Technology news

GUEST: Last month, journalist Kyle Chayka wrote an article for The Verge in which he coined the term ‘Airspace’ to describe the “coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live/work spaces” that share a certain set of hallmarks (raw wood tables, exposed brick, Edison bulbs etc). Chakra’s theory is that this faux-artisanal aesthetic has spread thanks to digital platforms such as Foursquare and AirBnB, which are creating “a harmonization of tastes.”
But t

According to Forbes, Apple’s latest iOS release seems to have accidentally weakened the the iPhone’s security, potentially allowing unauthorized access to localized backups.
Elcomsoft, a Russian firm that has created tools to break into iPhones, discovered the vulnerability as it worked to update its phone breaker tool. It found that backups saved after a user updates to iOS 10 uses a new "password verification mechanism" that skips several security checks, according to a blog post.

After Angry Birds earned more than $300 million at the box office, it was only a matter of time before other studios decided to jump on the bandwagon to adapt mobile phone games. The next one? Fruit Ninja.
New Line Cinemas has snapped up the rights to turn the mobile game — which lets its users slice fruit in half with a swipe of the finger — into a film. J.P. Lavin and Chad Damiani will write the script, which The Hollywood Reporter says will "revolve around a team of misfits who ar

Dutch bicycle manufacturer VanMoof found that it had a problem. As it shipped its products to customers, it found that they were arriving to customers damaged. The company came up with a genius solution: print a graphic of a flatscreen television on the side of the box.
VanMoof had planned on keeping the trick a secret, and it wasn’t until Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal posted up an image of the box that it was revealed:
genius idea alert: @vanmoof bikes had problem with shipping dam

GUEST: As football season gears up again, it’s a good time to consider the relative benefits of broad-based live TV advertising vs. more targeted and distributed digital options. It’s not the black and white comparison that it used to be.
Last year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg famously commented in an Advertising Week presentation that there is a Super Bowl every day on Facebook (Facebook mobile, to be exact.) Reports of her presentation note that she emphasized how Facebook gives a

After revelations that its founder had donated money to a pro-Donald Trump group, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe has joined the discussion, noting in a Facebook post on Friday that "Palmer acted independently in a personal capacity, and was in no way representing the company."
Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey apologized on Friday after a Daily Beast article revealed that he had donated a considerable amount of money to Nimble America, a group dedicated to "shitposting" and "meme magic," during the 20

GUEST: Self-driving vehicles are already on the nation’s roads and many more are coming. Uber, Google, Tesla, and the major automobile manufacturers have plans to develop and deploy tens of thousands of such vehicles on America’s roads over the next decade.
A key point on the government’s just-released 15-point checklist to guide the development of autonomous vehicles is cybersecurity, guarding against the risk of vehicles being hacked. But underlying the functionalit

Shawn Wang’s recently completed short film Planet Unknown looks a bit like WALL·E. It features a pair of rovers sent to a planet to see if it can harbor life, and as they set out to complete their mission, they run into some unexpected troubles.
Comparisons to WALL·E are appropriate
Wang told The Verge that comparisons to WALL·E are appropriate: he was inspired in part by Pixar’s 2008 film. But inspiration came from other places as well: "The idea [for the f

I have high hopes for this one.
While Google Allo is still fresh off the starting block, it could become the most significant chatbot messaging platform ever. Of course, for now, it does not even allow third-party participation. It’s fairly limited, and it has an uphill climb if it is going to replace WhatsApp or Messenger on your phone.
Yet, there are hopeful signs. The app already uses a Smart Reply feature that can parse out requests. It can read the context of your conversation and pro

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law a bill that will require commercial websites to remove information about an actor’s age upon request, in an attempt to combat agism in the state’s film industry.
The law, known as AB-1687, states that commercial online entertainment employment service providers will be required to remove "certain information regarding the subscriber’s age on any companion Internet Web site under the provider’s control if requested by the

GUEST: “Where are the UK tech companies that can become the next Google or Facebook?” goes the cry.  Well, I think the UK has plenty of what it takes to grow a tech titan or two, or three.
Britain consistently punches above its weight when it comes to digital innovation and technology. In a recent OECD/McKinsey 2016 report, the UK was ranked top in its digital share of overall GDP (10 percent), beating the USA (8 percent) and Sweden (7 percent).
Meanwhile, PwC has just placed Lo

If you read our coverage of Tokyo Game Show earlier this month, you'll know that Rez is my favorite game of all time, and that the new version for PlayStation VR is its most spectacular iteration yet. Rez Infinite is the rare example of a pre-existing game that feels like it was designed for virtual reality, despite first coming out fifteen years ago.
But fifteen years ago, designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi was no less concerned with how to amplify the Rez experience, even on modest hardware like

On Monday, NASA is set to hold a press conference about some “surprising activity” on Jupiter’s icy moon of Europa. There’s no indication as to what that activity might be, other than it involves the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s garnering more than one 2010 reference around the internet. Europa has always been a fascinating world that has challenged our view of the nature of the solar system.First Glimpse
Europa was discovered by accident. Galileo Galilei turned

On Monday, NASA is set to hold a press conference about some “surprising activity” on Jupiter’s icy moon of Europa. There’s no indication as to what that activity might be, other than it involves the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s garnering more than one 2010 reference around the internet. Europa has always been a fascinating world that has challenged our view of the nature of the solar system.First Glimpse
Europa was discovered by accident. Galileo Galilei turned

I’m known to be a bit negative about email. When you receive a few hundred of them a day, it tends to make you a little skittish, even a little depressed. Yet, it’s still my primary form of communication, especially when I’m trying to find answers to problems. In our highly digitized world, it’s amazing we still use asynchronous communication so often.
Here’s my big problem with how this all works. When you send a message, there’s no way of knowing if the reci

Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column "Ask Leah" ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. During the day, Leah is a Senior User Researcher for Slack, but her views here do not represent her employer. You can write to her at [email protected] and read more How to be Human here.
Dear Leah,Eight months ago I graduated from a university and moved to New York City to chase my dreams. In the process of doing so, me and my girlfriend (of

Developers are given a plethora of tools which can be used to build and grow their mobile apps. Platforms release APIs and SDKs with the hope apps will be built upon them, and there are even resources dedicated to increasing exposure amongst the masses. But in this data-driven world in which we live, having all the bells and whistles, marketing magic, and so-called growth hacking isn’t enough — it’s necessary to be able to track the people actually using the app.
Last year at i

It’s rare to get a chance to meet someone truly different. Phil Tippett is one of those people. He has been creating monsters for the movies — including the memorable Holochess game in the original Star Wars film — for more than three decades. He reprised that work for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. And that inspired him to make monsters for a new augmented reality mobile game, HoloGrid: Monster Battle.
I traveled to Tippett Studio in Berkeley, Calif., last week to v

On Monday night, the two candidates running to be president of the United States will square off in the first debate. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are probably after this job for plenty of reasons, but one neat bonus is having new species named after you. A whole bunch of presidents — past and present — have animals and trees that bear their names.
The current commander in chief, Barack Obama, is pretty popular — especially among fish. In 2012, scientists named a freshwater

Even if you’ve tried virtual reality or already own a VR system, nothing has prepared you for what’s coming over the next month. Three major VR platforms are expected to launch before Thanksgiving Day with massive announcements and retail roll-outs in the works.
Despite our dogged pursuit of VR news at UploadVR, the technology is still the stuff of science fiction for most people: VR may have appeared in a couple news reports or been seen as an ad for the Samsung Gear VR on TV a

In February, I read Belle Beth Cooper’s Fast Company piece “How I became a morning person, read more books, and learned a language in a year,” which listed the four steps to assuming a new hobby: set small goals, focus on one new thing at a time, remove obvious barriers, and build the new routines onto old ones. It’s a powerful piece, and if you haven’t already made the time to read it, you should.
Terrible at following even the most simple rules, my immediate respo

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe weighed in on Facebook about Oculus founder Palmer Luckey’s ill-considered contribution to an anti-Hillary Clinton internet campaign.
Luckey made a lot of money selling Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. He used part of his money to make a $10,000 contribution to pay for a group of self-proclaimed “shitposters” who wanted to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election with anti-Hillary Clinton memes. Luckey had to apologize after he w

Let’s face it, we’ve all found ourselves trapped this loop: We install certain apps whenever the need arises, run out of space two weeks later, and after long and thorough deliberation, finally decide which ones get to stay and which ones have to go — to make room for selfies — only to eventually reinstall them again later.
Soon, WeChat users may finally be emancipated from this never-ending cycle of installing and deleting. Since midnight last Thursday, Tencent’s i

The Microsoft Garage group, which regularly releases experimental applications for Android, iOS, and other platforms, has developed a new Microsoft Excel add-in called Project Córdoba that’s designed to help students easily import data from internet-connected devices. This will allow them to make real-time dashboards with the data.
“When combined with a collection of worksheets customized for middle school students, Excel brings to life the data behind scientific principles. I

Today at the Minecon conference in Anaheim, Calif., Mojang, the Microsoft-owned game developer behind Minecraft, announced that on October 18, it will release the Boss Update for Minecraft Pocket Edition on Android and iOS and Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta. The update is notable because it includes add-ons, a new way for players to customize the appearance of animals and mobs by tinkering with JSON.
Mojang first unveiled the Boss Update with add-ons at the Electronic Entertainment Expo&

It was just a normal shower. My phone was resting on the counter and playing music from Spotify at the loudest possible volume. I liked the song I was listening to, and I wanted to know what it was. So I pulled back the curtain to check.
That’s when I remembered that this phone, this rose gold iPhone 7, was water-resistant.
So I reached for it and brought it into the shower.
Spotify kept playing, only it was louder, because the phone was closer to me now and wasn’t being muted by the

GUEST: 37 percent of edtech funding deals, representing $1.07 billion, were made in China-based edtech companies in 2015, up from 18 percentin 2014. These are companies teaching software development and other technology disciplines. Assuming the trend from 2013 to 2015 remains steady, in my estimation based on the percentages, China will take the top spot in 2016 — ahead of the US — and will be the country to receive the biggest investment in education startups around the world.

British Police have arrested the 35-year-old man alleged to have hacked into an iPhone belonging to Pippa Middleton, the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge. The news of the arrest was reported by the BBC.
Earlier today, The Sun reported that it had been approached through WhatsApp by a hacker who claimed to have 3,000 images from Middleton’s iCloud account and demand £50,000 for them. Some of the pictures reportedly included the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, her husband Willia

Disney gave up on its Infinity games earlier this year, but Warner Bros. is forging ahead in the battle for the toys-to-life market with Lego Dimensions, which combines Lego toys with big entertainment brands and funny Lego video games.
In a war with market leader Skylanders and other rivals, Warner’s TT Games division has continued to release a bunch of new toys and games for Lego Dimensions fans. A new starter pack, dubbed Wave 6, is available now for $80-90 with a bunch of new character

GUEST: Words are the new UI/UX. That means the same diligence and attention to detail that was once poured over every pixel of a website or app will now have to be applied to each word of a bot interaction. The problem is that most people were only too cognizant of their lack of expertise when it came to laying out an app, but when it comes to chatbot dialogue, we all believe ourselves to be experts. After all, we have been talking since we were two years old, so we must know a thing or two