Technology news

Waking up is easy — at least if you're Cristiano Ronaldo and Dwayne Wayde.
The two athletes showed off their athletic prowess in a new ad campaign for PokerStars, an online poker site, Thursday.  
SEE ALSO: Lady Gaga yells at random drivers in hilarious 'Carpool Karaoke' trailer
From inside a bedroom with photos of himself as a child and a blanket bearing his own name, Real Madrid player Ronaldo reveals his early morning football skills. On cue in five seconds after his alarm clock ri

People don’t visit websites for the design – they want content. As explained in Web UI Patterns 2016 Vol. 1, design is just a means of presenting content in the most intuitive and useful manner. In this piece, we’ll explore examples, best practices, and common scenarios for 12 successful web layout patterns: Cards Grids Magazine Container-free Split Screen Single-page Web Apps F Pattern Z Pattern Horizontal Symmetry Approximate Horizontal Symmetry Vertical Symmetry Asymmetry T

It’s Thanksgiving in America, and that means consumers (occasionally also known as “people”) have stuffed themselves with shopping fuel in the form potatoes and gravy in preparation of holiest and darkest day of the year: Black Friday.
But you will not survive this depraved celebration of capitalism without a little help, and I’m here to offer it to you. We all must play our parts in the black ritual, and this is mine. So join me as I help you fill that hole inside you wi

Google has sweetened the deal for a new Chromecast, offering 3 months of free HBO Now access for new subscribers. If you want HBO, the deal basically nets a more-than-free Chromecast: the streaming device is on sale for $25, and 3 months of HBO Now normally costs about $45. The free subscription also comes with Google’s higher-end, 4K Chromecast Ultra, which costs $69. It’s definitely the best deal Google is offering this year for Black Friday.We’re not telling you what to do w

It’s hard to imagine modern-day Apple ever struggling. The company is the most valuable one in the world, and it sits upon a veritable Mount Everest of cash. But one industry analyst thinks that the good times are about to come to an end, with the company will soon enter a “decade-long malaise.” Oh dear. Models created by Oppenheimer analyst Andrew Uerkwitz suggest that sales of the iPhone (which accounts for an astronomical share of Apple’s profits) are going

Face it — you’re probably not backing up your computer. You know you really should, you’ve read about people losing all their data after a hard drive failure or ransomware attack, but still your last backup was nine months ago. Or maybe you’ve never even considered backing up. Let me help. First of all, you need to recognize the importance of backing up. Nobody’s perfect, and when you lose, break or otherwise mess up your computer you’re losing years of

Sphero has been selling the Force Band wearable for awhile now, designed to let you control the adorable little BB-8 droid with "force gestures" — like a Jedi. But now the $80 (or slightly less) gadget is potentially a lot more useful. As Gizmodo notes, the company is setting it up to work with If This Then That, which means that you can use it to control much more than a cute robot toy. IFTTT, if you’re not familiar, lets you create little applets that use one thing to trigger anoth

If you’re shelling out $3000 or more for a new computer, you’re going to want to receive some pretty good customer service if something happens to goes wrong — and that’s exactly what Microsoft is hoping to deliver to Surface Studio owners with its new support hotline. Customers will be able to call the dedicated phone line with any questions, comments or concerns they have about their computer, which is a service I’m sure will be appreciated by many early ado

The last time I used a web browser without tabs was well over ten years ago. It was Internet Explorer 6. Things, thankfully, have moved on since then. But it seems that nobody has told Colibri – a new browser that aims to differentiate itself from the pack by excising tabs entirely. This is a browser for people who like to do one thing a time. It’s currently available as a free beta for MacOS users. According to the developers, Windows, Android, and iOS versions are also i

Thanksgiving is finally here, giving us all reason to reflect on what we should truly be thankful for: a fantastic year for television. Seriously. Many of us will be downing our turkey dinners with a side of drunken hilarity, family dysfunction, and tense political discussion. But when the plates clear and you’re sinking into a food coma, rest assured that there’s some great TV waiting to see you through the long weekend. Here are some recommendations for what to watch while you dige

As the European Commission updates the Payment Services Directive (PSD2), 2018 is set to be a game-changing year for the financial industry. Opening the door to data – if you’re an EU citizen, have economic stakes in the game, or simply a finance-freak – here’s what you should know about it. Since the update on the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is based on an existing directive, let’s just quickly recap what the original key piece of payments legislation entail

