Technology news

Google has updated its website that guides iPhone owners through the process of making the change to Android. But more importantly, the company is also adding a new feature to its Google Drive app on iOS: the ability to instantly back up your contacts, calendar, and camera roll and store it in the cloud. That way, whenever you buy a Pixel or some other Android phone, all your stuff will be waiting in Google’s various apps. It’s all automatic when done this way, as opposed to before w

Donald Trump, who gets intelligence briefings only once per week, reportedly met with rapper Kanye West, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, retired NFL players Ray Lewis and Jim Brown at Trump Tower in New York City today. Trump also announced his pick for Secretary of Energy this morning — former Texas governor Rick Perry who infamously could not remember the name of this department when saying he would like to get rid of it. Perry also appeared on the fall season of Dancing with the Stars, but w

A group of music industry organizations sent President-elect Donald Trump a letter today, urging him to focus on intellectual property protections during his presidency, Variety reports. The letter, signed by companies like ASCAP, BMI, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), asks Trump to consider the issue of music piracy ahead of his Silicon Valley “tech summit” tomorrow.The letter claims that some search engines and file-sharing sites are guilty of “pervers

Otterbox, the company best known for their rugged phone and tablet cases, is expanding its sights on the larger accessory market, with today's launch of new headphones, USB chargers, and a laptop sleeve.
The headphones, made in conjunction with Decibullz, are available in either a $99.95 Bluetooth or $49.95 wired versions. Otterbox isn't saying much about the technical specs on the headphones, but the wireless ones claim to get up to 3.5 hours of playback time on a charge.Also available is the $

Slack introduced voice calls in March with the promise that video calling would soon follow. Now, nine months later, the company is finally rolling out a video calling feature that’ll allow up to 15 people to chat simultaneously for companies on Slack’s paid plans. Free users will only be able to make direct calls.
To access video calling, users just have to click the phone icon — like they would to make a voice call — and then click the camera button to turn on video. Vi

Every day seems to be Horrible Climate Change News Day. We learn of major airports that are going to be underwater because of sea level rise, a chunk of sea ice the size of India melting in the Antarctic, and glaciers cracking from the inside out. Today’s depressing news comes from a report on the Arctic’s warming trends. The report, sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that unprecedented warm air over the Arctic caused extensive melting of sea i

It’s December, and all I want is to walk 10 kilometers to hatch a Togepi. Thankfully, developer Niantic has my back.
The Pokémon Go studio updated its app this week to introduce a handful of hatchling pocket monsters, and we fired up the ol’ podcast to talk about whether this is enough to get people playing again (even though plenty still are). Hosts Jeffrey Grubb and Mike Minotti took on that topic and pressing issues like Super Nintendo World at Universal

Advanced Micro Devices is taking a swing at Intel with Ryzen in a move that it hopes will reinvigorate the computer industry. Ryzen is the new brand name being announced today for AMD’s flagship desktop processor that will be introduced in the first quarter.
Formerly known under the code name Summit Ridge, Ryzen is the first processor that will be based on AMD’s highly touted Zen design, which took four years to design and could be AMD’s most competitive processor architecture

An extensive New York Times report on this summer’s catastrophic email hack of the Democratic National Committee has turned up a very embarrassing detail about how the attack took place. It was reported at the time that Clinton campaign manager John Podesta fell victim to a phishing scheme — specifically a fake “account reset” appearing to be from Google — but it now seems that a typo from one of Podesta’s aides may have played a crucial role in ensuring that

If the real snow is making you want to stay inside, Overwatch’s new holiday extravaganza can bring you some white Christmas cheer without having to venture out into the elements.
Winter Wonderland, the holiday event for Blizzard’s team-based shooter on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, is now live. It adds new cosmetics, including costumes, animations, and sprays, for its cast that players can unlock through loot boxes. You can earn those either by leveling up, winning games in the Ar

While many of you may have tired of the charms of Pokémon Go, a whole new group of trainers is just about to get started. Today developer Niantic Labs announced that the augmented reality mobile game is finally available in South Asia. Users in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh can download the game from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store starting today. “The Niantic team had to resolve a few administrative challenges before launching in order to en

