lot to read — and, honestly, it's hard for me to narrow it down to the ones I find most interesting. So here's a list of a bunch of things that caught my interest.For reviews, there's: Snowden, La La Land, a global warming documentary from Leonardo DiCaprio, the new film from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook, the very buzzy sci-fi film Ar

FEATURE: By the end of 2019, it’s estimated there will be more than 2.9 billion email users worldwide and 246 billion emails sent and received per day (up from 205 billion messages in 2015). Since we’re already inundated by daily emails, it’s easy to see this as a prime opportunity for alternative messaging solutions, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Yammer, Hipchat, Kik, or Google Hangouts. But with all the speculation about the next “email killer,” the

Before you decide to play Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness, you have to ask yourself an important question: how much do you love the cyberpunk anime series about a dystopian future governed by thought control? If you’re unsure about the show, or haven’t seen it at all, this game isn’t for you. It doesn’t ease new people into the experience at all, instead throwing them into its near-future world, assuming they already know the deal. It’s not a good starting point.
B

GUEST: Growth stage or growth equity tech investing is on the rise in Europe. According to Invest Europe, growth investments rose 11% year-on-year in 2015 to reach €6.5 billion ($7.3 billion), reflecting the increasing number of European companies leaving their startup years behind them to embark on the next stage of their life cycle. But unlike in the US, where — due to the maturity of the ecosystem — growth stage is seen as a key investment category in its own right, in Europe

 Like most small products with a cult following, SCiO has its fans and detractors. Those detractors took to the Internet recently to complain that the handheld molecular scanner, which raised $2.5 million in 2014, still hasn’t shipped. The result? Negative press and plenty of Tweets. I asked SCiO’s creator, Dror Sharon, what was going on with the device and when it would ship and,… Read More

YouTube’s Arf, who did not want to be named for this article, loves Gabe the Dog.
"Gabe is far and above my favorite meme," he told The Verge on the phone. "Usually you like a meme for a week and then it becomes so oversaturated that everyone kind of moves on to the next thing. But I still enjoy Gabe."
Gabe is a miniature American Eskimo dog owned by YouTube user gravycp. In January 2013, gravycp uploaded a short video of Gabe barking. The footage itself never went viral though it was used

Angling for a project management career? Now’s your chance. Join the ranks of other project managers with the Project Management Essential Certifications Bundle, which features six courses on acing key certification exams. For a limited time, you can grab this training for just $59 from TNW Deals. With this premium bundle, you can work towards earning key certifications to prove their competency in various skill sets. Along the way, you’ll learn what it takes to identify and mitigat

Summer is over and the weather is getting chilly, so it’s time to turn to spicy foods to warm up—“taco trucks on every corner”, anyone?For some, the spice is the best part while for others (the weaklings) spice makes tacos unbearable. It’s true that for those who didn’t grow up eating it, us spice-lovers are a mystery.Peppers have been linked to the revolutionary spiritA quick refresher: in most cases, what makes things spicy is capsaicin, the active ingredien

The rise in end-to-end encryption in messaging apps — for instance, WhatsApp and Facebook adding E2E encryption and built-for-encryption systems like Telegram and Signal gaining popularity — highlights a growing consumer focus on data privacy. But what does the popularity of E2E encryption mean for startups, small businesses and tech giants? To find out, I asked a group of successful founders from YEC the following question: Do you think companies will start to further pri

Earlier this year, I released the book Progressive Partnerships – The Future of Business. The central tenant of the book was that we are moving away from competition and into a period of collaboration. In it, I show how, whatever stage your business is at – even if it’s nothing more than a vague idea – you can use partnerships to achieve pretty much anything. I gave specific, step-by-step guides to how early stage businesses can easily generate several thousand doll

GUEST: Where, oh where, have the console games gone?
GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, which measures TV advertising in real time, to bring you a monthly report on how gaming brands are spending. The results below are for the top five spending gaming industry brands in August.Picking back up the pace as summer races to a close, the gaming industry jumped up its budget for TV advertising in August with an extra $4 million worth of gaming ads flooding your TV sets vs. July. In total, 21 brand

If #DicksOutForHarambe isn’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer to pay tribute to the fallen gorilla with some fisticuffs and magic. Harambe vs Capcom is a real video game that features everyone’s favorite gorilla, insane special moves and a touch of storyline to round off the rough edges. Harambe, if you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past several months, was the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla shot by a Cincinnati zookeeper after a three-year-old boy climbed

It was only a matter of time before the lawsuits started rolling in over Samsung's exploding Galaxy Note 7s, and what appears to be the first one was filed today in Florida. According to Reuters, Samsung is being sued by a man who says a Note 7 exploded while in his pants pocket, leading to a second-degree burn on his leg and burns on his thumb, as he went to remove it.
The man, Jonathan Strobel, says his phone exploded on September 9th. That's a week after Samsung issued its unofficia

While Apple was expecting to make news this week, it had hoped it would be for the launch of the iPhone 7 rather than on shortcomings in its corporate culture.But mixed in with the reviews of the new iPhone were reports from Mic and Gizmodo highlighting several negative experiences from women working at Apple, including one woman upset with the company’s response to what she perceived as a “rape joke” made by her male co-workers.So, on the same day that it launched the new phon

 A day after the Consumer Product Safety Commission formally issued a recall of Samsung’s occasional explosion-making Galaxy Note 7, the FAA is offering a more strictly worded warning against the troubled phablet.
A week or so ago, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a fairly benign suggestion, “strongly advis[ing] passengers not to turn on or charge these devices on board… Read More

Fandango, one of the biggest movie ticket distributors in the country, teamed up with Facebook to make your next ticket purchase even easier. Announced today, the partnership allows users to buy tickets directly through a movie’s official Facebook page, a move Fandango president Paul Yanover hopes will attract more millennials. The move makes a lot of sense. Most of us are on Facebook for hours each day and being able to quickly wrangle a handful of friends to catch a movie