Technology news

(Reuters) – International Business Machines Corp reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue, helped by continued growth in the company’s cloud and analytics businesses.
Under Chief Executive Ginni Rometty, the company has shifted towards more profitable areas such as cloud services, analytics, and security.
Revenue from those areas, which the company calls “strategic imperatives”, rose 16 percent to $8 billion in the third quarter.
Cloud revenue jumped 44 percent, co

A few weeks after Fitbit's Charge 2 started shipping to customers, the wearable maker and digital health company has admitted that there were software bugs in the device that have resulted in inaccurate distance tracking, and says a fix has been issued.
In our full review of the new Fitbit Charge 2, The Verge noted that the device had recorded distances that were significantly different from the distances measured by GPS-equipped fitness watches, whether the Charge 2 was in "connected GPS"

Google’s built-in flight-searching tool just got a big improvement with the addition of price notifications. Now, when looking up the cost of future travel plans using its search engine, you may see a card pop up telling you when the fare is expected to expire and how much you’ll save by booking sooner rather than later. If you still want to wait to purchase the ticket, you can track the flight or route and receive notifications about fare increases.
Google sources the informati

Facebook announced an update for its journalist app aimed at keeping media apprised of what people are talking about on the social network and Instagram. Starting Wednesday, Signal for Facebook and Instagram will receive support for live video, meaning that there’ll be a new column in the dashboard, replacing the current FBNewswire/Politicswire column powered by Storyful. The goal is to help surface more Facebook Live content that could be used to inform articles and real-ti

Pepe the frog, a one-time comic character and long-standing internet meme, has had a rough year. But after seeing Pepe repurposed by racists and identified as a hate symbol, his creator is trying to reclaim him. The Anti-Defamation League and Matt Furie, who first drew Pepe in his comic Boy’s Club, announced a joint project last week to recast the character as "a force for good." Using the hashtag #SavePepe, the ADL will start posting "a series of positive Pepe memes and messages" in order

 Razer, the company that develops hardware and services for gamers and the world of gaming, has made an acquisition to catapult it to more platforms and more people: The company has acquired THX, the legendary audio and video quality assurance company that was originally founded by George Lucas as part of Lucasfilm. Razer’s CEO Min-Liang Tan said in an interview that the terms of… Read More

GUEST: The evolution of chatbots over the past few decades has ingrained them into our daily lives. From virtual assistants on our phones to de facto customer agents online, they have come a long way from their origins. However, if chatbots are going to one day outpace apps, they need to become more naturally integrated into a wider range of technologies.
In the mid-1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum invented the first chatbot program. Eliza was designed to simulate a conversation by us

A few months ago, drivers stuck in Mexico City traffic were greeted with a strange sight: drones carrying signs advertising UberPool. “The city would be for you, not 5.5 million cars,” one drone’s sign read. “Driving by yourself? This is why you can never see the volcanoes,” another read, a reference to the smog that obscures the mountains surrounding the city.Uber is using drones to advertise in Mexico as the startup plans to double its presence in Latin America by

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services today announced that its new Ohio region of data centers is now available for public use. The region is officially known as us-east-2, which is distinct from AWS’ widely used us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia.
The new region has a range of services available, and for basic raw computing infrastructure, the C4, D2, I2, M4, R3, T2, and X1 series of instances are available, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.
Report

Online sexual assault tracker Callisto has expanded its service to two additional colleges, Sexual Health Innovations founder Jess Ladd told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
Callisto is now available at Coe College and Central College in Iowa.
Callisto pilot programs started last year at University of San Francisco and Pomona College.
Additional expansions are planned in Colorado, New York, and other parts of the United States later this year, Ladd said, and plans are being considered for

Netflix reported its third quarter earnings today. The company took in a record best $2.15 billion in revenue, a jump of 36 percent over last year. It also added 3.6 million new subscribers, easily besting the 2.3 million it had projected. The company attributed its better-than-expected performance to the break-out success of its original content, specifically Stranger Things and the second season of Narcos. Its stock was up nearly 20 percent in after-hours trading.
"Our over-performance ag