Facebook has been getting a bad rep lately for a lot of different things — and rightfully so. There’s the looming fake news problem it can’t seem to fix, and it’s been held accountable for the surprising result of this year’s US election. The first one is for the company to fix, but the second is something that’s a inherent problem of every social network. If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you’ve been slowly and unknowingly building up

While major movie studios would often shoot for days only to include a tiny fraction of that footage in the final cut, American rock band OK GO has taken the exact opposite approach in their latest music video. Instead of spending days on set, the Chicago-based quartet shot the entire footage for their new 4-minute music video in only 4.2 seconds. The band dropped the music clip – fittingly titled ‘The One Moment’ – on Facebook yesterda

The turkey’s in the oven and my uncle is passed out in front of the TV. I head to my room to pass the time until dinner’s ready (which happens at 3:42PM every year without fail, because we eat whenever the turkey’s done, and no matter when we begin cooking the bird, it will finish at 3:42PM on the dot). After some aimless rifling around, I stumble upon a literal time capsule: a green IKEA storage box filled with everything from old letters and mix CDs to prom photos.
My mom, wa

At this time of year, people tend to go through a lot of family-related anxiety, as they reconnect with far-flung family members around the Thanksgiving table, and realize they have nothing to say to them — or worse, they have far too much to say, especially about intergenerational gaps and disagreements about religion, politics, lifestyle choices, and pretty much everything else. So a lot of families fall back on entertainment to fill the silences, pass time with a pleasurable distraction

Family holidays can be stressful: you have to sit through hours of never-ending meals that run high on alcohol and carbohydrates, all the while engaging in meaningful conversations with relatives you barely saw all year. Add in the contentious election, and politics is likely to dominate many Thanksgiving tables — the perfect storm for some holiday-themed family drama.This is where the live animal cameras come in. They’re everything you need to melt your holiday stress — becaus

Researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have discovered what could one day be a new type of display technology: bubbles of graphene that change color as they expand and contract. Scientists say that these ‘mechanical pixels’ could eventually make screens that are more flexible, durable, and energy efficient than current LED technology. They caution, though, that the work is very much in its infancy; whether these graphene bubbles can make displays of equiva

FEATURE: Big news merged from M&A land earlier this morning, when travel search giant Skyscanner revealed it had been acquired by one of China’s biggest online travel companies, Ctrip, in a deal worth £1.4 billion (USD$1.74 billion).
Founded out of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2003, Skyscanner is one of the world’s largest travel search engines by traffic, with 50 million monthly users. It has also been an entirely independent company, unlike fellow travel search giants such as K

I have played every Civilization game since the original, and each one has proven a mini education for me. Civ is where I learned what monotheism and polytheism are, the requisite ingredients for gunpowder, and the world-changing effects of the invention of the printing press. This year, in Civ 6, I'm learning new words again with the concept of suzerainty over city-states, but more importantly I'm reminded of a timeless life lesson that's more pressing today than ever: greed leads to unhappines

The epic and unpredictable adventures of John McAfee have taken their most startling turn yet: He’s accepted a job working for someone else.
Toronto-based Equibit Development Corporation said in a press release today that McAfee has been hired as chief security officer. Though in a somewhat unusual arrangement, McAfee will be reporting to the company’s board and not the CEO.
“We’re honored and thrilled to be working with John McAfee,” said Equibit CEO Chris Hor

FEATURE: Finland is living in the future, and the rest of the world can only sit back and marvel.
The sauna-loving population of this frozen Scandinavian country is once again breaking new ground, thanks to the forward-thinking city planners of a small town west of Helsinki named “Lohja.” The town is in the process of approving plans for construction of a new business and commercial district but was having a hard time coming up with original names that didn’t rely on the t

(Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp said it aims to develop a more advanced electric-car battery “in a few years” that will allow the Japanese automaker to build vehicles with up to 15 percent greater range and battery life than they have currently.
“Lithium-ion battery is a key technology for electrifying cars, and there is a clear need, going forward, for improving this technology and its performance even more,” Hisao Yamashige, a battery technology researcher at Toyota

Paris-based Wynd announced today that it has raised $31.7 million as it seeks to take its point-of-sale solution beyond the borders of its native country.
Cofounder and president Ismaël Ould said in an exclusive interview with FrenchWeb that investors in the Series B round include Sodexo Ventures, Orange Digital Ventures, and Bpifrance. Wynd had raised $7.4 million last year in a round led by Alven Capital, and had brought in a seed round of $1.9 million the ye

