Technology news

You no longer have to broadcast to post content on Twitch.
The popular livestreaming-video site, a subsidiary of Amazon, revealed during a stage presentation at its TwitchCon fan event today that it has launched video uploads as its latest feature. This enables anyone with a Twitch account to upload videos from their video-manager dashboard. Unlike archived livestreams, these clips will remain on Twitch forever without expiring. Now, with this capability, Twitch creators can make highl

Live streaming site Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, today announced an exclusive set of perks for Amazon Prime members, including ad-free viewing and discounts on video games bought on Amazon.com. Twitch CEO Emmett Shear announced the new service, appropriately called Twitch Prime, at the company’s community convention held this year in San Diego. Unlike other Amazon services like Prime Video, Twitch Prime will not be available as a standalone subscription service. Instead, it will only

It’s prime time for Hearthstone’s Priest class. On Amazon, that is.
Onstage today at TwitchCon in San Diego, Hearthstone art lead Ben Thompson announced that players who sign up for the just-announced Twitch Prime product will get a new hero portrait for the Priest in the category-leading digital card game. The partnership is a sign of just how big Blizzard’s free-to-play app has become — it has more than 40 million registered players, and it’s drawing upon that gro

Twitch today announced Twitch Prime, a premium subscription service for its streaming site, during its TwitchCon event in San Diego. It’s actually part of the Amazon Prime subscription, which gives users of the online shopping site discounts on items and shipping. Amazon bought Twitch in 2014.
Twitch Prime gives subscribers ad-free viewing of livestreams. You also get game loot each month, including free games and in-game cosmetics. The first batch will include goodies for Hearthstone, Bli

More people are tuning into Twitch for their livestreaming gaming entertainment than ever before.
The Amazon subsidiary averages 622,000 viewers at any one time over the last 12 months, Twitch chief executive officer Emmett Shear revealed at the company’s TwitchCon fan event today. That’s a new record for Twitch. The site also broke its record for peak simultaneous users with 2.06 million people logging onto the Twitch site for a number of esports tournaments. That’s an en

People love to watching Overwatch.
The streaming site Twitch revealed today during the keynote for its TwitchCon event in San Diego that Overwatch has been the most popular 2016 release on the site, meaning that it has attracted more viewers than any other game released during the year. You can see the other most popular 2016 releases in the image above.
Overwatch’s place at the top isn’t a huge surprise. The team-based shooter for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC launched in May and

GUEST: Chatbots are just a “hi” away. Not like a website that you have to navigate to, or an app that you have to locate and open. But chatbots today lack the ability to provide the visual feedback customers rely on for a sense of validation. People like to see content plainly, and they can do this on websites and apps. At Yala we are tackling this problem. Here are three lessons we learned along the way:
1. Don’t be dense
Example:
Me: help.
Chatbot: I can help by ans

While you check your email daily waiting on an update that says you’re new iPhone 7 is on its way, these jackasses are tossing them off buildings. TechRax, a vlogger known for doing crazy things puts the iPhone 7 Plus to the the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Standing a towering 2,717 feet above the ground, the vlogger tosses the phone while attempting to capture its descent on a GoPro. Ignoring the fact that this would almost certainly kill below with a direct hit, the drop (over half a mile) sh

PewDiePie is a host onto himself. As long as he can hold up a brofist, he’s a threat to take over any market he enters.
Developer Outermind’s new PewDiePie Tuber Simulator is the most downloaded game on the App Store for iPhone, according to data-tracking firm Sensor Tower. It launched earlier this week on both iOS and Android. The virtual pet-like app has players building up a YouTube empire just like Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s by making videos and buying&n

Converged data center hardware company Nutanix today had its first day of trading on the stock market, and its stock closed at $37 per share, up 131 percent from the $16 share price at which it sold more than 14 million shares in its initial public offering (IPO).
Nutanix stock started trading this morning at $26.50 on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The closing price of $37 was 39.6 percent higher than that.
Generally speaking, during its first day of trading, the stock went up. The high for t

Iconoclastic tinkerers have a new toy: the popular BeagleBone Black single board computer just got a slight makeover. The new BeagleBone Black Wireless swaps out the 10/100 Ethernet port for some much-needed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It’s only 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi, but that’s sadly all most internet of things devices ship with these days, thanks to cost considerations. BeagleBone Black Wireless also has a new “system-in-package” chip which integrates the processor, GPU, m

GUEST: With the release of Google Allo last week, we’ve officially entered the era of the assistant. Every company that owns a major tech platform is now betting that assistants will be an important interface in the post-mobile world. 
You might think assistants today are trivial or stupid, and you wouldn’t be wrong. They often don’t understand what we say and can’t hold real conversations yet. Mostly they’re relegated to simple tasks like playing music, sendin