Every Christmas celebration could use a few more laser guns.
Destiny’s The Dawning is live now on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The holiday event brings time-limited holiday content to Bungie’s online MMO shooter, with it ending on January 3. Updates like these can keep current players engage while bringing back lapsed ones. If new content dries up, players could leave a game.
The Dawning includes new quests, weapons, gear, and the return of Sparrow Racing, which has players competing

Apple has picked a rather interesting way of dealing with the unpredictable (and underwhelming) battery life on its newest MacBook Pros: the company is eliminating the “time remaining” estimate that shows up when you click the battery icon in the status bar. The change is being made in the newest version of macOS Sierra — 10.12.2 — which hit the Mac App Store today.
The problem with the time estimate, as our own Walt Mossberg noticed in his review of the MacBook Pro with

Blizzard announced the latest seasonal event for Overwatch that adds holiday-themed unlockable items to the online team-based shooter for a limited time. The event runs from December 13th through January 2nd, and offers a variety of festive player icons, emotes, highlight intros, voice lines, and most importantly, character skins.Additionally, the Hanamura and King’s Row maps have been given a temporary winter makeover, along with a new Snowball Offensive brawl that will two team teams of

Uber appears to be preparing to launch a fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco, expanding on its existing self-driving pilot in Pittsburgh. CNET discovered a fleet of Uber-branded Volvo and Ford vehicles in a warehouse in San Francisco, complete with self-driving sensors and camera hardware.
The site says the vehicles will launch “very soon,” perhaps allowing San Francisco Uber users to receive a ride from an autonomous car when booking a trip. Not much else is known about the

You don’t have to buy the BioShock games again to play them on your Xbox One — although you can if you want.
The Xbox 360 versions of all three BioShock games are now backward compatible on the Xbox One. This means that if you own the physical discs or the digital versions from the Xbox Game Store, you can play them on your Xbox One today without having to make any additional purchases. This is a rather decent action for the publisher, which could have blocked Microsoft from making t

One Direction has been on an indefinite “hiatus” since December 13th, 2015 — one year ago today. In the meantime most of the members have moved on to new projects: a solo recording contract here, a label imprint there… a Christopher Nolan film, a golf management company, an embarrassing production moniker, an Ed Sheeran-lite debut single. The boys have been busy, but they haven’t been together.Regardless, One Direction was Forbes’ second highest-paid musical

Synaptics has announced a new optical fingerprint sensor that can offer fingerprint scanning for smartphones and tablets through glass that’s up to 1mm thick.The FS9100 is also waterproof and scratch proof
The new sensor, called Synaptics FS9100, would solve many of the current issues that conventional scanners currently have: it would allow for fingerprint security without requiring a separate button cut-out, and it would also function far better with wet fingertips. Additionally, Synapti

Microsoft today is announcing an update to its Microsoft Translator app that makes it possible to see live translations of the things people say nearby during in-person conversations. The idea is that everyone participating in the conversation uses the app and gets to see translated words on their devices. And for some languages, devices can even provide spoken translations.
To use the feature, you open the app — available on Amazon, Android, iOS, and Windows — or the new website for

EXCLUSIVE: LG is planning to introduce a second generation of numerous smartphone models in its mid-range K- and X-series, VentureBeat has learned, along with a third generation of its digital pen-equipped phablet, Stylus.
Four of these 2017 K-series handsets — K3, K4, K8, and K10 — will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, alongside the LG X calibur (new to the lineup) and LG Stylus 3 (to be known as Stylo 3 plus in the U.S.). The initial, first generation K-seri

Google and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) may be working together on an autonomous ride-sharing service that could launch as soon as next year, according to a Bloomberg report. It would be an expansion of a partnership announced earlier this year that saw Google install its self-driving hardware 100 Chrysler Pacifica minivans for testing.
In a event today, Google announced that it is spinning its self-driving project off into a separate company called Waymo, and Bloomberg suggested that the ride-sharing pa

Slack has launched a new way for you to communicate with colleagues, with the addition of video calling. Now you can not only message team members, but also call and now video conference, either one-to-one or group video calling. But there’s more to just seeing someone’s face — you can also include emojis within your chat, such as a hand raise if you want to ask a question, a thumbs up to express your approval, or anything else.
“Making calls within Slack, whether voice o

