Technology news

 Sphero’s BB-8 was the most memorable bit of merchandizing among last year’s epic Force Awakens merchandising bonanza. It was the perfect piece of synergy – leveraging the hardware startup’s compelling piece of remote control technology to bring to life the film’s most marketable creation. This year the company looked to take things a step further with the addition… Read More

True to her word, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed for an election recount in the state of Wisconsin this afternoon, just 90 minutes before the deadline to file, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The move comes after Stein raised over $5 million through a fundraising effort to cover the cost of recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three key battleground states that helped Donald Trump gain the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the el

GUEST: In April, 2016 (a mere seven months ago) Mark Zuckerberg, David Marcus (and, in a smaller side tent, myself) went on stage to proclaim that the future of business is conversation.
Imagine the opportunity to communicate with one billion potential customers   in a personal, private space  that makes it as easy and delightful as messaging your best friend.
But for the first few months, the experience felt more like messaging your ex-girlfriend  — poor response t

I recently a read a good book called The Art of Startup Fundraising written by Alejandro Cremades, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Onevest, a venture investing community platform. One of the chapters in Alejandro’s book specifically talks about these red flags for investors, and Alejandro was kind enough to let me share that list with you. Too many members of the founding team Giving equity is a great way to motivate and enroll the help of more individuals when your startup is lea

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider holds the title as the world’s largest particle accelerator, boasting an underground circular tunnel that’s 17 miles long. It’s ideal for smashing particles into each other at nearly the speed of light, but making sure such a gigantic structure is up-to-date and working properly is a daunting task — especially for us mere humans. That’s why CERN’s got TIM, the LHC’s robotic inspector that provides real-time monitoring o

Happy mrrrglgglgl season!
Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to prepare for the December holidays. And if you celebrate Christmas, what better way to get in into the mood than with an almost hour-long video of a decorated fireplace? And, if you’re a fan of the digital card game Hearthstone or the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, Murlocs are can make the Christmas spirit even brighter!
So grab some eggnog, sit back, and let the soothing tones of Murloc Christmas c

Last night, a twitter account by the name of @solikearose tweeted out a surprising image of CNN broadcasting porn instead of Anthony Bourdain’s scheduled show Parts Unknown. And then without really much questioning, a bunch of news sites ran with it, claiming that the network showed the footage for about 30 minutes. It looks like the chaos all started when The Independent wrote up a story from this person’s tweets, which was then tweeted out by the Drudge Report. After that, it sprea

People are shopping via their mobile phones at record levels.
One of the busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday, is off to a positive start for retailers, according to data released by Adobe. The technology company is forecasting that online spending will hit $3 billion, up 11%, surpassing the $3 billion for the first time.
The company says that early data shows that consumers have already spent $490 million so far and similar to previous years, mobile shopping is also off to stron

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! We hope our American readers enjoyed their Thanksgiving! While you get over your turkey hangover, you can read our thoughts on Overwatch’s new 1-on-1 mode or check out a postmortem on the open world Mafia III.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Opinions and pieces of flair
The DeanBeat: What they don’t tell you about making games
Jason’s Gloriously Geeky Gift Guide for the Old Geeks in your life
The holiday gift gu

Fashion designer Tom Ford’s second film, Nocturnal Animals, is fine.It is a semi-convincing gothic about modern America — urban but fatally tied to a rural past, prosperous but insecure, intellectual but campy and incredibly violent. It uses the grotesquery of vintage Southern gothic literature, remixed with Sex and the City platitudes about love and ambition, to make a weird, hyper-specific portrait of what Amy Adams’ character Susan refers to as a culture of “all junk.&

WordPress.com has launched a new widget — powered by Google Translate — that lets bloggers and their visitors translate a website’s content into more than 100 languages.
Above: “Translate This”
For bloggers wishing to use the new Google Translate widget, head to the “My Site(s)” section of your WordPress.com dashboard, and visit “Widgets” under the “Customize” menu. Visitors will then see a “Select Language” option in

Dead by Daylight could be the biggest success that Behaviour Interactive has seen in its 24 year history. The Canadian game studio, which spent much of its existence making games for other game developers and publishers as an outsourcing contractor, made the horror game with publisher Starbreeze, and it became big hit upon its debut in June. That could help it become an original game maker in the future.
The title has shipped well in excess of a million units, and it is growing more popular with

