Technology news

GUEST: “‘It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer.” — New York Times, 1997
“Master of Go Board Game Is Walloped by Google Computer Program” — New York Times, 2016
Software development has gone through massive paradigm shifts over the past decade. Once limited to developers with years of study or access to expensive servers, web development has now become a trade where boo

Television actor Ron Glass, who was best known for his roles as Shepherd Book on Firefly and as Detective Ron Harris on Barney Miller has passed away yesterday, according to TV Line. He was 71 years old.
Glass got his start acting for the stage in Minneapolis before landing roles on a variety of television shows in the early 1970s, such as All in the Family, Hawaii Five-O, and Sanford and Sons before landing a major role in Barney Miller in 1975. In 2002, Joss Whedon cast him in his science fict

GUEST: GE’s recent acquisition of ServiceMax, a cloud-based field service solutions provider, marked the first billion-dollar SaaS (software as a service) acquisition by a company outside the traditional software business. The move not only underscores the growing importance of SaaS and digital to companies beyond the technology space, it’s also evidence of the tremendous importance of the cloud. As we close out 2016 and move into a new year, I predict we’ll see many more billi

Getting knocked offline is costly.
When a novel hacking attack crippled parts of the Internet in October, it cut off consumers access to popular websites like Netflix and Kayak for hours at a time. For online retailers, the effect was the same as when a physical store shuts down: no customers and no sales.
While hacking is not responsible for every website shutdown—an ordinary onslaught of customer traffic caused the online operations Target and Neimen Marcus to buckle last year — th

GUEST: Google and Facebook are without a doubt two of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the digital age. Both companies serve billions of users. They are the winners of our era. But what if they got the core of their business wrong?
What if Google and Facebook focused on the wrong monetization strategy from a long-term perspective? What if ads are inferior to transactions? And what if we can watch our future unfolding in China today?
There are a growing number of signs that this mi

Now that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has received over $5 million to fund a recount in Wisconsin, and other battleground states, an official from the Clinton campaign has announced that they would be assisting with the recount efforts, even as the final results are not expected to change.
The Clinton campaign has already been on the lookout for tampering
Marc Elias, general counsel for the Clinton campaign, said in a post on Medium this morning that the organization will "parti

DockATot has sold nearly 10 million units of its well-designed baby lounger in the past year. Now the company has come up with CloudTot, a monitor that detects moisture and alerts the parent if the baby has wet the bed in the DockATot.
By adding a tech component, DockATot is joining the Internet of Things, or making everyday objects smart and connected. The CloudTot product will come out in the summer of 2017, and it will be shown at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas dur

Nestled among the jokes, the takes, and the joke-takes on my Twitter feed is at least one small joy. It is literally small: @thetinygallery, a bot account that spits out an image of an imaginary art gallery a few times a day. Sometimes the galleries are empty, and sometimes there are couples or a dancing lady inside, but each one contains two tiny pieces of art.The account was created by Emma Winston, a musician and artist based in London. She was inspired by the @tiny_star_field and @tiny_seas,

GUEST: Vrideo, the portal that started back in 2014 with the lofty aim of being the YouTube of virtual reality, called it quits earlier this week. Two years is like a decade in “VR-years”, as those in the fast-moving industry can readily testify, and while Vrideo’s founders tried to stretch the $2 million they raised from early 2015, it could only take them so far before the well dried up.
One reason Vrideo failed to get the traction it needed to survive was its inability

GUEST: Mobile games haven’t heard the Call of Duty the past few weeks.
GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, which measures TV advertising in real-time, to bring you a monthly report on how gaming brands are generating the most digital response to their ads. Below are or the top five most engaging gaming industry brands from October 16 through November 15.
In total, 40 brands ran 129 spots nearly 23,000 times, for a total estimated spend of $105.6 million. Of that spend, Sony’s Play

Hey everyone, I just got back from seeing The Edge of Seventeen, which was every bit as sharp, smart, and funny as its trailer let on.
So many high school movies seem to exist in a weird fantasy world where, even amid the drama, its characters are having a good time — but The Edge of Seventeen doesn’t. It’s main character gets to be quick and funny, but it also makes her truly isolated and lost in a way that so few teen films actually make their stars. It conveys an uncomfortab

In Silicon Valley, there are companies that prefer to target low-hanging fruit, problems that may not be significant but that have a high likelihood of gaining traction quickly. But a few are bucking this trend, instead opting to look at the bigger picture and developing technology that can genuinely solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.
Endeavors such as these require a high amount of capital and a lot of patience. Traditional investors are not likely to bank on them, but t

Disney has released a new trailer — titled Trust — for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, signaling that we’re finally in the home stretch before the next installment of the franchise hits theaters.
The new trailer shows off a mix of footage that we’ve seen in the most recent international trailer, as well as a couple of of new moments that makes it look as though Alan Tudyk’s K-S20 will steal the show and inject a bit of humor into the film.
This coincides with the anno

