Technology news

GUEST: Chatbots hit a hot streak in 2016. It seemed like every week there was a new bot. Many of these bots faded as fast as they came on the scene. Most likely, they weren’t backed up with a proper business model, and many of them overestimated the capacity of chatbot and AI to tackle problems.
We’re going on almost two years working with this technology in the healthcare space. We quickly realized that a pure AI chatbot would never be able to replace a physician or benefits expert.

Long before Rogue One was conceived, there was another Star Wars story that followed another band of rogues: Michael A. Stackpole’s X-Wing series. These entries in the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Legends) were a different beast altogether compared to their counterparts, and proved that the franchise didn’t need to rely on characters named Skywalker or Solo.When I watched one of the later trailers for Rogue One, I was struck by one of the scenes: a squadron of X-Wing fighters wea

GUEST: Recently, there has been a rising tide of concerns surrounding voice manipulation software. In sum, this technology allows a person to take someone’s speech recordings and create new utterances that the individual may or may not have said. This type of synthetic speech technology has been around for decades, but the entry of a new player in this space, or the publication of a research paper on this topic, tends to create a frenzy of excitement — and anxiety — a

GUEST: Over the last year you’ve probably seen a variation of the headline, “Anyone can now invest in startups!” With the birth of equity crowdfunding, we’ve seen the launch of new platforms, including one by Indiegogo, that let the average person back companies for profit instead of just for product or perks. While exciting, this development is fraught: Many will get drawn into the tempestuous world of startup investing without a plan, a budget, or a full understanding o

Even though Rogue One isn’t getting a sequel, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to Star Wars lore and that its characters won’t have other chances to pop up. It looks like Saw Gerrera, the extremist Rebel leader played by Forest Whitaker, will make an appearance in the Star Wars Rebels animated series.
Spoilers ahead.
Saw recently appeared in a Toys “R” Us poster for the next season. It was first seen by Rebels Reactions:
Looks like Saw Gerrera is coming to

Spoiler alert.
I stayed deliciously ignorant of the press around Rogue One: A Star Wars Story before I saw it last night. I’d agree with VentureBeat’s Chris O’Brien that it is one of the best Star Wars movies ever. And one of its accomplishments was completely unexpected: computer-generated humans that fooled me.
When I first saw Grand Moff Tarkin, the evil Imperial leader of the Death Star in the original movie, appear in Rogue One, I was surprised. I had forgotten that Peter

If you’ve ever wanted to see a mashup of animated cyberpunk action and the archeological thrills of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, short film X-Story has it all. There’s cybernetic arms, fantastic lost cities, exciting plot twists, and above all, some beautiful animation.The short was created by Moscow-based animator Vitaliy Shushko, who worked with a team for over two years to finish it. The story follows an unnamed treasure hunter with a bionic arm who sets off in search of an ancien

Christmas is almost here. It’s a time of giving, family, enormous credit card bills, and turkey-induced food-poisoning. If you’re a parent, it’s also a time where you’ve got to deal with kids who are out of school, and therefore bored. If you’re looking for something to occupy your teen’s time, you could do worse than GE’s Labracadabra. These are a family of mind-expanding science sets which start at the allowance-friendly price of $29.99

GUEST: South Korea’s startup scene finally looks ready to go international.
The Korean government is extending Korea’s international reach in startup circles through initiatives like its fintech bridge with the UK. It’s also encouraging international startups to enter Korea through programs like K-Startup Grand Challenge.
Seoul city government is also out to attract globally minded entrepreneurs and has established Seoul Global Startup Center to directly sup

SimilarTech crawls the web to analyze what technologies are popular among website operators. The company can track all of the technologies that a website uses, and it then ranks them in order of popularity.
As an example, SimilarTech tracks 60 payment technologies used across 2 million web sites. PayPal is the No. 1 vendor in the space, used at more than 1.01 million sites. If you look at the top 10,000 sites tracked by SimilarTech, Alipay is in third place, behind PayPal and PayPal Subscribe. Y

GUEST: The average venture capital investor evaluates 200 companies in a given year. They invest in just four. Even once those four have been selected, completing the deals is labor-intensive, taking an average of 83 days, including 118 hours of due diligence involving consultations with as many as 10 references. Given the time and effort involved, VCs are understandably concerned with making sure the selection criteria they use to whittle the initial 200 down lead them to a final four that will

Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column "Ask Leah" ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. During the day, Leah is Slack’s user researcher, but her views here do not represent her employer. How to be Human runs every other Sunday. You can write to her at [email protected] and read more How to be Human here.
Hi Leah,I know that you’re the one that usually writes the long answers, but hear me out.
I was raised in an Islami

