Technology news

GUEST: Mobile payments, digital wallets, and other forms of financial technology (fintech) have seen widespread adoption in the West, but fintech has a whole new meaning for the developing world.
Because of the largely unbanked populations in emerging markets, fintech companies serving those markets are facing a unique opportunity (and challenge) to entirely skip a whole generation of financial services (i.e., banks, cards) and rethink the payments ecosystem as it moves away from cash.
Take Afri

GUEST: In the last few years, commercial organizations have relied heavily on immersive technology, effectively transforming operations, and even market competition. The internet makes cross-device integration increasingly common, particularly as more devices become connected. And as it becomes easier to connect with one another, the lines between reality and the digital world are increasingly blurred.
Immediate benefits
Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning were huge buzzwo

GUEST: Blockchain startups are disrupting the VC and fundraising landscape with initial coin offerings (ICOs), a new form of investment that allows blockchain-based projects to raise funds by selling cryptocoins to early investors. As VentureBeat recently covered, this type of fundraise is booming at the moment.
ICOs are considered easy money — they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the past three years — but they’re also a very risky. Many of these projects

Porsche is a two syllable word that is often made into one. I speak rudimentary German and had a German-Jewish Opa who sharpened my ear to the flow of the guttural language as an infant. The Oxford Dictionary pronunciation is ˈpôrSH(ə). But I have heard many a “Porsh” argument by people who know much more about cars than they know about languages.American ignorance on this topic is understandable, even from people who own a Porsche or 911, and still say “Porsh.&

Ultrahaptics had an touching demo at the VRX virtual reality conference last week. It used ultrasound technology so that I could feel things in VR using my own fingers. While wearing a VR headset, I reached out and held a virtual ball. My fingers were in mid-air, but it felt like I was touching something.
The Bristol, England-based company wants to bring “haptics” technology to VR to make it more immersive. VR does a great job of giving you the feeling that you are in a location

My name wasn’t Ashley Carman anymore. It was . Yes, a guy I dated last summer saved me in his phone as a fishcake emoji. We met on Tinder and the first thing I messaged him was the fishcake. I thought it was cute or something. I don’t know — I didn’t expect it to become my identity. To be fair, I didn’t save his name in my phone until we had been hanging out for a month because I don’t save numbers unless I know a guy’s last name, or I intend to see him

GUEST: There’s no doubt that virtual reality, when it’s well executed, can be an emotional and literally awesome experience. I’ve experienced it myself, and the possibilities are mind-blowing. But the problem is that right now, and for the foreseeable future, there is a dearth of VR content. There’s not much to do with it other than ooh and ah over some visuals. And its immersive qualities that are so impressive ultimately limit its opportunity for widespread use. Its eco

The long-awaited trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived just the other day, and while the film isn’t due in theaters until July, Sony has announced that it will be releasing its sequel on July 5th, 2019.Deadline revealed the date last night, noting that the date was a response to the success of the trailer launch on Thursday. The film bumps Sony’s other big summer blockbuster, Bad Boys 4 to Memorial Day 2019.Read moreWatch the first Spider-Man: Homecoming trailerThe first trailer

GUEST: Israel has no indigenous auto industry, but the country’s startup community is serious about autonomous vehicles and is producing a whole host of technologies to help make self-driving cars ready for market, as the infographic above shows.
And the automotive industry is taking note. Five of the companies in the infographic have been acquired already. TowerSec, iOnRoad, and Redbend were acquired by Harman International Industries, which Samsung just agreed to buy for $8 billion &ndas

On Thursday, Smithsonian Magazine held its annual American Ingenuity Awards, in which Amazon.com and Blue Origins founder Jeff Bezos received the Technology Award for Breakthroughs for his work creating a reusable rocket. During the ceremony, he received a letter from astronaut John Glenn, who died earlier that day.In his letter, dated November 28th, Glenn praised Bezos for the award and noted that he was “deeply touched” that the next generation of Blue Origin rockets would be named

The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive might offer a superior VR experience to PlayStation VR, but there’s one very big reason the latter is poised to perform better on the market, at least in the short term.
As seen in tweets from this week’s VRX conference in San Francisco, Zvi Greenstein, General Manager at Nvidia, confirmed that there are currently 15 million VR Ready PCs using the company’s GeForce graphics cards in the market, which, according to the tweet below, he predicted would

I usually use this space to write a little something about what I've been watching lately, but this week I kind of just want to ask: why on Earth did every movie studio suddenly decide to release a trailer for its biggest upcoming films? This week has been filled with blockbuster after blockbuster.
My best guess is that studios are preparing for the holidays, when plenty of people will be headed to theaters with their families. It’s prime time to prime people for the big and flashy spring

GUEST: How did we get it so wrong? All of the fancy data-driven electoral maps and visualizations painted a seemingly objective election forecast. Yet the smooth victory for Hillary Clinton that much of the mainstream media anticipated failed to materialize.
But blindly blaming pollsters for not anticipating this year’s election results simplifies a rather complex problem. In fact, the idea that polling forecasts were outrageously out of kilter with reality is based on a gross misconceptio

This week, NASA continued its spread into the social media sphere by announcing two new accounts — one on Giphy and one on Pinterest. Seeing as how I had forgotten of Pinterest’s existence, half of this announcement matters very little to me. But the other half is very critical to my interests!It’s a brilliant move on NASA’s part, because sometimes astronauts, rockets, and artistic renderings of space are the only ways to truly express your feels. And as someone who write