Streaming giant Netflix now has 86.74 million subscribers after adding 3.2 million abroad and 370,000 in the U.S. during the third quarter. These stats beat the estimates Netflix shared three months ago — 2 new million international subscribers and 300,000 new U.S. subscribers.
Not much has changed for Netflix this year, fiscally. The company continues to lead the pack in streaming, but it faces some hurdles: big content cost

HBO's Westworld is a show about technological anxiety, explored through the lens of a futuristic theme park where you can live out your wildest fantasies with hundreds of almost perfectly lifelike (and increasingly self-aware) animatronic "hosts." It is also, as many people have pointed out, a series about video games.
Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have explicitly compared the titular park to violent open-world games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, the latter sharing a simi

What if there were information sources that could keep you up-to-the-minute informed on the technology topics that matter most? What if there were one-stop shops that provided breaking news and access to deep, authoritative knowledge — again, on those tech topics that matter most to you? And above all, what if these destinations welcomed you as a member of their independent communities? These are just some of the goals driving important changes underway a

Blizzard has announced that the first Heroes Brawl for its multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) Heroes of the Storm will launch tomorrow, October 18. Heroes Brawl offers a weekly rotation of new game types, each with different rules than the normal Heroes of the Storm experience. It’s a mode that Blizzard has implemented in its other games, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Overwatch. Blizzard is also releasing a new hero that day, Samuro, the Blademaster from the 2002 strategy game Wa

 But a trip along Interstate 5 reveals a different world. Miles of browning grass stretch along the roadside, broken by the green clusters of California’s farms, which provide fruits, vegetables and nuts to most American households.
California is the top farm producer in the U.S. In 2015, the state’s farms and ranches harvested approximately $47 billion for their output, vastly… Read More

 Facebook Messenger may have already hit the billion-user club this past summer, but the company is always looking for new ways to increase app usage. The latest attempt is the introduction of “conversation topics” on Messenger – a feature offering suggestions about what to talk about with friends. These conversation starters appear to rely on Messenger’s connection… Read More

 Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Mike Rothenberg, the founder of Rothenberg Ventures, which was more recently renamed Frontier Tech Ventures. According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, San Francisco’s Planning Department was notified earlier this month that Rothenberg Ventures has been operating out of two floors in a building that’s not permitted… Read More

GUEST: Chatbots are the new black in UX design. Facebook already has over 11,000 chatbots since the official announcement of chatbot support made earlier this year. The question is: Should you build a chatbot for your business?
Yes, if your goal is to create a more personalized experience with your customers without hiring additional staff. You shouldn’t be perceived just as “faceless” website or a product page. Your bot can appear as a witty and helpful assistant with act

Scientists have turned skin cells into fully functional eggs that led to eight mouse babies being born. It’s a promising procedure that one day could help humans with fertility issues.
The team of Japanese researchers led by Katsuhiko Hayashi first took cells from the tails of 10-week-old female brown mice. (That’s about 30 in human years.) Next, they turned the skin cells into a special type of cell called induced pluripotent stem cells, which can divide and form different cells, ac

You’d probably rather be playing Civilization VI, but this new video should help get you through the agonizing wait of these last few days.
Publisher 2K has released a new trailer for its upcoming turn-based strategy game for PC. It’s calling the video a launch trailer, although Civilization VI doesn’t come out until October 21. However, those who preorder the game on Steam are able to now preload it, meaning it’ll become instantly playable on its release date. The C

Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is driving away partners from Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator where he is a part-time adviser. Project Include, which works to improve diversity at tech companies, said today that it would no longer work with YC startups. "Thiel’s actions are in direct conflict with our values at Project Include," the group’s co-founder, Ellen Pao, wrote in a Medium post. "Because of his continued co

Apple released an iOS update today to address the complaints of thousands of Verizon customers who were experiencing signal drops and unexplainable issues with GPS when using the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The update is numbered 10.0.3, and it’s solely focused on fixing the cellular connectivity issues for those two phones. If you have an older iPhone, you won’t see the update pop up.
It’s unclear exactly what the issue was. But iPhone 7 owners began complaining late last mont