FEATURE: Hordes of iconic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons have appeared in video games — Beholders, Mind Flayers, and even Tiamat, the five-headed queen of evil dragons, show up at one time or another. It’s time for some of the lesser-known beasts to shine — and learn more about the famous monsters as well.
D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast released Volo’s Guide to Monsters, its latest guidebook for the renown role-playing game, earlier this month. The

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I’m thankful that you are taking some time to read GamesBeat and this column. Today’s the day when the real season for gaming begins, as shoppers decide which creations they want to spend their hard-earned money on. I hope you make some good choices. This week, I’m going to dwell on the choices and advice that game developers have for each other.
As I noted last week, I attended the Montreal International Game Summit for the sec

The idea of using messaging as a conduit for marketing and customer service has been gathering steam since Facebook declared its intention last year to let businesses connect through its standalone Messenger app.
One startup benefiting from that burgeoning interest is Philadelphia-based Relay Network, which counts Cox Communications, Comcast, and Citizens Bank among the big companies using its private messaging service with appreciable results.
Cox, for example, started using the Relay app

You’re already used to TNW Deals offering up cool tech items at discounted prices all year round… but for Black Friday, we’ve upped our game. Check out these four offers we’ve compiled up exclusively for TNW readers. We’ve dropped the prices lower from their originally discounted sale price to help fill your holiday shopping list, while saving you a nice wad of cash. As if that weren’t enough, you can also take another 15% off almost all TNW Deals purchases

While most people tend to focus on the big deals on things like TVs or laptops on Black Friday, it’s also a great time of the year to buy books. Yes, actual print books, not Kindles (although Amazon does have sales on a bunch of Kindle models too, should digital be more your speed.)
Here’s where you should be looking if you’d like to build out your library this Black Friday.(And if you’re stuck for book ideas, check out The Verge’s Holiday Gift Guide or our Thanksgi

The UK is about to pass into law sweeping surveillance legislation that will force ISPs and mobile operators to keep a complete record of every citizen’s browsing history for up to a year. This information will be accessible without a warrant to intelligence services, the police, and a number of other government agencies — including, bizarrely, the likes of the Gambling Commission and the Food Standards Agency.While much of the legislation is concerned with how the government can tra

We all mess up every now and then — and that’s totally okay. But someone is probably getting fired for this mistake. Last night at 11PM EST, some unsuspecting viewers getting ready for a brand new episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on CNN were surprised to see that scheduled programming had been replaced by 30 minutes of adult entertainment. The mess-up only affected viewers in Boston, as CNN’s broadcasting in the city is provided by RCN

A Russian propaganda apparatus was successful in spreading fake or false news stories during the recent US election, Washington Post reports. The findings come from a new, unpublished report provided to the Post that found more than 200 websites responsible for publishing Russian propaganda during the election cycle. These sites had a combined readership of 15 million Americans.
The campaign reportedly included the use of thousands of botnets, a network of websites and social media accounts, and

Lightricks has released a new version of its popular Facetune app that may get as much attention for its new business model as the suite of new features.
With Facetune 2.0, the Israel-based developer is beginning a shift away from the paid download model that has propelled its indie success and toward the subscription model that Apple made available earlier this year to all developers in the App Store. With Facetune, the self-portrait editing app, and Enlight, a broader image-editing app, L

This recap contains spoilers for the first episode of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, titled "Winter."
Welcome back to Stars Hollow, friends; we're all a little bit older — if not much wiser — since the last time we visited the best fictional town on the planet, but the talk is still fast, the coffee's still hot, and our titular girls are still just as perfectly imperfect as they were before. 
Times have changed out here in the real world, but it's comforting to know that in

One of the mobile era's bestselling photo apps now has a sequel — and in a nod to the changing economics of the App Store, it's going free for the first time. FaceTune 2, from Israeli developer Lightricks, arrives on iOS today boasting a series of radical improvements over its predecessor. But to realize the full power of the app, you'll still have to pay: via in-app purchases for individual effects, or via a monthly or annual subscription.If you're in the practice of perfecting your selfi