SPONSORED: This sponsored post is produced in partnership with Optimizely.
Picture a world without the scientific method. There would be no clinical trials, medical journals, or SpaceX rocket test flights. Without the ability to run experiments, the pace of innovation would slow, new discoveries would be inconsistent, lacking clear data to support them.
Experimentation is the process that has guided how all of human knowledge has been discovered and documented, reinforced, and shared. Why wouldn

When you perform a Google search for every day queries, you don’t typically expect systemic racism to rear its ugly head. Yet, if you’re a woman searching for a hairstyle, that’s exactly what you might find. A simple Google image search for ‘women’s professional hairstyles’ returns the following: Here, you’ll find hairstyles, generally done in a professional setting by stylists. It’s the nature of Google. It returns what it thinks you’re loo

Google Maps is getting tighter integration with your Android calendar. The company today announced that your events will now start showing up in Maps. Simply open up the side/hamburger menu, tap on ‘Your Places’ and head to the ‘upcoming’ tab to see directions for places you might have to travel to soon. …And that’s about it. It’s small, and a little buried; it would be neat if Maps automatically suggested locations based on upcoming events (say, if yo

After seeing Instagram launch ‘Stories’ in August, it seems Facebook wanted in on the fun. The blatant rip of one of Snapchat’s key features is making its way to a second Facebook-owned platform, Messenger, at least for testing. ‘Messenger Day,’ lets users post photos and videos, with filters, that self-destruct after 24 hours. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been a Snapchat feature for years, and just recently came to Instagram. Current

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide if a federal law that bans the trademarking of "disparaging" terms constitutes a free speech violation, Reuters reports. The case in question involves a Portland-based band called The Slants, who were denied a trademark because their band name is a racist term for people of Asian descent. The court's decision could impact the ongoing legal battles of the Washington Redskins, who have also challenged the law.
The law in question is th

When Star Trek Beyond hit theaters, Simon Pegg wasn’t shy about discussing how the film was an attack against surges in xenophobia and nativism in the US and UK — and now Pegg, director J.J. Abrams, and cast and crew from all corners of the Star Trek universe are speaking out as part of a group called Trek Against Trump.
In an open letter posted to Facebook yesterday, the group made its case, stating that Star Trek has always portrayed an inclusive future, where "people of all races

The iPhone 7 is all about the camera. You knew that. But maybe you need more than the iPhone 7 Plus's dual cameras to capture a perfect photo. Moment announced today that its lenses now officially work with the iPhone 7, even with the 7 Plus’s dual cameras, though the lenses only cover the wide-angle camera.
The lens choices include a wide lens, tele lens, superfish lens, and a macro lens. They all cost $99.99 and require either a Moment Case or Moment Mounting Plate. The Mountin

Google today unveiled a no-brainer update to Google Maps: integration with Google Calendar. Rolling out gradually worldwide (so don’t be surprised if you don’t see it on Google Play just yet), the new feature means Android users will start to see their Google Calendar events on Google Maps.
For an event to appear on Google Maps, the address needs to be in the “Where” box in the Google Calendar event. The other requirement is that you need to be signed into both Google Cal

EXCLUSIVE: There is a general problem with analytics, especially when it comes to understanding your audience — knowing where to find the right data, understanding what questions to ask, and gathering real insights in the resulting swamp of information.
That kind of research usually requires a data scientist, and even then it can take days or weeks to gain real insights.
Today, ARCompany and RealSociable have announced a merger, forming Verve.ai, a SaaS platform that traces both your

We’re really excited to see Duncan Jones return to his roots after taking on Warcraft earlier this year. His next movie Mute just went before cameras earlier this week in Berlin, and it turns out that you might not have to go to theaters to see it. Speaking to the Empire Podcast, the film’s star Alexander Skarsgård revealed that Netflix will be distributing the movie.
The deal is apparently similar to that of Beasts of No Nation, which received a limited release in theaters alo

Yahoo today announced its latest open-source release: a model that can figure out if images are specifically pornographic in nature.
The system uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like dirty images) and getting them to make inferences about new data. The model that’s now available on GitHub under a BSD 2-Clause license comes pre-trained, so users only have to fine-tune it if they so choose. The mod

Facebook once tried to buy the company formerly known as Snapchat for $3 billion. After getting rebuffed, the social networking company opted to find ways to compete against the ephemeral messaging app, even repeatedly launching experimental apps to see which ones would gain traction among its users. It seems that something must have clicked because some of Facebook’s tested features have started to stick on its established apps, starting with Instagram, and could very well be coming to Me

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, teams and figures from the NBA get involved in the esports market, No Man’s Sky loses players, and Ubisoft has high hopes for Nintendo’s NX.
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Westworld finds the frontier between the real and the virtual, between humans and A.I.
How Hearthstone’s new card nerfs will change the game
Call of Duty’s art shows the soul behind the megafranchise
The NBA is esports&rsq

