Technology news

GUEST: Most of today’s chatbot experiences are terrible. Conversational user interface design (UI) is difficult because it is foundationally different from the web and mobile interfaces. So how can chatbot makers identify patterns of interaction that engage users and build holistic experiences that delight them?
Conversational UI design is difficult for two main reasons: 1) Chat has a “random” non-hierarchical flow, and 2) we don’t have a general purpose artificial intell

Taylor Swift’s debut album Taylor Swift was released 10 years ago today.It’s hard to remember a time before her outsize cultural influence, which spans not only country and pop music but Twitter, “good girls,” confessional writing, capitalism, the music streaming wars, “squad goals,” red lipstick, white feminism, tabloid culture, Tumblr memes, music videos, Coca Cola, and the unbearable creepiness of John Mayer.In fact, it’s so hard to remember a moment

 Not everything in our field of view at any given time is all that interesting; often, it’s only when something consistent changes that our eyes take notice. Paris-based Chronocam is looking to further develop this concept in the computer vision space with its new camera technology being optimized for autonomous vehicles. Today, Chronocam announced that it has picked up $15 million in… Read More

Chicago startup InContext Solutions has raised $15.2 million from Intel Capital and others to create virtual reality solutions for retailers and manufacturers.
Intel Capital announced the deal at its annual Intel Capital Summit today. Other investors include Beringea, Plymouth Ventures, and existing investors. InContext helps retailers visualize what their store shelves will look like in a simulated retail store. The investment is one of 12 companies that Intel Capital poured $38 million into.
T

Paxata today announced it has raised $33.5 million to bolster the machine learning and semantic analysis foundations of its enterprise information platform. Led by Intel Capital, today’s investment is Paxata‘s fourth funding round and brings its total capital raised to $61.5 million.
Paxata’s platform provides a self-service, visual approach for information management to large corporations. “We target the one billion people in the enterprise who know how to use Micro

Intel Capital announced today that it has invested $38 million in 12 technology startups. The world’s biggest chip maker made the announcement at the beginning of its annual Intel Capital Global Summit.
The 17th annual Intel Capital Global Summit in San Diego, California, will draw nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs, investors and business luminaries for an event that hopes to shape the future of technology.
Intel’s newest investments include startups in big data analytics, au

Chronocam, a maker of advanced vision sensors, announced today it has raised $15 million in venture capital in a round led by Intel Capital.
The announcement came as part of the Intel Capital Global Summit in San Diego. Intel said it had invested $38 million in 12 technology startups in markets such as virtual and augement reality (VR/AR) and Internet of Things (IoT).
Based in Paris, Chronocam makes visual sensors that operate in a manner similar to the human eye. The company believes a more eff

PRESS RELEASE:Enterprise Mobility Company Received the Highest Rating possible in API Management, Application Life-cycle Management Support, DevOps and Front-end ToolingAUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–October 24, 2016– Kony, Inc., the leading enterprise mobility company, today announced it has been named a “Leader” in Mobile Development Platforms by independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. Based on the in-depth evaluation, Kony achieved the highest score pos

There’s been a lot of excellent analysis and reporting about the proposed $86b AT&T / Time Warner merger in the days since the deal was announced, but this infographic from the Wall Street Journal really nails the fundamental insanity of the telecom industry. What started in 1877 as the original Bell Telephone Co turned into the great phone monopoly of AT&T, found itself broken up by the government in 1984, and has since slowly reconstituted itself as the massiv

This weekend, I went to the “real” Stars Hollow — the Connecticut town of Washington Depot — for the first Gilmore Girls fan festival. On my first day there, someone gives me a handmade, artisanal pop tart. It’s good: thicker than a normal pop tart, conspicuously dusted with cake flour, and I’m very hungry. I eat it while scaling the front lawn of the Mayflower Inn, where Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino had her stroke of genius and started sketchin

GUEST: We launched our Telegram bot recently because we wanted to create a new channel to attract clients, ease our support desk workload, and bring value to our current and future clients.
That’s why our marketer chatbot, which speaks both English and Russian, has a knowledge base with answers to important questions that come up when you start creating content. It also allows you to request a consultation with real marketing experts.
But developing a chatbot program is not enoug

I don’t want to wait five more months to get my hands on a Nintendo Switch, but I’m gonna have to. But you can, however, get a taste of what the new system looks like in person on the 3D-model-sharing website Sketchfab.
Artist Shaderbytes has uploaded a computer-generated model of the Nintendo Switch in its handheld form to Sketchfab, and you can explore the hybrid console before its March release. Nintendo has already shown us a lot about the system in

