Technology news

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“We’ve always been a really ROI-driven company,” says David Rose, director of performance marketing at mobile game giant PocketGems. “Even back when it was hard to do attribution. We bui

Cribs are a bummer, man. Your only option for entertainment is staring up at the ceiling because you can’t roll over yet and probably don't own a phablet with a Netflix subscription. I hope your parents strung an inspiring mobile above you, or at least painted the ceiling with a fake sky, or else you’re probably really bored. I get you, babies. I have good news for you, though! There’s now a product called the SoundBub, which is a Bluetooth speaker and noise maker just for

GUEST: Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has taken the media by storm, with new groundbreaking accomplishments by global companies. Google’s DeepMind recently beat a world champion of Go, which is said to be the most advanced board game on this planet. Moreover, DeepMind is now able to assist doctors during surgery, detect risk of blindness in an early state to improve the chances of recovery, and other important breakthroughs such as natural language recognition, object detection in images,

Another day, another update to Samsung’s Note 7 odyssey. If you’re a frequent flier who’s been holding on to a Note 7 for dear life, I have some bad news for you. The US Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, and Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration have now banned the device on all flights ‘to, from, or within” the United States – even if they’re turned off, and regardless of whether they’re on carry

The new Call of Duty doesn’t come out until next month, but you can still play it today … or you could, if the servers were working.
Publisher Activision has launched the beta test for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the latest entry in the long-running shooter franchise, and most players are having trouble finding a live match. The sci-fi shooter launched in its testing phase earlier today, but the game’s matchmaking service has already melted. This means you can&rs

One of the most popular competitive games around the world is getting another massive championship tournament in the United States.
Esports-platform company FaceIt is holding the finals for season two of its Esports Championship Series at Anaheim Arena in California. This event will have a $750,000 prize pool that will go to the best teams competing in the military shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The finals will feature the top four teams from both North America and Euro

SB Nation contributor Russ Steinberg tweeted a prescient joke at Donald Trump three and a half years ago, and now some strangers are holding him accountable for the Republican presidential nominee.Steinberg’s exchange was simple enough:
Obama can kill Americans at will with drones but waterboarding is not allowed—only in America!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2013@realDonaldTrump If you hate America so much, you should run for President and fix things— R

Samsung says it will send a text message to all Galaxy Note 7 owners in the US, informing them that the phones will be forbidden on board US aircraft starting tomorrow.
Notifying Note 7 owners, who should really have replaced their phones by now, that the devices are banned from aircraft will be key — uninformed passengers who are told that they must choose between their smartphone or boarding their flight will likely be furious, and it will be up to airlines, the government, and Samsung t

I’ve reviewed a robot or two in my time. I’ve played with many more that I didn’t deem worthy of writing about. Cozmo is, as consumer robots go, easily the best I’ve seen. In fact, even before Anki released its new robot toy, we were smitten. When unpacking Cozmo, it’s easy to be underwhelmed. The packaging is terrific, but inside lies a plastic figure with a short stature that’d seemingly be just as at home as a kid’s meal freebie. But&n

Sony’s online gaming service went through some hiccups earlier today. Now it’s back up, and that means one of the biggest games of the fall is live as part of a pre-launch test.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s beta is now available on PlayStation 4 for anyone who preordered the full the game. Developer Infinity Ward will launch the sci-fi military shooter November 4 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. But prior to that, the studio and Activision are running this beta, which tests

If you’re thinking of getting on an airplane and own a Samsung Galaxy Note7, it’s best that you leave the device at home. The U.S. government reportedly (and has since confirmed) banned passengers from bringing the Note7 on board any aircraft, even if they’ve been powered down. The flight restrictions extend to flights in the country.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has formally banned the Galaxy Note7 smartphones, effective October 15, 2016 at 12:00 p

A company called Airspace is launching a bounty hunter drone that’ll capture other drones that infringe on airspace. It won’t traverse the country seeking out a specific drone, but it’ll keep your property intruder-free, or at least that's the idea. Airspace thinks plenty of drones are flying around places people might not want filmed or surveilled, so the company is marketing its drone to venues that want to "protect customers and guests from unwanted intruders," corporations

When my wife and I swapped a New York City apartment for an Austin, Texas home, we were low on cash but rich in space. At first, dozens of cardboard moving boxes did a commendable job of filling out the house, but as we dispersed the contents of a Manhattan one-bedroom into our ranch — complete with a shed, a garage, and a couple offices — our space felt empty.
Like a goldfish, our lives had grown to the size of a very small bowl, but now we had an entire aquarium at our disposal. Be

Forget everything you know about Microsoft’s Tay chatbot. It was a disaster, it didn’t work, the researchers behind it have likely all been fired or reassigned. In truth, it was a test of the Microsoft natural language processing algorithms, and it didn’t pass the test.
Plus, Tay was never intended as something that proved Microsoft’s prowess with A.I. It was a mere consumer test, a minimal entry in their grand A.I. scheme. You know what the company is really planning to

Samsung’s recalled Galaxy Note 7 smartphone will be banned from US airline flights. The order comes from the FAA and the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and follows an announcement from earlier this week that Samsung is ending production of the phone entirely. The ban takes effect Saturday at noon eastern time.
The devices will not be allowed on planes even if they are turned off, a dramatic escalation of the current restr

