Technology news

Zotac released the VR Go today, joining MSI in the relatively small club of companies that are actually shipping wearable VR backpacks. For those who are unfamiliar, VR backpacks are wearable gaming computers meant to allow for untethered room-scale virtual reality environments — they’re the future of VR, at least until we manage to advance technology for wireless headsets or can compress the demanding hardware for virtual reality into a more easily worn form factor.
The Zotac VR Go

I could live with e-paper everything. I’m talking billboards, monitors, keyboards, remotes, watches, phones, and wallets. Yes, we now have an e-paper wallet called the Wonder Wallet. It just launched on Kickstarter. Why an e-paper wallet, you ask? Because e-paper looks cool and because on Kickstarter, anything can maybe become reality with your blind trust.
I don’t have many details on Wonder Wallet, but I do know that users can display an image on their wallet and that it connects t

For an OS typically preferred by power-users, Android has an embarrassing amount of trouble with copy and paste. Sometimes it works just fine, but in other apps you can only copy entire huge swaths of text, or worse – nothing at all. Microsoft’s new Clip Layer app wants to fix that by letting you copy pretty much any text on your screen. Hold down the home button, and it’ll analyze your display’s contents and let you copy text from areas normally inaccessible. I tri

If you’ve ever wondered about the infinite loop one could create by pairing two smart home assistants, it’s this. YouTuber Adam Jakowenko used both an Amazon Echo Dot, and a Google Home device to answer a simple question: “what’s on my calendar for tonight?” Using the Echo first, the device dutifully read off the beginning of a calendar notification before passing the buck on to Google Home. From there, Google started, and then passed the buck right back. Someone i

A massive glacier at the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is cracking from the inside out at accelerating speed. That’s alarming because this glacier — and others — function like corks in a bottle: they keep the ice from flowing into the sea, which would raise sea levels by several feet.The glacier, which is described in a paper published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters, is called Pine Island Glacier. In 2015, a 224-square-mile iceberg broke off from the glacier.

The small Canadian town of Kensington on Prince Edward Island has found a special way of deterring drunk driving this holiday season — and we can all learn a lesson or two from the process. In a recent Facebook post seen by Consequence of Sound, the town police announced that drivers arrested while intoxicated will be fined, suspended, and forced to listen to Nickelback’s classic 2001 LP Silver Side Up. This is How You Remind them how to not drink and drive.
Here’s the full sta

Ferrari will auction off the last LaFerrari supercar ever made to raise money for earthquake relief in Central Italy, the carmaker announced today. Only 499 coupes were planned, but Ferrari decided to make one more, as a gift to its home country.
The car, the last new LaFerrari to be sold, will be auctioned off by RM Sotheby’s at the Ferrari Finali Mondiali weekend at Daytona International Speedway. All proceeds will go to the National Italian American Foundation’s Earthquake Relief

Cinema Blend interviewed Arrival concept artist Peter Konig today, and he gave them a glimpse at a number of alternate universes — his other designs for Arrival’s aliens, the heptapods, show all the worlds that might have been.
Konig emphasizes that director Denis Villeneuve was willing to entertain any and all ideas during the brainstorm phase, and that he wanted to hear a lot of them. Villeneuve opted to deliberately stray from the descriptions in the source material, Ted Chiang&rs

Ford will expand its on-road testing of autonomous cars to Europe in 2017, the company said today. The company has been investing heavily in self-driving cars, promising to have such a car ready for ride-sharing fleets by 2021. It is currently testing its vehicles in a number of locations across the United States.
“It is important that we extend our testing to Europe,” said Thomas Lukaszewicz, manager for Automated Driving for Ford of Europe. “Rules of the road vary from countr

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time largely because it offered players an easy way to build their own Lego-like creations. Now, after a couple of years in Early Access, a Lego game that plays like Minecraft is about to launch.
Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, The Lego Group, and developer TT Games have announced a plan to launch Lego Worlds for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 21. This game enables players to explore and create with their frien

President-elect Trump has named one of the members of his NASA transition team — and it’s someone who will find the space agency a familiar place. The team will include Christopher Shank, a former top aide and communications official for NASA, as well as a recurring staff member of the House Science Committee.Also a former member of the US Air Force, Shank has played important roles at NASA in the past — most notably as the special assistant to NASA Administrator Mark Griffin u

The Tiny TS, the first standalone synthesizer from Jan Ostman, can do just that. Measuring in at a — as the name suggests — tiny 3.94 x 2.56 inches, it's roughly the size of a credit card.
The synth offers audio, CV, and gate outputs, and works well with Ostman's other synth chips if you don't like the way they sound. Despite the small size, it manages to fit in a full one-octave capacitive touch keyboard and six parameter knobs for controlling things like pitch and amplitude.The Tin

Twitter introduced a new design for replies today that ranks conversations in your timeline according to signals including whether you follow the person who replied and whether the author replied. The personalized ranking means that different people will see a different set of replies by default, although you can still expand the tweet to see every reply. The feature is new to mobile, devices, though Twitter previously brought this design to the web in ... June 2015? Huh.
It's now easier than ev