VB LIVE: Facebook’s long-term plan: make Messenger the center of users’ online lives. Your short-term plan: position yourself to monetize this revolution in messenger tech innovation. Register for this free VB Live event now and learn how you can make money with Messenger’s new features.
Register here for free.
Remember how Facebook told marketers how important Likes and organic reach were? You built your entire Facebook marketing strategy around the promise of that relevant, h

In a move considered unusual for a Chinese internet entrepreneur, Alibaba founder and business magnate Jack Ma urged Chinese officials to use big data to stop would-be criminals. Ma announced his ideas on Friday in a televised speech to about 1.5 million domestic security and legal officials. The speech was also published on the Chinese Communist Party’s Commission for Political and Legal Affairs' WeChat account on Saturday, according to Bloomberg.
Ma's speech touched on how data can 

This weekend saw one of the biggest corporate acquisitions in years as AT&T reached a deal to purchase Time Warner for more than $80 billion. If approved, the deal would create a massive new joining of the telecom and media business, along the lines of AOL-Verizon (combined in May of last year ) and Comcast-NBCUniversal (combined in 2011, and also an investor in The Verge’s parent company).
But AT&T's new conglomerate has a unique combination. Comcast has a bundle of cable channels

Lyft announced on Monday that it’s testing out a membership plan for its Line carpooling service that promises riders cheaper prices per ride. Available in Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., riders can purchase either a $20 or $29 pass, each with different options — the former reduces all your Line rides to $2 each, while the latter covers the entire ride.
Passes must be purchased before October 31 and can only be used through November. There&rsquo

First, they gave us Exploding Kittens, the physical and digital card game that raised $8.7 million on Kickstarter and sold more than 2 million physical card games. And now, Matthew Inman’s The Oatmeal and video game maker Elan Lee are creating Bears vs Babies, another crazy card game.
In just seven days, their new Kickstarter campaign has raised $1.4 million, and it still has 23 days to go. Once gain, Lee and Inman have swept far past their $100,000 original goal. They will likely do

Google is continuing work on a standalone headset that blends virtual and augmented reality, according to Engadget. The device, which has been rumored previously, functions differently from the Daydream VR headset that will soon ship to consumers. It works completely standalone without any smartphone attached.
Additionally, Engadget now reports that the unannounced product integrates eye-tracking technologies and algorithms "to map out the real-world space in front of a user." The resu

 Industry, a job site for the hospitality sector, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to fuel nationwide expansion, as well as product and team growth.
We originally covered Industry last year when it was still in beta in San Diego with about 300 restaurants signed up. Shortly after, they raised $200,000 in pre-seed funding from local San Diego angel investors.
Industry likens itself to… Read More

Every week, Chris Plante swings for the fences with one massive theory about the future of Westworld. I’m taking over for him this week. Am I wrong? Am I right? We probably won’t know for sure for years, so why not enjoy the present?
There are two stories that keep coming to mind when I begin thinking about this show.
The first is a classic novelette from 1941 called the Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon. In it, a scientist engineers live in a laboratory: tiny people called Neote

Portrait mode, one of the most interesting features designed for the iPhone 7 Plus, is now available to owners of Apple’s newest, biggest phone.
Apple designed Portrait mode to recreate the attractive, blurry backgrounds common in portrait photography, but the two lenses inside the iPhone 7 Plus don’t create this shallow depth of field effect on their own. Instead, Apple has turned to software to emulate the look. After using the feature for a month (in beta)

We’re just two days away from Microsoft’s big Surface PC event in New York City, and even the company’s digital assistant is starting to drop subtle hints as to what we can expect. If you ask Microsoft’s Cortana to spark your imagination today, the software will reply with real-world examples of how to foster creativity, find inspiration, and solve problems, using examples like Velcro creator George de Mestral and novelist Gertrude Stein.
It sounds generic on th

Apple is launching its portrait photo mode for the iPhone 7 Plus today with the release of iOS 10.1. The update, which includes some smaller features and bug fixes for other iOS 10 devices, is headlined by the addition of a photography mode that uses the 7 Plus' dual cameras to take portraits with blurred-out backgrounds, making them look a bit more like they were taken on a high-end camera.
The feature is technically still in beta — and, for what it's worth, early examples of the portrait

Violet Blue grew up in San Francisco, and she writes about hacker culture and cybercrime in the region’s hacking community. That made Blue, an author and tech journalist, the ideal conduit between the hacktivist community and the game developers at Ubisoft, maker of Watch Dogs 2.
Watch Dogs 2, an action-adventure game with stealth elements, debuts November 15 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. It’s set in San Francisco, and it depicts the hacktivist community’s con