Black Friday may be over…but we’re not done yet! TNW Deals is excited to offer four stellar deals in our Extended Black Friday Sale: An outdoors-ready Bluetooth speaker, a three-pack of Lightning cables, a handy smartphone lens kit, and games delivered straight to your inbox. All these items have been previously discounted and are further marked down for today only. And if that’s not enough for you, grab 15 percent off items storewide with coupon code BLACKFRIDAY15 (some rest

Through its first three episodes, Telltale’s Batman game series has managed to carve out a niche, tackling very familiar territory in its own unique way. The Batman you control is a composite of the choices you’ve made in the game, while characters like the Penguin, Harvey Dent, and Catwoman all feel distinct from other takes on the Dark Knight. Even this version of Gotham City feels different, with a history largely its own. In episode four, called ”Guardian of Gotham,”

Virtually everything about Disney’s latest fairy tale, Moana, is familiar from past Disney films. The studio is still following the broad parameters it started laying down in 1937, with Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, by reshaping a culturally specific fairy tale to fit a family-friendly, accessible template. Once again, there’s a young woman leaving a safe, comfortable home, venturing into a dangerous world, and finding her destiny, all while singing catchy songs about what she wan

When the world shifted from desktop to smartphones, one thing didn’t change: the existence of a screen on both devices.
The screen shrank, but it remained the medium through which we interact with computers.
For Google, that meant its core online advertising business — visible search ads on a webpage — remained intact and lucrative.
Today, Google may be at the beginning of a new shift — one toward artificially intelligent virtual assistants, in which we use our voice to i

In 2014, Kenyan teenager Caroline Wambui lost her uncle after he suffered kidney failure. Nobody in her family was a match for a donation, and Kenya, like so many other African countries, lacks an official countrywide organ donor program. Organ donation has in fact become somewhat of a taboo. In the meantime, individual’s like Caroline’s uncle die unnecessarily, or are forced to turn to an unregulated and unsafe market that has sprung up around organ donation in reaction to the coun

If your content marketing and sales processes each exist in a hermetically-sealed bubble, then you are not getting the most out of your investment in content production. Many leaders are happy to let the marketing team produce content, hand over qualified leads to sales and never the twain shall meet. But storytelling has an important role to play throughout the sales journey, from introduction and establishing credentials at the top of the funnel, to actually assisting the sales team with coll

(Reuters) – Uber will seek to convince Europe’s top court next week that it is a digital service, not a transport company, in a case that could determine whether app-based startups should be exempt from strict laws meant for regular companies.
The European Commission is trying to boost e-commerce, a sector where the EU lags behind Asia and the United States, to drive economic growth and create jobs.
The U.S. taxi app, which launched in Europe five years ago, has faced fierce oppositi

Earlier this week Russian president Vladimir Putin said that, while new technologies such as Uber or Alibaba should not be demonized, they may still threaten the traditional economy in the future.
“I believe that [new] business models are not a threat to existing ones. They represent a new way of organizing things which businesses consider as being more effective and necessary. They should not be accused of undermining activities — they just apply up-to-date metho

(Reuters) – Banks involved in the blockchain consortium R3 CEV have expressed interest in investing $59 million in the company’s first funding round, less than half its overall target, a person close to the deal said on Friday.
R3, a New York-based startup, is seeking to raise $150 million from its members and strategic investors to fund its activities focused on developing blockchain-based technology for the financial services sector.
It had originally sought to raise $200 million,

Rogue One isn’t the only Star Wars event in December.
On December 2, BioWare will release a new expansion for its massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Star Wars: The Old Republic. The expansion, called Knights of the Eternal Throne, adds nine chapters of story content which includes two new planets for players to explore. Set thousands of years before the events of the movies, TOR originally came out back in 2011. It didn’t live to its hype as a World of Warcraft-killer, b

 Black Friday online shopping is continuing to grow, and this Friday was another record-breaking day. According to a new report out this evening from Adobe, which has been tracking e-commerce transactions throughout the sales holiday, Black Friday is on track to set a new record by surpassing the $3 billion mark for the first time. It’s also expected to become the first day in U.S.… Read More

Stripe, a US fintech firm founded by two Irish brothers, has raised $150 million (£121 million) in a funding round that values the company at over $9 billion (£7 billion).
The investment round, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by CapitalG and General Catalyst, and also included participation from existing investors including Sequoia Capital. Facebook investor Peter Thiel and Tesla founder Elon Musk have also invested in Stripe in previous rounds.
Founded in 2011, St

Scaling a company without compromising its culture can be an incredibly challenging problem to solve, but it’s certainly not impossible. One of the keys is building and maintaining a strong, genuine company culture. Through the people you hire and how you structure your teams, you can enable the company to scale effectively. Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains the role of culture in scaling: The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture

EXCLUSIVE: Niantic Labs is reportedly planning a huge Pokémon Go update for December that will give players a lot of what they’ve been asking for.
The update will include more than 100 new normal and Legendary Pokémon, player-versus-player battles, raising your critters (like Tamagotchi pets, after the eggs hatch), and trading between players, according to an analysis of the hit mobile game’s code by people associated with web scanner PokeVS. If true, that could se