Scientists are scrambling to download troves of climate data collected by government agencies that they fear could disappear under a Trump administration, according to Motherboard and The Washington Post. Efforts include saving the data on independent servers and making it available on websites. The concern is that once Donald Trump becomes president and takes control of the .gov websites hosting climate data collected by agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe is stepping down to lead a newly established internal PC virtual reality division, leaving the Facebook-owned company’s top leadership position open. Oculus announced today that it will be internally dividing into two groups, one focused on desktop-based VR like the Oculus Rift, and the other on mobile VR. Iribe is making the move right away, while Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer will help look for a new leader of the overall Oculus team. Oculus Rift inventor Palmer L

Radio stations are repetitive. Different stations have their own personalities, themes, and genres, but they’re still beholden to the same master: the listeners. If the people want to hear the same Mike Posner song played ad nauseam, who are you to disagree, puny one?
For those of us who have been through the full emotional merry-go-round with song repetition (disinterest leading into tolerance, tolerance leading into obsession, obsession into hatred, hatred into disinterest, and so it goe

Every company loves CRM. Every sales rep hates it. Former Salesforce executive and current Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi thinks the solution is a virtual personal assistant, driven by modern artificial intelligence.
And he’s just raised $15 million more to make it happen.
Modern customer relationship management is essential to tracking and managing a company’s revenue. The problem is that it relies on manually inputting endless reams of data, and salespeople tend to hate the&nbs

In a post today, Google published a series of eight National Security Letters, in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation secretly requested subscriber information on specific accounts. The letters range from 2010 to 2015, but follow a nearly identical format, identifying a number of accounts and sometimes a specific time frame but providing no evidence or suspicion to justify the request.
Google was legally prohibited from disclosing the requests when they were first issued, but that prohibit

Google today announced that it’s spinning off its nearly 8-year-old self-driving car division and making it a division of its parent company, Alphabet. It will now operate under the new company name Waymo under the leadership of chief executive John Krafcik, formerly president and chief executive of Hyundai North America.
“We’re a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around,” Krafcik wrote in a Medium post.

Facebook’s Oculus VR division is expanding its efforts to do both mobile and PC virtual reality systems. And the company is searching for a new CEO to replace Brendan Iribe, who is stepping down from the top position to run the PC VR division.
Iribe, the current CEO of Oculus VR, will now be head of the PC VR division at Oculus. Meanwhile, former Microsoft technologist Jon Thomason will move from head of software at Oculus to run the mobile VR group. Iribe said the company has decided

Google today released Android Wear 2.0 Developer Preview 4, which focuses on adding new APIs that help developers build more powerful standalone apps. New features include OAuth API for Android Wear, in-app billing, new APIs for cross-device promotion, and the return of swipe-to-dismiss.
Android Wear 2.0 was revealed at Google’s I/O 2016 developer conference, where the company called it “the most significant update to Android Wear” since the platform launched over two years ago

 Hollywood’s love affair with VR continues.
VR game maker Survios announced today that it has raised $50 million over a pair of funding rounds, a good chunk of which comes from MGM, who led one of the two rounds, with Lux Capital leading the other. Shasta Ventures, Danhua Capital, Shanda Holdings, Felicis Ventures and Dentsu Ventures also participated in the rounds.
The company was… Read More

Virtual reality game studio Survios, creator of the VR shooter Raw Data, is disclosing that it has raised two rounds of funding totaling $50 million this year. One of the new investors is entertainment company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
MGM Chairman and CEO Gary Barber has joined Survios’ board in the latest round. In a prior financing round earlier this year, Survios raised money from lead investor Lux Capital, with participation from Shasta Ventures, Danhua Capital, Shanda Hold

Interest in smartwatches may have cooled quite a bit, but Google is plugging away on its Android Wear 2.0 platform, due to be released to the public early next year. Today, it is releasing a new developer preview of Android Wear 2.0 that adds a number of new features and restores some of the functionality that was in earlier versions of the platform.
The most significant new feature is support for one-click Google sign in on the watch. In a blog post announcing the new feature, Google says that