Nintendo continues to play with our emotions. The company has yet to outright state if its upcoming console, Switch, will support VR, but patents uncovered today suggest that it’s certainly possible in the future.
NeoGAF user Rösti (it’s an online forum of some of the most passionate gamers on the Internet) posted the patent online complete with various images and descriptions that match the new device, which allows games to be played either at home on a TV or on the go wit

You know how the infamous “Rainbow Road” tracks from Mario Kart are just, like, impossible? They twist and turn in ways that are hard to predict, and you always seem to be just a moment away from falling off the edge to your death. Now imagine a game with tracks that all have that same feeling, but where you had to manage three different cars on three different tracks at the same time. That’s Drive!Drive!Drive!, a ridiculously trippy and fun new take on arcade racers.
Drive!Dri

This afternoon, the United Launch Alliance is set to launch its final rocket of 2016 — an Atlas V tasked with sending a communications satellite into orbit. If successful, it will wrap up 12 launches for ULA this year, and 115 for the company since it was formed nearly a decade ago.
The satellite going up today is called EchoStar 19
The satellite going up today is called EchoStar 19, which will be used by HughesNet to beam high-speed internet to homes and businesses in North America. To do

On Friday, The New York Times Magazine dropped a surprise for crossword obsessives everywhere: its latest Sunday edition would include a puzzle-oriented special section of the newspaper called Puzzle Mania. Among the neat collection of puzzle maker interviews and number and word games is a particularly unprecedented challenge, a puzzle larger than any The New York Times has ever constructed. The 50x50, 738-clue monstrosity covers two entire broadsheet pages. It may take even experienced puzzle s

Sweden’s Starbreeze, publisher of games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, has acquired 90.5 percent of Indian game maker Dhruva Interactive for $7 million in cash and $1.5 million in stock. It’s one more sign of the globalization of the game business.
In doing so, Starbreeze gains 320 employees at Bangalore-based Dhruva, which Indian game pioneer Rajesh Rao started in 1997. Dhruva has grown by providing art production, taking on tasks that include making the cars in M

The strangest device I’ve used this year is Lenovo’s Yoga Book, specifically the Android variant, which costs $499. Without question, the two-in-one tablet is worthy of praise for being distinctive. But what makes it different also makes it impractical.
This is why I was not particularly excited to hear that Lenovo will come out with a Chrome OS version of the device in 2017, as Laptop Mag is reporting. (Hat tip to the Verge for reporting on the news.)
Arguably the most significant f

Just try and code a modern web page without JavaScript… you won’t get very far. So if you’re looking to have a career in web development, understand the programming language that drives the web with this Essential JavaScript Coding Bundle. You can pick up this comprehensive deep dive into JavaScript for just $29 with TNW Deals. You’ll work your way through 15 different courses, outlining the framework and organization of the front-end programming language at the heart o

If you have a new MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, then there’s a great new game for you to play. It’s a variation on Pong, the Atari classic from the 1970s.
But instead of controlling the location of your paddle with a joystick or a controller or a key on the keyboard, this game — called TouchBarPong — lets you slide your finger on the Touch Bar, the narrow display that sits just above the keyboard on the laptop.
You can really get into the game when you put it in full-scre

Gene Munster, the best known of all Wall Street analysts who follow Apple, wrote his 874th and final research note on the company Thursday night, predicting more big things from the tech giant.
Apple was a much smaller company over 12 years ago when Munster wrote his first note, The Apple Option—Predicting Another Revolution, urging investors to buy the stock. Adjusted for later stock splits, the price was under $2 a share (it’s now at almost $116). No one outside of Apple had an ink

Hereeeee's Vladimir!
Saturday Night Live's last cold open of 2016 went out in holiday style, with Alec Baldwin returning as Donald Trump. 
This time the president-elect was dealing with some last-minute cabinet appointments before the Christmas holiday. Everything was going just fine (Yup, SNL got in their "unpresidented" joke right away), and then shirtless Vladimir Putin (Beck Bennett) came down the chimney à la Santa.
SEE ALSO: Alec Baldwin has perfect response after Trump disses

Google has chosen to revamp Google Contributor, a service it introduced in 2014 as a way for people to pay to block ads on certain websites.
Google has stopped letting people sign up for the current version of the service. But it is allowing people to ask to be part of a test of the new version, which will be released in early 2017, according to a note on the service’s website.
The service hasn’t received many prominent updates since it first popped up. So it was significant when peo

Tesla is sick of ya'll hogging their Supercharger stations. You've already got a Tesla, don't be greedy.
The electric car company announced in a blog post Friday that owners who use Telsla's power stations will face charges if they don't move on fast enough. Drivers who fail to remove their car within five minutes of completing charge will pay a penalty of $0.40 per minute.
SEE ALSO: Tesla's Enhanced Autopilot is coming mid-December, but not all of it
"A customer would never leave a car parked b