When YouTube Red launched last year a big emphasis was placed on original programming, and the platform is now stepping up those efforts in a big way by ordering new shows from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Bourne Identity director Doug Liman. Variety reports that YouTube global head of content Susanne Daniels announced the new shows — along with a new series from Community creator Dan Harmon — during a presentation at the Mipcom trade show on Monday.
Johnson will be executive p

Pixar Animation Studios is known for making surprisingly dark, bold storytelling choices in its movies. For movies that are meant to be accessible to children, they can be sharply daring in the directions they take. Ellie Fredricksen's life montage at the beginning of Up, the toys grimly facing oblivion together at the end of Toy Story 3, and Bing Bong's tear-jerking decision in Inside Out all tap into painful emotions around death in order to underline the joy the characters feel around life. B

Market research firm The NPD Group has released a new report on gamers’ spending habits on downloadable content. According to The NPD Group, 28 percent of the U.S. population of men and women ages 13 to 54 have purchased extra video game content in the past three months, with males and teens making up the bulk of the group. The NPD Group clarified to GamesBeat that its research targeted console and PC games, so these figures do not take mobile into account.
Microtransactions

Hearthstone is giving its 40 million registered players some big incentives to compete this week.
Blizzard has announced this week’s Tavern Brawl, which are weekly events in the digital card game with changing rules. Usually, you can earn one free pack of cards for winning one game in a Tavern Brawl. This week, however, Blizzard is creating an Heroic Tavern Brawl for its PC and mobile card game. It will launch in place of when the Tavern Brawl usually goes up, which happens every Wednesday

Samsung’s Gear 360 virtual reality camera can now be purchased at more locations. Previously only available through online retailers, the company is now also selling the device directly in-store through Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, and Best Buy.
The $349.99 camera went on sale in the U.S. on August 19, five months after its debut at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Samsung limited its release initially, starting with content creators at VidCon and Lollapalooza

 CoreOS today announced that it has hired the founders of Redspread, a Y Combinator-incubated company that helps enterprises deploy their software on Kubernetes container clusters, and that Redspread’s open source tools are now part of the CoreOS family.
In its announcement today, CoreOS simply said that Redspread is “joining” CoreOS. Even after repeated prodding, the… Read More

Three months after unveiling an all-new Linux app, Skype has finally announced that it’s adding video-calling to the mix too.
Though the Microsoft-owned communications service has existed on Linux for some years, users had long complained that it was lagging behind its counterparts on Windows and Mac and was rarely updated. The new WebRTC-enabled version of Skype on Linux promises a more responsive interface and more of the features Skype is known for, including file sharing. However, Skyp

After more than a year of legal struggle, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal has issued a landmark ruling on the country's secret bulk collection program. That program, first revealed by Edward Snowden, allowed the country's surveillance agency, the GCHQ, to tap internet cables and build a detailed database of the country's communications with little to no legal oversight.
The ruling has both good news and bad news for British spies. First, the bad news: the court found that, betw

Google has released an update to its travel offering that tells you the best time to book a cheap flight and hotel room. With millions expected to travel this holiday season, this new feature should alleviate some of the stress of trip-planning, especially for those doing so through a mobile device.
Google will now tell you if you’re getting the cheapest flight possible — based on when the prices for the flights and routes you are interested in are expected to increase. In some cases

 Google’s airfare search destination Google Flights already offered a variety of features aimed at helping you find low-cost tickets, but today it’s rolling out one more: it will show you when prices are expected to increase for certain flights, so you can book before the tickets become more expensive. It’s also rolling out other tips that will help you shop for the best… Read More

CoreOS, a startup that provides a distribution of Linux for servers and tools for working with the open-source Kubernetes container management software, is announcing today that it has acquired a small startup called Redspread, which developed software for managing Kubernetes.
This is not a major financial deal. The Redspread team comprises just two founders: chief executive Mackenzie Burnett and chief technology officer Dan Gillespie, and the duo focused on open-source tooling rather than on se

Taika Waititi, the director behind comedies like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Eagle vs Shark, did a Reddit AMA for the first time yesterday. Although a large portion of it focused on his upcoming project, Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi also shared his thoughts on the Marvel universe (he ignored it), breaking into the film industry (be an assistant first), and the best way to approach a celebrity in public (just do it).
Waititi says Ragnarok will have an '80s vibe and a "Taika-esque tone" to