Technology news

Digital health and fitness company Fitbit reported its third quarter earnings earlier today, and shortly thereafter its shares fell off a cliff. Its guidance for the fourth quarter was especially weak, with the company citing softer demand for its products, a 45 percent contraction in growth in Asia-Pacific markets, and supply constraints around its new Flex 2 wristband.
The Flex 2 supply constraints are stemming from production issues, with Fitbit chairman and chief executive officer James

For a limited time, you can tour the world with Leonardo DiCaprio, free of charge. Before The Flood, an advocacy documentary that grimly examines climate change around the planet, debuted in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened in theaters on October 21. But National Geographic has now released the film — hosted by DiCaprio and directed by Fisher Stevens — on YouTube for free viewing. Embeds on Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, and the National Geographic site itsel

For a limited time, you can tour the world with Leonardo DiCaprio, free of charge. Before The Flood, an advocacy documentary that grimly examines climate change around the planet, debuted in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened in theaters on October 21. But National Geographic has now released the film — hosted by DiCaprio and directed by Fisher Stevens — on YouTube for free viewing. Embeds on Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, and the National Geographic site itsel

Incredibles. The Iron Giant. Ratatouille. Brad Bird is responsible for some of the best animated films in the last decade and a half, and in a fantastic new video essay by Kees van Dijkhuizen Jr., Bird outlines exactly what appeals to him about animation and what it can do as an art form.
This short is chock-full of nuggets of wisdom, beginning with Bird’s observation that modern films tend to focus more on the actions and pace of a narrative, rather than taking joy in the journey. "I thin

Twitch is the next big name to take on ad blocking. Starting today, it’s rolling out a new ad format that’s supposed to be harder to skip. Twitch says the change will “reduce the efficacy” of ad blockers — seemingly leaving some wiggle room there under the assumption that someone’s going to find a way around them.
To block ads, Twitch is basically doing the exact same thing that Facebook did: it’s going to begin making ads look — from a code perspe

It looks like Civilization VI is going for a Domination victory.
Take-Two revealed today with its earning reports for the second quarter of fiscal year 2017 that its new strategy game has already shipped 1 million copies. While this doesn’t represent games sold to consumers, it is still a metric for success that outpaces all previous entries in the series. The game only just released on October 21.
“Civilization VI is the fastest-selling title in the history of the series and is

GUEST: While there’s been significant interest around chatbots, most bots have significantly under-delivered to date. Industry insiders attribute this to the fact that it’s still a nascent space and refer us to the early days of apps.
Bots are already able to do extraordinary things. If implemented correctly, they hold the potential to drive significant value for brands and consumers alike. While the age-old adage is “content is king,” brands that are able to outline

Apparently millenials hate to grocery shop and cook, or at least that’s what The Atlantic tells me. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard about the Juicero, which makes fresh juice from the equivalent of a Keurig pod, or the Flatev, an oven for creating tortillas from pods. Yes, pods are an entire economy, but today, I think we’ve gone too far. A cookie pod oven is being funded on Kickstarter. The ChiP (look at that capitalization) is a convection oven specifically designed for pr

There is a lot of opportunity to show ads to potential consumers when you're a social network used by over 1.1 billion people each day. Facebook reported its third quarter earnings today, and its revenue rose more than 50 percent over the same period last year, to $7.1 billion. Out of that massive influx of cash, Facebook posted a net income of $2.37 billion, a massive increase of more than 165 percent compared to its profit for the same period in 2015.
Over a billion people now use Faceboo

The money is in basketball and crime simulators. At least, that’s the case for one of the biggest gaming publishers in the world.
Take-Two Interactive generated $420.2 million in revenues during the second quarter of its fiscal 2017, and that’s up 21 percent year-over-year. The Grand Theft Auto V and NBA 2K17 publisher earned 39 cents per share, according to generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP). For non-GAAP earnings, it brought in 45 cents per share, which was 16 cent

(Reuters) – Wearable fitness device maker Fitbit Inc’s revenue forecast for the key-holiday shopping quarter fell well short of analysts estimates, hurt by stiff competition from rival device makers.
Shares of the company, which also reported lower-than-expected quarterly revenue, plummeted more than 30 percent in extended trading on Wednesday.
Fitbit forecast revenue of $725 million to $750 million for the key holiday-shopping quarter, well below analysts’ estimates of $985.1

The telescope portion of NASA’s James Webb Telescope is finally complete — marking a major benchmark for the spacecraft that has been in development for the past 20 years. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other members of the James Webb mission team discussed the milestone with a group of reporters today at Goddard Space Flight Center, where the telescope has been undergoing its assembly. Now that the telescope’s optics are complete, it will undergo a series of rigorous pr

Take-Two Interactive shipped more than 4.5 million copies of Mafia III to retailers in its first week, and the company said in its earnings release today that it is the fastest-selling game in the history of the 2K label.
Mafia III shipped after the September 30 close of Take-Two’s second fiscal quarter, debuting on October 7. 2K didn’t provide early copies of the game to the press, and some reviews came in pretty poor. I rated it at 75 out of 100, largely because