Online learning company Lynda.com, a subsidiary of LinkedIn, which is now officially a subsidiary of Microsoft, today sent out an email to some users alerting them to a breach of a database that includes contact information and courses some users viewed. Altogether, it’s emailing about 9.5 million users whose passwords weren’t included in the affected database, a LinkedIn spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
But there was a small percentage of users (fewer than 55,000) whose pa

Nothing warms the heart like the sweet face of a baby animal. With the New Year on the horizon, we asked wildlife photographers to share a few of their favorite baby animal pics in celebration of new beginnings.  If these images make you smile, consider adopting an animal from a shelter or donating to a wildlife protection fund this holiday season. With loss of habitat and poaching, creatures around the world are constantly at risk. These little guys need all the help they can get to g

Reddit’s annual Secret Santa is a joyous event for all involved. Over 100,000 Redditors participated this year, including Alyssa Milano, Snoop Dogg, and Bill Gates. Gates is the stalwart on the list, as he’s been doling out presents to lucky Redditors since 2013. This year, it was Reddit user Aerrix who found herself on the receiving end of Gates’ generosity. And generous he was; his oversized shipment even contained gifts for her dog. Among the highlights were big t

After Chris Connors died earlier this month, his family made sure to get the last laugh.
In their local Maine newspaper, Connors, 64, was remembered in his obituary as a "Ladies man, game slayer, and outlaw." Even the headline poked fun at the husband and dad who was apparently joking until the end, "Irishman Dies from Stubbornness, Whiskey" (all jokes aside, he died fighting ALS and stage 4 pancreatic cancer).
Scattered in among the jokes are touching tributes and memories, remembering him for

In 2017, let us all have the bonkers energy of this 11-year-old girl.
Sabre Norris was the youngest surfer to compete in the Sydney International Women's Pro competition event in November, but it was her hilarious interview with the breakfast show Today that really charmed.
Norris' personality, and her deep affinity for doughnuts, have now taken her all the way to America and the The Ellen DeGeneres Show show. Find out what the wee Australian is spending her prize money on (sugar, of course) pl

GUEST: While we think of them as the latest thing in tech, conversational interfaces have been around for quite some time. From Cleverbot and Smarter Child to labyrinthine phone trees (“say REPRESENTATIVE”), we have been trying for years to build technology that mimics how we interact with humans. Recent advances have positioned these tools for substantial growth and brought them back to the foreground of the conversation on the future of technology.
Conversational interfaces for bot

A lot of companies would have you believe 360-degree video is the future of storytelling. It’s why 20th Century Fox just signed a deal with Felix and Paul, and IMAX is bringing VR stations to cinemas around the world. But is ‘VR video’ in its current state really proof of that?
That’s what VR testing company, Fishbowl VR, wanted to find out with its new report, ‘The State of VR Video‘. The company, which traditionally allows users to playtest VR experiences an

UPDATE: Dec. 18, 2016, 1:57 p.m. AEDT So, that was CeeLo, but we still don't have answers.
At around 9:30 p.m. ET, CeeLo showed up on Facebook and broadcast a live video to confirm that the person in the video was indeed him, and that he's fine. 
CeeLo's frustratingly vague explanation is that the video is part of something he's shooting for an upcoming project, and it's meant to set up a character's story. He never comes out and says it was fake, but since he has no visible wounds, it appe

We’re about to hand over the keys to the kingdom.
If you ask Elon Musk, it’s possible we already have.
That’s right: Artificial Intelligence is creeping into every area of our lives. It’s more than just robots vacuuming the carpet and talking to our kids. AI is now a big part of the Microsoft strategy. Your least favorite but most used application of all time (that would be PowerPoint) can generate slides automatically with just a click and can write captions, making

Michael Phelps kisses his son Boomer after the swimmer won the Men's 200m Butterfly during the swimming event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 9.Martin Bureau/Getty A couple kisses as they take a selfie in a field of cosmos flowers at Olympic Park in Seoul, South Korea on Sept. 21Ahn Young-joon/APRepublican presidential candidate Donald Trump, kisses Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana after Pence's acceptance speech during the third day sessi

The Legend of Zelda was the pinnacle of 1980s console games. Its sprawling levels spanned multiple regions and included desert, wetlands, and tree-lined forests. For the time, it was a massive map and an impressive display of pushing hardware to its limits. Due to the size of the world, it often left nerdy young children, like me, to their own devices in an attempt to map out each of the game’s rooms. Or, perhaps your parents loved you more than mine did (sorry mom and dad), and splurged