Microsoft has started shipping some Surface Studio orders a little early. The software giant originally planned to ship units to customers in mid-December, but Microsoft has been emailing the first people to preorder the $3,000 device, letting them know the Studio will arrive this week. Microsoft is still accepting “preorders” for the Surface Studio, but new devices won’t ship until “early 2017.”Thurrott.comAlongside the shipments, Thurrott.com reports that Microsof

Samsung is rolling out a handful of new features for its Gear Fit2 wearable device to help automate the process of tracking your exercise habits.
The $179 Gear Fit2 global rollout kicked off back in June, arriving more than two years after Samsung launched its first fitness band, and bringing a number of important hardware updates, including GPS and a barometer.
Rolling out via an over-the-air (OTA) software update this week, the new features enable the Gear Fit2 to automatically pause whenever

Researchers from Google’s AI division DeepMind and the University of Oxford have usedartificial intelligence to create the most accurate lip-reading software ever. Using thousands of hours of TV footage from the BBC, scientists trained a neural network to annotate video footage with 46.8 percent accuracy. That might not seem that impressive at first — especially compared to AI accuracy rates when transcribing audio — but tested on the same footage, a professional human lip-read

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has received $2.5 million in donations to push for election recounts in three swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Stein, who launched her crowdfunding campaign on Wednesday morning, hit her first requested total inside of 24 hours, securing more than $2 million by midnight ET, and reaching $2.5 million by 3AM ET.Upon reaching the original goal of $2.5 million — the total at which Stein had indicated the Green Party would f

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has received $2.5 million in donations to push for election recounts in three swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Stein, who launched her crowdfunding campaign on Wednesday morning, hit her first requested total inside of 24 hours, securing more than $2 million by midnight ET, and reaching $2.5 million by 3AM ET.Upon reaching the original goal of $2.5 million — the total at which Stein had indicated the Green Party would f

(Reuters) — Ctrip.com International Ltd, China’s biggest online travel company, said on Wednesday it agreed to buy travel search website Skyscanner Holdings Ltd in a deal valuing the Scotland-based company at about 1.4 billion pounds. ($1.74 billion).
Ctrip’s shares were up 9.2 percent at $44.75 in extended trading.
Skyscanner, a result of CEO and co-founder Gareth Williams’ frustration with finding cheap flights, enables users to compare prices from different travel

Stanford study finds most students failed to distinguish between real news and fake.
The rise of “fake news” is a topic that is getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to the role that Facebook and other social platforms play in news consumption for a growing number of users. But there are other problems, as well, a recent Stanford study found.
According to researchers from the university, a majority of students — more than 80 percent of them, in fact — could not d

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman today admitted that he had edited Reddit user comments that criticized and insulted him, wielding his power to anonymously change references to his own username, and replace them with moderators of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald.
Huffman — who posts on the site as "spez" — admitted to the transgression after being called out by users of r/the_donald, saying he was inspired to edit the comments after a spate of insults emanating from the pro-Trum

(Reuters) — In the shadows of Samsung Electronics’ Note7 smartphone crisis, affiliate Samsung SDI is quietly reassuring anxious clients including Apple Inc that its batteries are safe.
But potential new customers may prove harder to convince as Samsung’s biggest in-house parts supplier grapples with the reputational fallout from the Note7 debacle.
Created as a joint venture with Japan’s NEC to make vacuum tubes in 1970, Samsung SDI’s TV and smart

Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman is finding himself in a little bit of hot water after he revealed that he modified comments aimed at him that were posted in the “fuck u/spez” subreddit. He acknowleged that it was a mistake and claimed that whatever changes he had made were now fixed. “Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again,” he wrote in an apology post.
The disclosure comes just hours after Reddit banned the Pizz

Google is well on its way from being a company synonymous with search and the web to a brand name well known for its hardware products. We’re now familiar with the Chromecast name; the streaming stick has been Google’s Trojan horse into the living room, selling millions of units and establishing the search giant’s software as a viable media nexus. Now, there’s the Google Home smart speaker to compete with Amazon’s Echo, as well the company’s new flagship Pixel

At least five members of Twitter’s Cortex artificial intelligence group have left this month, at a time when companies are rushing to accumulate AI talent.
Earlier today, Kevin Swersky tweeted out a photo of his laptop and Twitter badge, indicating his departure.
Goodbye @TwitterBoston #TwitterCortex! Thank you for all of the wonderful memories! pic.twitter.com/0XzHed3XRi
— Kevin Swersky (@kswersk) November 23, 2016Two days earlier, Jasper Snoek and Alex Wiltschko had done the same t