In its third quarter 2016 earnings announcement today, Facebook revealed it now has 1.79 billion monthly active users (up 16 percent year over year) and 1.66 billion mobile users (up 20 percent year over year). The company also shared that it now has 1.18 billion daily active users (a 17 percent bump year over year) and 1.09 billion mobile daily active users (a 22 percent increase year over year).
Breaking the numbers down, 65.9 percent of all Facebook members use the service daily, and 65.7 per

Facebook announced its third quarter financial earnings today, revealing that it had $7.011 billion in revenue and an earnings per share (EPS) of $1.09.
For those of you playing at home, Wall Street analysts predicted the social networking company would have $6.92 billion in revenue and an EPS of $0.97.
The stock traded down 1.73 percent at $127.26, but after the market closed, it’s currently up 0.14 percent.
“We had another good quarter,” said Mark Zuckerberg, F

The Nintendo Switch looks amazing. The entire console appears to have been shrunken down to the size of the Wii U’s GamePad controller. And while the Switch doesn’t come out until next year, Hackaday seems to have found the next best thing in Sudomod forum user banjokazooie’s mod that turns an old Wii U GamePad into a fully functional standalone console.The hack turns a broken Wii U GamePad into a portable consoleThe Wii U GamePad is meant to be a controller for the Wii U with

Google today said that it has stopped supporting and developing Google Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin for the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). Android Studio is the official IDE for Android development, and now Google wants to push all Android developers to it, following the release of version 2.2 in September.
The move doesn’t come as a surprise; in fact, Google actually said back in June 2015 that support would end by the end of 2015, and it essentially continued 1

When YouTube Red launched a year ago, the plan was for the service to grow into a competitor against the likes of Netflix and Hulu. Now, less than a year later, subscriber totals show that YouTube still has a long way to go before the public will accept paying a monthly fee for YouTube.According to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, YouTube Red had 1.5 million paying subscribers as of late summer, with another 1 million users signed up on a trial basis (and not paying the monthly

Climate science is finally winning in court and it could save endangered species. Last week, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals determined that federal authorities can use climate models to list a bearded seal subspecies as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The ruling reinforced the principle that climate projections are valid science, and the government can use that science to warrant protection to species whose habitats are threatened by global warmin

Uber was sued in federal court Wednesday by Desoto, the oldest cab company in San Francisco that recently rebranded itself as a ride-hail company called Flywheel. In it’s complaint, Flywheel alleges that Uber used “predatory pricing tactics” to cause a “race to the bottom” in transportation services.Flywheel also accuses Uber of lying about the availability, pricing, and safety of its rides, lying to drivers about the income they can earn, discriminating against dis

Nice pairs of headphones don’t just get dropped on a desk or in a drawer — they have stands to display them when they’re not in use. But as more and more high-end headphone brands are moving over to wireless, why not integrate a charger into that stand so you can store your headphones and charge them at the same time?
That’s the idea behind the Fermata, a wireless headphone charging stand from Twelve South. As that description would suggest, it’s a headphone stand f

The IdeaPad Miix 720, the latest model in Lenovo’s Miix line of Surface Pro lookalikes, has leaked a little early.While Lenovo did just recently release the Miix 510, an upgraded successor to last year’s Miix 700, WinFuture reports that the upcoming Miix 720 will offer further improved specs. Specifically, the 12-inch is getting a higher-resolution 2880 x 1920 screen, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to a 1TB SSD. And even more importantly, Lenovo is also updating the processor options to I

When a video of a sleeping polar bear popped up in my Facebook feed, I — like so many others — abandoned all my work to tune in to this stream of a polar bear sleeping. Yep, that’s all the polar bear did. It napped. What a luxury for a mid-work Wednesday!
The stream comes from Facebook page I fucking love science via explore.org, and it is exceptional entertainment. The video is also home to the most wonderful, welcoming comments I’ve ever seen on a live stream. Most of t

Microsoft announced its Surface Studio all-in-one PC last week, with a plan to appeal to creatives. At Adobe's Max conference in San Diego today, Dell aired a teaser video for its upcoming all-in-one PC that looks like its own take on Microsoft's Surface Studio. Spotted by SurfaceProArt on Twitter, the teaser doesn't mention specs, pricing, or even when we'll see Dell officially unveil this device, but it looks like a PC with two screens and additional input through its own Surface Dia

Gawker has settled its long-running case with Hulk Hogan, ending the lawsuit that forced the company into bankruptcy after it lost an initial ruling earlier this year.
In exchange for dropping his invasion of privacy claims, Hogan will receive $31 million from Gawker. That’s down significantly from the $140 million Hogan was initially rewarded. The sex tape story that Hogan was suing over will also be removed from Gawker’s website.
The settlement came as something of a surprise this

The Food and Drug Administration has a very personal — some might even say invasive — question to ask you. It wants to know how much Nutella you eat.
For those deprived folks who don’t know, Nutella is a thick, delicious, nut-butter spread that just tastes like chocolate. It’s currently classified as a "dessert topping," but its makers want it to be classified as "jam" instead. The main difference is that the serving size on the food label for jam is one tablespoon, while