You spent all night cooking and now you just want to sit back on the couch and watch Netflix. Well, fear not. Just strap a drone on to your tablecloth and watch your dinner table get cleared off in seconds.Watch Usain Bolt drop the mic on James Corden with an epic rap battle
Someone help this koala mum; she has a stage five clinger on her face
‫Syria's White Helmets apologise for #MannequinChallenge rescue video
Bird throws a snake straight at a car's wind shield for some reason Read more

In addition to everything else on sale on Black Friday, it’s also a great time to pick up some deals on new audio equipment. Whether you’re looking for a new pair of headphones, or some great new speakers, we’ve combed through the various circulars and advertisements to find the best of the best Black Friday headphone and speaker deals.The best headphones to buy on Black Friday
The Verge’s Vlad Savov reviewed the AKG N60NC as some of the best on-ear noise-canceling headph

Black Friday is finally here. And while there’s some amazing deals to be had, it’s tough to sort through them all. We’ve been rounding up all the various deals across product categories and companies to find the best options for the last few weeks, and now we’re taking a look at the best of the best we’ve seen so far.It’s by no means a comprehensive list — there are far too many deals out there — but here are the best deals we’ve seen on our

ProtonMail, the encrypted email service that has previously touted itself as “NSA-proof,” has made a limited number of lifetime subscriptions available to mark Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Founded out of CERN in 2013, Geneva-based ProtonMail launched in beta in 2014 and went on to raise more than $2.5 million in funding ahead of its proper launch earlier this year.  ProtonMail’s key promise is to provide a secure email service that uses client-side encryption so all data

Don't let the stress of the holiday shopping season get you down this year — there's plenty of good to go around.
Various companies are giving their products a true philanthropic edge, appealing to consumers who want to give gifts and give back at the same time.
SEE ALSO: Google predicts the most popular gifts this year
These quality gifts take on the world's biggest inequalities and most noticeable causes — and all without causewashing. If that doesn't get you in the holiday spirit,

Weed won big in 2016.
The 2016 election brought legal recreational cannabis to four more states, continuing a trend of ending a decades long prohibition on the sticky icky. With legalization comes normalization, and more than ever people are feeling more comfortable with admitting that they like the green.
So, now that the holidaze are upon us, consider treating the lovable stoner in your life with one of the following gifts. Or just give them cash so they can go buy some weed. 
1The Stoner

Reports that residents of a Spanish village have become millionaires after the founder of Corona beer died have been categorically denied by his foundation, Mashable can reveal.
According to widespread reports by British media outlets, Antonino Fernandez, who was the CEO of Grupo Modelo, the brewery company who make Corona beer, left 200m euros (£169) to 80 residents of Cerezales, the village of Leon province where he was born and raised. 
Fernandez, who migrated to Mexico in 1949 whe

Sharp drops in smartphone sales for China’s Xiaomi Inc will not have a major impact on the company as profit growth will be driven by sales from smart home devices as well as revenue from its software eco-system, a senior executive said.
Xiaomi was valued at $46 billion in its last fund-raising in 2014 – making it briefly the world’s most valuable start-up at a time when it was China’s best-selling smartphone maker and looked set to make a splash worldwide.
But last year

Now that your belly is stuffed, it's time to satiate that other yawning chasm of desire. Today’s "Black Friday," as the natives call it, which means that many Americans are now in their underwear busily filling their online shopping carts with gifts galore. Many Verge readers are undoubtedly taking advantage of the $100 discount on the HTC Vive, bringing the headset's cost down to $699. Savings that can then be spent in Viveport where you'll also find discounted titles.
The Vive first star

As Marie Antoinette once famously said, "Let them binge all the things." 
Thanksgiving is a time for eating until you can scarcely stomach another bite, shopping until you quite literally drop, and consuming all the TV, movies and other media available before Monday rears its ugly head.
That's a lot of pressure for just a few days, so let's get cracking.
SEE ALSO: Critics weigh in on the 'Gilmore Girls' revival
The Crown
Whether or not you devoured this immediately after its Nov. 4 release,

LONDON — Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. But, for many people it's a day of pandaemonium that's enough to put you off shopping for life.
SEE ALSO: Booksellers are ditching Black Friday, hosting Civilised Saturday instead
Luckily, there are ways to step away from the mayhem to do something a little bit different — something that doesn't involve getting elbowed in the ribs to buy a cut price TV. 
Here are five ways to do good this Black Friday. 
1. Suppo