Algorithm open marketplace Algorithmia today released more than three dozen stylized filters with names like alien goggles, post modern, Sunday, purple storm, and space pizza.
Made with machine learning, filters that mimic the style of any artist have earned a buzz this year due to the popularity of apps like Prisma and Artisto.
Algorithmia’s styles can be used on a computer, called upon through an API, or integrated into a bot or app. Developers can train their own mac

Microsoft is making it easier to work with others on your next PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint app on Windows now supports collaborative editing, allowing two or more people to jump into a document at once and make edits and comments that are seen by the entire group. This is something people have been able to do with PowerPoint Online for years, but Microsoft opens it up to a much larger group of users by enabling it in the desktop app too.
Collaborative editing has been in the wor

Old technology was reincarnated this year. There was the NES Classic Edition and Kodak’s revamped Super 8 camera. And now, a software engineer named Jeff Harris is twisting the formula by bringing modern technology to the past. He wrote software that runs the popular corporate messaging service Slack on his Commodore 64.
As you might recall or can probably assume, the C64 doesn’t include a USB-C or even a USB port. Instead, it has something called a UserPort. So to run his custom sof

Lionsgate has announced that Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda will be the creative producer for a series of screen adaptations of Patrick Rothfuss’ bestselling Kingkiller Chronicle novels, according to The Wrap. Lionsgate is planning a feature-film adaptation of the first book, along with a tie-in TV series that will further explore Rothfuss’ setting.THE NEWS.
I just love the world of @PatrickRothfuss and I want to spend time figuring out how to share it with you. So this is happe

The Mushroom Kingdom is sprouting up in key places around our world thanks to Nintendo’s partnership with Universal.
The game publisher announced today that Nintendo-themed areas will open at Universal Studios resorts in Osaka, Japan, and in the U.S. cities of Orlando, Florida, and Hollywood, California, over the next several years. The idea is to give visitors the sensation that they are walking around inside games like Super Mario Bros. in real life. Nintendo and Universal first announce

Lyft will now inform riders of the total cost of their ride before booking, adopting the same “upfront fare” scheme that Uber did earlier this year.
It allows riders to see how much their ride will cost, with fees, taxes, tolls, and Prime Time (Lyft’s version of Uber’s surge pricing) charges rolled in. However, it’s not exactly fixed pricing. Lyft notes that if riders change their destination en route, or if the ride takes more or less time than expected, the price

Scientists have genetically engineered bacteria to make a protein that squishes silicon and carbon together long enough for them to stick to one another — forming a bond that, until now, only chemists had managed to create. If scientists can teach these bacteria to produce the carbon-silicon molecules used to make semiconductors, pesticides, and even silicone breast implants, it could make manufacturing these products easier.The chemical factories of the future
Carbon and silicon are reluc

Microsoft today said that it has enhanced certain versions of its PowerPoint presentation-building program with real-time collaborative editing.
This feature came to Word on desktop last year. And before that it was available through Office Online. Microsoft said last year that real-time coauthoring would come to all of its desktop apps, and now Microsoft is executing on that commitment.
Above: Real-time collaboration in PowerPoint.Image Credit: Microsoft
Just like in Google Docs, Sheets, and Sl

This election season, the term ‘alt-right’ went from relative obscurity to the forefront of our collective conscious in a matter of weeks. Man-sized Oompa-Loompa aside, the real winner in the 2016 election was a term many believe to be synonymous with white supremacy. Call it the politically correct way to say ‘white supremacist’ for a crowd that thinks political correctness is, you know, bullshit. A New York-based advertising professional is having none of it. George Zo

Last week during the Thanksgiving holiday I skillfully avoided conversations about politics (for the most part) and talked tech instead. It was easy enough to do: people were asking which new laptop to buy, whether to upgrade to an iPhone 7, what’s the best budget Android phone to get, and when Apple’s AirPods are coming out.The latter three are pretty straightforward conversations. But laptops are a different story. As The Verge’s Dieter Bohn pointed out, it used to be that yo

Microsoft’s Garage division, which regularly pumps out experimental apps, today released a new Android app that could be useful to many people. It examines the raw text that’s displayed on the screen and makes it super simple to copy whichever regions of text you’re interested in and then do things with it — like share it in another app, email it, or make a Wunderlist task out of it.
This app, which goes by the name Clip Layer, might seem like a low-level utility —

The Internet Archive, a digital library nonprofit that preserves billions of webpages for the historical record, is building a backup archive in Canada after the election of Donald Trump. Today, it began collecting donations for the Internet Archive of Canada, intended to create a copy of the archive outside the United States.
“On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change,” writes founder Brewster Kahle. “It was a firm reminder that in

BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and Volkswagen have entered into a partnership to create a network of high-speed charging stations for electric vehicles across Europe. The new chargers will be capable of doling out up to 350 kW of power — which would make them almost three times as powerful as Tesla’s Supercharging stations. The result will be “the highest-powered charging network in Europe,” according to a statement released by the manufacturers.
The automakers say that con