This week, Outside Magazine published an obituary of the Great Barrier Reef and it quickly went viral. "The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness," the obituary began. "It was 25 million years old." It turns out scientists aren’t very happy that the world’s largest coral reef system was proclaimed dead — mainly because it isn’t.
"We’re very far from an obituary."The Great Barrier Reef is definitely in a dire situation, but "we&rsqu

A few weeks ago, it seemed there was a good chance Twitter was about to be purchased, with potential suitors including Google, Disney, and Salesforce. Then Google and Disney backed out, and now Salesforce has as well, according to the Financial Times. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff simply said “In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us.” Twitter is apparently still looking for other bidders, but prospects of a nearby sale seem to have eroded. Twitter CE

Amazon Studios has picked up the American rights to Ronia The Robber's Daughter, a 26-episode Japanese animated series co-produced by Studio Ghibli, directed by Ghibli's Goro Miyazaki, and animated by CGI animation studio Polygon. The American dub will be narrated by The X-Files' Gillian Anderson. According to Variety, the show is set for release on Amazon Prime later this year.
When Studio Ghibli announced in 2014 that it was shutting down film production after co-founder Hayao Miyazaki an

The emotional roller coaster that is Twitter’s future seems to have hit a new low today as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells the Financial Times his company has “walked away” from making a bid to buy it.
If you’re keeping track, that’s now... pretty much everyone who’s said they’re not interested in buying Twitter. Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Recode says that Apple is likely also out of t

As someone that hates mowing the lawn, Kobi might be my new best friend. The autonomous robot uses GPS and built-in sensors to cut grass, rake, pick up leaves or plow snow. If you’d prefer a more hands-on approach to lawn maintenance, you can even take the reigns and control Kobi with a smartphone app. Whether via app or in complete autonomous mode, the robot gardener can handle lawns up to 7 acres, leaves on up to 3 acres, and shoveling snow from more than a third of an acre &m

Chinese-based DMG Entertainment has snapped up the rights for Ken Liu’s 2015 epic fantasy novel The Grace of Kings, according to Variety. The company is looking to turn the novel series into a larger film franchise.
'The Grace of Kings' is an ambitious and exciting epic fantasy
The Grace of Kings is Liu’s debut novel, and is an incredibly ambitious and exciting work of epic fantasy. The first of a projected trilogy, Liu’s novel follows a bandit, Kuni Garu and the son of de

For the first time, teenagers are spend more time watching videos on YouTube than Cable TV. This is according to the findings of a survey commissioned by investment bank Piper Jafray. The survey looked at the viewing habits of 10,000 teens. It found that while 26 percent watch YouTube daily, only 25 percent watch cable TV. This is the first time ever YouTube has overtaken broadcast television in this survey, which is commissioned twice annually. That said, there’s clearly still

Verizon has a new unlimited mobile data offering with some significant strings attached. Announced yesterday, PopData is essentially a pay-as-you-go unlimited option that costs $2 for every 30 minutes or $3 for every 60 minutes. Think of it like a microtransaction or in-app purchase in a mobile game, where you can’t enjoy the full benefits of a product you ostensibly already own or pay for without ponying up a few extra bucks.
Of course, PopData isn’t quite as insidious as it sounds

Twitter is currently out of companies interested in purchasing it, as Salesforce has bowed out after its chief executive Marc Benioff said that it “wasn’t the right fit for us.”
In an interview with the FT, Salesforce’s head put an end to speculation that the company would make a bid for Twitter, especially after many had stated that it would be a bad move for the enterprise company. Ahead of his Dreamforce keynote last week, Benioff brushed aside questions about Sal

Next time you go to an Apple Store, playing around with an iPhone is going to feel a lot more personal. As noted by MacRumors, various Apple locations (Apple technically doesn’t want you to call them ‘stores’ anymore) have begun removing tethers from their iPhones: people don’t use their iPhones with a permanent cable attached all day. I imagine Jony Ive sleeping somewhere in a Marc Newson designed bed, having nightmares about the blasphemy of his beautiful iPhones being

Update: PSN is back up and running, and the Call of Duty beta is live.
I hope you weren’t looking to engage in an infinite amount of warfare because Sony’s gaming service isn’t working.
PlayStation Network is down for many people on PlayStation 4. Players have taken to Twitter and other forums to complain about the outage, and Sony has confirmed on its status site that its gaming and social features are not functioning properly. This interruption is preventing players

Pinterest has revealed a little Easter egg its engineering team has incorporated into the visual search and bookmarking service. For many people, it’s a place to find and share creative ideas, but what about users with technical skills? Well, Pinterest hasn’t forgotten about you: If you do a search for “reactjs,” “nodejs,” “javascript,” or any other keyword pertaining to the company’s web stack, you’ll be able to hack the site.
OK,

The White House today shared open source code for President Obama’s Facebook Messenger bot to help other governments build their own bots.
The White House says it’s sharing the code “with the hope that other governments and developers can build similar services — and foster similar connections with their citizens — with significantly less upfront investment,” according to a post published today by chief digital officer for the White House Jason

New pictures have emerged of the HTC Bolt, a phone that’s rumored to be coming later this month. VentureBeat’s Evan Blass posted the images, which appear to show the physical phone — not a rendered version — for the first time. As we saw in an image Blass leaked in September, the Bolt looks similar to this year’s HTC 10 phone, but it’s supposedly going to be a midrange Android device, not a flagship product. It also, notably, has no headphone jack.
Blass write