It looks like Apple’s wireless earphones won’t be ready for the holiday season.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the technology giant continues to delay the availability of its AirPods, which were announced in September with great fanfare as a companion to the new iPhone 7. The newspaper, citing an unnamed source, reported that the delay is being caused by technology problems with how the earpieces receive wireless signals via Bluetooth.
Apple blogger John Gruber wrote

2016 was a really good year for weird jazz! Not good in the sense of commercial success or cultural impact — but for a genre that arguably peaked decades ago, there was a surprising amount of good, weird jazz coming out this year. A lot of it is still fundamentally upsetting when you listen to it, but in a sort of good way? Here are my three favorites of the year, which I also forced Lizzie to listen to:Shabaka & the Ancestors - Wisdom of Elders
Easily my favorite weird jazz album of t

Despite the lore dating back to Pokémon Gold and Silver claiming you can make a delicious soup from Slowpoke tails, the new Pokémon Cookbook doesn’t show you how to cook your Pokémon friends. To that I say: thank goodness. Instead, we get a delightful guide on how to style your food in the most kawaii of ways, whether it’s a “Pikachu Happy Face Cake” or “Meowth Mashed Potatoes,” in which Meowth’s arms are made of cauliflower.
Unlike

The night pioneering astronaut John Glenn died, Jeff Bezos received a message from him.
Smithsonian Magazine was honoring Bezos, founder of aerospace company Blue Origin, at the American Ingenuity Awardson December 8.
Glenn was supposed to attend, but because of his declining health in the last month of his life, the former NASA astronaut wrote Bezos a letter on November 28, to be read at the ceremony.
Hours after he passed, Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, read the letter

Another week, another collection of fantastic, money-saving offers from TNW Deals. This time around, we’ve locked down four deals on a travel-friendly power strip, presentation software that beats Powerpoint, a lifetime cloud storage solution, and the world’s smallest camera drone. Check them out below: Slidebean Presentation Software: Lifetime Subscription — 96% off Why learn all the intricacies of PowerPoint when you can get the same professional-grade presentations —

(Reuters) – The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Citing U.S. officials briefed on the matter, the Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including

Boosted has turned to federal regulators to help handle the investigation into two battery failures on its electric skateboards last month. Boosted reported its short circuit problems to the Consumer Production Safety Commission, according to a statement issued on its website and social media accounts.The California-based startup stopped shipping units of its second-generation Boosted Board after two users reported smoking batteries in early November. Boosted also told customers who had already

A secret assessment conducted by the CIA determined that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was intended to help put Donald Trump in office, The Washington Post reported this evening, using anonymous sources.The revelations undermine the position of President-elect Trump’s campaign, which has sought to downplay reports of foreign interference by citing a lack of evidence. They also mark a stark escalation in hostility between the US and Russia. It appears to be unprecedented

(Reuters) – “Office Christmas Party” actor T.J. Miller was arrested in Los Angeles early on Friday because of an altercation with his Uber driver over President-elect Donald Trump, according to police and media.
Miller was booked at a jail for misdemeanor battery and released with a promise to appear at an upcoming court hearing, Los Angeles police spokeswoman Jenny Houser said in a phone interview. She declined to give details of the incident.
An attorney for Miller did not im

 The U.S. Department of Commerce is opening six new international markets for its Commercial Digital Attaché program, according to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, who spoke with TechCrunch today in San Francisco. The attaché program, which began in March this year, establishes commercial officers in countries where U.S. businesses seek to export their digital goods and… Read More

It appears that DirecTV Now, AT&T’s new internet TV streaming service, is down for many customers, all of whom are furiously tweeting at the service’s various Twitter handles this evening. Now, it’s pretty standard for online services to go down from time to time, but this is only DirecTV Now’s second week of availability. AT&T began offering the service, which lets you watch network and cable television on a wide variety of streaming devices and screens, on Novem

It’s tough to make a virtual reality game, but it is even tougher to make a profitable virtual reality game. And now developers are talking about it.
Light Repair Team #4 developer Eerie Bear Games has lost more than $36,000 making that HTC Vive puzzle game, according to a post from founder Joe Radak on blogging site Medium. He noted that he has seen some developers opening up about the difficulties of making VR games, like RocketWerks founder Dean Hall, who is directing the team

Magic Leap, a buzzy augmented reality startup privately valued at $4.5 billion, overhyped its technology, according to a report on Thursday.
The article by tech news site The Information claimed that Magic Leap executives have overstated the quality of their still unreleased augmented reality device and that a prototype is inferior to that by rivals’ such as Microsoft HoloLens.
The report raises questions about Magic Leap’s ability to live up to its billing as one of the next bi

GUEST: Chatbots are emerging as powerful customer service tools in many industries. You’ve probably encountered one of these automated helpers while browsing or shopping; they often pop up on websites, offering to provide guidance or answer questions.
In the real estate industry, these bots have the potential to revolutionize lead generation. By automating the initial stages of contact between agents and prospects, a real estate bot can be more efficient in engaging visitors, resulting in

Jimmy Fallon might shake like a leaf as he holds the Nintendo Switch on The Tonight Show, but games are never going to get the bulk of the attention on a network-television talk show. But we don’t need that, because we’re getting The Foo Show.
That’s a new interactive media program that plans to take you inside of your favorite video games. Using Foo’s 2D viewer (which works like a game) or a virtual reality headset, you can join host Will Smith — a former