Chinese electronics company Hangzhou Xiongmai is recalling its webcams in the US following last week’s massive distributed denial-of-service attack that shut down multiple websites, including Github, Amazon, and Twitter. Some security researchers, including security firm Flashpoint, blamed the attack on Xiongmai’s lagging security practices and use of a default username and password in its software and camera components. That weakness, and similar weaknesses in other IoT products, al

This past weekend, while riding the train from Toronto’s Union Station to my suburban house, I found myself transfixed by a map. I look at transit maps all the time, but it’s always just a fleeting glance; I see where I am and where I need to go, then I’m done. But this time was different. I was struck by how clean and orderly the map looked, and analyzed it for tips on how I could make mine the same. Clearly I’ve been playing too much Mini Metro on my iPad.
Mini Metro is

The Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden just ruled that camera drones qualify as surveillance cameras and require a permit under Sweden's camera surveillance laws. The ruling requires owners to cough up a sizable fee in order to get their equipment off the ground, and paying to start the process is no guarantee a citizen will be granted the right to fly. County administrators will have to consider whether use of a "surveillance camera" overrides the public's right to privacy on a case-by

Sound is a vibration and the more you think about that fact the weirder it gets. It means that everything you’ve ever heard in your life started off as a movement in the physical world. Something hit or scraped or brushed against something else, and that made the air around it wobble. That wobbly air moved as a sound wave — a pattern of alternating low and high air pressure — and bounced off buildings, trees, loved ones, etc., until it careened into your ear and jangled a tiny

Everyone’s favorite zombie show is back on the air, but someone doesn’t want you to forget about its mobile game tie-in.
Last night, AMC’s hit show The Walking Dead returned for its seventh season. Now, developer Next Games has said that content for its turn-based mobile app No Man’s Land will hit throughout the run of the new episodes. This will include new characters and behind-the-scenes videos on the TV series. The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land orig

Samsung is bringing its Galaxy Tab A 10.1 tablet to the US five months after it was announced back in May. The tablet, which will retail for $349, will ship with an S Pen (hey former Note 7 owners!) and 3GB of RAM — an improvement on the 2GB of RAM the tablet shipped with when it was released overseas. Otherwise the Tab A 10.1 is your run-of-the-mill tablet:
WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display
Exynos 7870 octa-core processor
16GB storage (up to an additional 256GB with a microSD car

Watch Dogs 2 is an open world game about hacktivists taking on the smart city of San Francisco. Its anti-hero is Marcus Holloway, a hacker who is wrongly accused of a crime as a result of manipulation of data from San Francisco’s smart operating system, ctOS 2.0.
Holloway joins the hacktivist group DedSec, which is modeled after real-world hackers, and his goal is to bring down the smart city and its maker, the Blume corporation. Ubisoft’s Danny Bélanger, director of the game,

 Google announced this morning two strategic partnerships with Visa and MasterCard aimed at expanding the reach of its mobile payments service, Android Pay. The company says that Android Pay users who are shopping online from their smartphones will soon be able to make payments on hundreds of thousands of new sites where either Visa Checkout or Masterpass are accepted at checkout. Visa… Read More

Microsoft is expected to unveil a Surface-branded all-in-one PC on Wednesday at an event in New York City. While a PC is expected, we haven't heard rumors of possible names for the device until today. Trademark attorney Brian Conroy may have uncovered potential names for Microsoft's Surface PC, or the software features powering it. Conroy has a habit of spotting trademark filings: he found the AirPods trademark, an AirPods case, and Warner Brothers' filing of Harry Potter and the Cursed Chi

PayPal has announced that it’s rolling out as an additional payment option within Facebook Messenger, which currently supports payments via debit cards.
Above: PayPal & Messenger
PayPal has been pushing to expand its reach into the consumer realm, having struck partnerships with MasterCard, Visa, Vodafone, and Alibaba, among other companies in the past few months alone. With Facebook Messenger on board, this opens PayPal up to a potential one billion users.
Facebook first unveiled plan

Xbox Live Gold members are getting another round of games for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 at no additional charge in November.
This go around, the company and its partners are rolling out a handful of classics alongside a smaller indie game for anyone who pays the $60 per year or $10 per month for the Gold service. As always, Xbox One owners can also play the 360 games thanks to the system’s backward compatibility feature.
If you’re an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, you should make su