SPONSORED: It’s prime time for 80 million millennials. The largest generation in history is digital-first, and their mobile shopping habits and expectations are changing the way online companies need to earn the ecommerce ecosystem’s most potent purchasing power.
Millennials are leading the march toward a total disruption in purchasing trends — how, where, and why consumers buy. In the United States alone there are about 80 million millennials, with a total purchasing power of

Want to see climate change happening before your very eyes? Just take a look at the updated imagery on Google Earth Timelapse. Google first launched Earth Timelapse in 2013, covering a span of imagery since 1984 to 2012. The company has now updated the tool with images up to 2016, and older imagery has been sharpened using the same technology Google implemented with Maps earlier in the year. Google had to sift through three quadrillion pixels from more than 5,000,000 satellite images to cr

Starting today in select cities, Lyft is launching its upfront price estimation tool for all of its ride types. That means that when you enter your destination, the app will display the fare you can expect to pay. Previously, this was only available for Lyft Line rides. The feature is initially available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Phoenix, but additional cities are planned in “the coming months.”
The goal of the upfront pricing tool is to prevent

‘Mythbusters’ is getting the band back together for a new show to air exclusively on Netflix. The Netflix Original, ‘White Rabbit Project,’ features Kary Byron, Tory Belleci, and Grant Imahara — sorry Jamie and Adam fans, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. According to the show’s description in the YouTube promo, you’ll see: The coolest tech. The weirdest weapons. The craziest escapes. Three science-loving sleuths put them under the microscop

If you’ve got a Chromecast, Pixel, or Google Fiber TV box, you’re probably familiar with the Featured Photos app. Essentially, it’s a screensaver app that shows off the best nature photos shared by the Google Plus community. And now, it’s landing on the Mac. Featured Photos will display high-resolution photos whenever your machine is inactive, and works on Macs of all shapes and sizes, from from the dinkiest 11-inch MacBook Air, to the ginormous 5K, 27-inch iMacs. Google

PRESS RELEASE:Latest investments support China’s $140B ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative and global trade growthSAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–November 29, 2016– Tradeshift, the leading business commerce platform, today announced two new joint ventures in China to connect millions of trading partners, digitalize the transactions between them, and offer accessible trade-based financial services to SMBs in the region. The joint ventures can help strengthen the comp

Two weeks ago PewDiePie, the world’s most popular YouTuber, announced he was quitting the service. Four days later Casey Neistat, one of the fastest rising stars over the last two years, said he was ending his daily vlog. Imagine Beyoncé and Taylor Swift both declaring in the span of a few days that they were taking a sabbatical from music.PewDiePie’s retirement from YouTube was very short-lived. Turns out he was just off shooting his web series, Scare PewDiePie. He wanted to

 In Ernestine Fu’s future, you shouldn’t have to wait more than a few seconds to launch a game or an app to connect with a friend. In fact, a few seconds might even be too long. That’s what prompted the birth of Blackstorm, a development platform that has the tools to build high-fidelity applications — the same you might get from an app in the App Store — in HTML5… Read More

Facebook games are pretty much the epitome of casual gaming, but now the company is making it easier to play than ever – including right from Messenger and News Feed. Instant Games allow you to to tap on a title and start playing immediately, no download or extensive app set-up required. The’re based on HTML5 – basically minimal browser games – allowing them to load quickly. On Messenger, you’ll see a new controller icon under your typing area, where you can select

Facebook wants you playing games just about everywhere, and today the company is introducing a new initiative called Facebook Instant Games that it hopes will do just that. Instant Games is an HTML5 gaming platform that lets Facebook users play games on Messenger and in the Facebook News Feed, without the need to download anything. Instant Games are cross-platform, so they’ll work on both the web and mobile.
The service launches today in a closed beta with a total of 17 games, including th

Facebook wants to completely remove the barrier between you and games on its platform, and it is using HTML5 to accomplish that across mobile and the web.
Instant Games are a new feature from Facebook that enable you to immediately start playing a game on Facebook’s service without having to install a game or an app. The games may show up in your News Feed when you’re on a desktop computer or even when you’re browsing on Android or iOS — but no matter what, you can c

Two important posts from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his company’s role in the US presidential election and news dissemination have disappeared from his timeline as of Tuesday morning. It’s currently unclear if this is due to an error, change in privacy settings, or whether they were intentionally removed.The first is Zuckerberg’s November 12th post that offered his thoughts on “Facebook and the election.” (Cached via Google at this link.) The Verge and countles

President-elect Trump has selected Elaine Chao as secretary of transportation, according to media reports. Chao is an experienced pick, having prior experience as secretary of labor under President George W. Bush for all eight years of his term and deputy secretary of transportation under President George H. W. Bush.
Trump’s ambitious infrastructure plan makes this a particularly important cabinet pick, as Chao would be charged with implementing much of the $1 trillion proposal if it were