We'll probably have robots in our homes one day. I don’t know if they’ll be our companions or just Roombas with animated faces, but a lot of companies seem to think they have an idea of what we want: really large cartoonish eyeballs on an LCD screen. We’ve all seen Pepper, and maybe some of us have seen Asus’ Zenbo. Most of these robots aren’t available to buy yet and have only been put up for preorders, including the new Alexa-enabled robot Yumi. Yumi is essen

 Gfycat, fresh off its $10 million seed round and debut of its first mobile app for texting and editing its own flavor of GIFs, announced today that it’s acquiring the Mac desktop application GIF Brewery in an effort at expanding its GIF creation capabilities. The GIF Brewery app, which lets users create, edit and share GIFs from their Mac, has seen over 110,000 downloads to date, and… Read More

I know will.i.am is the laughing stock of the gadget world, and I get it — he’s had some bad ideas.Featuring a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in a music videoA hideous phone case meant to look like a gold-plated camera and also it turns your iPhone 4 into a 14-megapixel camera and also there’s a keyboard and also there’s a new will.i.am-branded Instagram replacement and also it’s $500Working at Intel?
Two smartwatchesA car called “IAMAUTO,” which turned out

Uber is rolling out a major redesign of its app today — the most significant update since 2012. The changes, which are only for users and not drivers, are supposed to offer a much cleaner interface, less confusion around which service to request, and shortcut options to frequent destinations.The new app, which The Verge saw during a media briefing and product demo earlier this week, does appear to be much easier to use. (For instance, even small details such as the color of a driver’

At an event in New York City today, Microsoft officially launched its Microsoft Teams competitor to Slack. The announcement, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, comes just minutes after Slack published a warning letter to the software giant about competing with it. Microsoft is launching its Teams software as a service that ties into its existing Office 365 subscriptions. In a video demonstrating Microsoft Teams, the software maker describes the service as a chat-based workspace that's focused on re

The new MacBook Pro was so long and painfully awaited that our hopes probably ran away with us. We thought Apple would conclude the wait with a laptop that would last with us for years, but instead we got a transitional device that bridges the perpetual gap between present and future with the metal corpses of (almost) every useful port we now use and rely on. Apple’s position is clear: you either sign up for its vision of wireless and USB-C communications dominating everything, or you go e

Bragi just announced that it will issue a new software update for the Dash wireless earbuds later this month, the flagship feature of which is something called “MyTap.” The idea is that, instead of tapping the touch-sensitive spot on the earbuds, you’ll now be able to tap your cheek to activate your phone’s digital assistant. That’s a pretty big (and also pretty weird!) claim from a company whose product never quite lived up to promises that were made, but users can

Amazon’s physical bookstores used to offer the same discounted prices to everyone. But recently, they started charging more for people who don’t subscribe to Prime.
Prime members who shop at any of Amazon’s physical bookstores (three and growing) still get the same prices advertised on Amazon’s website — often a several dollar discount. But people who aren’t subscribed to Prime now have to pay list price. GeekWire spotted the pricing change, which it says has

Microsoft is just minutes away from unveiling its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, at an event in New York City today. The software giant is expected to position its Teams software with tight integration into Microsoft Office, Skype, and the company's Office 365 services, and as a direct competitor to Slack. Microsoft hasn't even officially unveiled its Teams service, but that's not stopping Slack from getting some words out before the software maker's event.
In a full back page ad in the New

HBO is home to many programs that I watch and appreciate and like to dish about with my friends. I love to blog about Game of Thrones. I have deeply enjoyed what I’ve seen so far of Insecure and Divorce, even though the latter is incredibly depressing and everyone wears wool tights all the time like it’s a Louisa May Alcott novel. Doll & Em? Great. True Detective? It was something to talk about at least. Big Love? Yes, I watched three seasons. Girls? I’m sorry, but I still

Sexting with emoji doesn't just make you thirsty. It can make you hungry too. 
Between the cherry emoji, the eggplant-alternative hot dog emoji, and the redesigned peach emoji, your choices for flirty texting with emoji are a virtual grocery basket of juicy options. And beyond just the food emoji, with a little imagination, nigh-on any emoji can be made sexy.
Here are 15 saucy emoji you can use for sexting:
1. Cherries Image:unicodeHow have we ignored the cherry emoji for so long? They

Apple is taking a lot of flack for its decision to drop the SD card slot from the new MacBook Pro range and outfit it with Thunderbolt ports only, but the company is confident it’s made the right choice — even if a lot of users won’t agree with its reasoning.
Speaking to The Independent, Apple exec Phil Schiller said the company had dropped the SD card slot as it was "cumbersome" and because wireless transfer technology for cameras is "proving very useful" as an alternativ

Microsoft's beautiful Surface Studio is a PC that's much more than an all-in-one. While you can do all the regular PC things you'd expect from a Windows PC, it's really the screen that makes it different from a regular computer. It's a screen that folds down to transform the PC into a drawing board, designed for stylus, touch, and new Dial input. It's unlike any regular all-in-one PC we've seen before, but I want to turn any laptop into a Surface Studio.
As speculation mounted over Microsof