In two separate polls, numerous iPhone owners are reporting some seriously annoying issues with Bluetooth connectivity. The problem, it seems, isn’t limited to the iPhone 7. Readers in one poll, from 9to5 Mac, report it’s affecting other phones (6, 6s, etc.) running iOS 10. The second poll seems to confirm the problems of the first, albeit on a smaller scale. Gizmodo polled its readers asking what problems they’re having with the iPhone 7 so far, and Bluetooth connectivity&nbs

Facebook has a long, fairly embarrassing track record of trying to clone Snapchat's features and core appeal. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is actually doing a pretty decent job at it, but Facebook has been through a number of failed attempts over the last several years. It's not giving up, though.
The company has quietly launched another effort to clone a big element of Snapchat's formula: stories. TechCrunch reports that Facebook has rolled out a new feature called Mess

If you’ve got a way to crack iOS 10, you can get $1.5 million for it. That’s the bounty announced by exploit broker Zerodium yesterday, available to anyone who can pull off a remote jailbreak attack. When the company made the same offer for iOS 9 last year, the price was only $1 million.
On some level, it’s a simple PR play. By offering a big, splashy reward they ensure that the next time a researcher is looking to cash in an exploit or a spyware company is looking to buy one,

It’s going to be a nostalgic Christmas.
Nintendo announced new features for the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, which launches November 11 for $60. The NES Classic is a mini-version of the original console, which dominated the gaming landscape from its launch in 1985 to the end of the ’80s. While it doesn’t play cartridges, it has 30 games on its drive and connects to modern TVs via HDMI. It also has multiple filters, which enables you to play

Mobile ad tech has evolved rapidly in recent years. As advertiser spend has increased greatly, there has been a correspondingly huge growth in tools and platforms to help app publishers earn as much revenue as possible through their in-app advertising.
One of the hottest topics in ad monetization right now is mediation. In principle, mediation is a wonderful thing for app publishers. It enables you to aggregate demand from different networks, making each demand source compete for your available

You don’t have to wait until December for a taste of the next Star Wars story.
Disney announced today that the mobile strategy game Star Wars: Commander is receiving new content based on the upcoming film, Rogue One. The update, available now, adds characters and vehicles from the movie, including Shoretroopers, Rebel Commandos, Gigoran Fighters, and AT-ACTs. Star Wars: Commander originally came out in 2014, but new content like this will keep players engaged with the iOS, Android, an

I haven’t played all that many games in virtual reality, but I feel confident saying that Google’s Tilt Brush — which is essentially the MS Paint of VR — is among the best experiences out there. And it’s going to get even better, because Google is adding a multiplayer mode.
My excitement probably sounds a little ridiculous if you’ve never played around in Tilt Brush before. Why on Earth would someone be excited about multiplayer Paint?
It's way more fun than a

Google today is unveiling new prototypes it has developed for Tilt Brush, a 3D painting app that’s available for the HTC Vive virtual reality headset.
It’s a lot of fun to use the app on your own. But if a video preview is any indication, Tilt Brush will get really cool when you can use it with someone else.“It’s amazing how collaborating in the same space makes the virtual feel real. We think you’ll love this one, so we’re exploring ways to develop this conce

The Girl Scouts have created a patch for girls to earn a badge in video game design. The organizing groups announced their badge program last week, and they’ve got another event coming this weekend.
Women in Games International and the Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles are holding an event on October 1 from 10 am to 4 pm at the Sony PlayStation Santa Monica Studio in Santa Monica, Calif. The move comes three years after the Boy Scouts created a merit badge series in 2013. But better

On Thursday, a minor shock wave went through social media as Bustle published a short piece quoting director Tim Burton in conjunction with his new film, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Associate entertainment editor Rachel Simon apparently asked Burton why his films — 36 of them to date — focus almost exclusively on white characters. His dismissive response, weirdly enough, had virtually nothing to do with the modern world, or even with the specifics of casting or conce

 We’re taking more digital photos than ever, but we’re not very good about printing them out to enjoy them in our homes. Meanwhile, the digital picture frame market has filled with cheap products that haven’t kept up with technology developments, like ubiquitous Wi-Fi, better photo quality, and higher resolutions, in order to instead chase ever-lower price points. Aura aims… Read More

The marriage of fashion and technology is advancing, as Intel announced today a collaboration with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan at his runway show during Paris Fashion Week.
Chalayan’s models showed off brand new glasses and belts powered by Intel technology, as part of a special demonstration. The demo was one of many fashion collaborations Intel has started to make technology cool under its “amazing experiences outside” brand campaign.
Intel said Chalayan’s Room To

Consumers continue to spend more money on digital game downloads and microtransactions.
Digital game sales reached $6.1 billion in August, according to intelligence firm SuperData Research. That’s up 11 percent year-over-year. As always, games like League of Legends, Overwatch, and Clash of Clans contributed a bulk of that total. But sci-fi universe-exploring game No Man’s Sky and mobile monster-catching sim Pokémon Go helped get even more people spending their gaming dol