Technology news

With the sheer volume and diversity of affordable camera gear, it’s hardly surprising 2016 was such an important year for video. From politics to advertising, video played an integral part in internet culture over the last twelve months. And while there was a multitude of truly stunning videos produced, only few will end up in our annual roundup. So here it is: Feast your eyes on some of the most infatuating videos that broke the internet in 2016. Hyper-Reality As virtual a

On December 6th, Uber driver Noah Forman claims he drove from Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem to Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan, then back up to 59th street, across to Second Avenue, and back downtown to the Bowery at Prince Street before hitting a single red light. That’s 240 green lights in a row, for a 27-minute nonstop drive through New York City at about 3:30 in the morning.
Forman told The New York Daily News that his personal best before that night was 186 green lights. A

Last week, I got to chat with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, one of the virtual reality gaming industry’s most prominent figures. Like many others, Sweeney believes that VR has the potential to transform how we interact online, especially as more sophisticated tracking systems translate body language, facial expressions, and other details into digital worlds. More specifically, he thinks virtual reality could make us treat each other better there. Unfortunately, this is almost certainly wrong &mdas

DirecTV Now’s limited-time introductory $35-per-month subscription deal is going away early next month. AT&T’s website confirms that the “Go Big” package of over 100 channels will switch to its normal $60 monthly cost starting January 9th.
If you’re at all interested in the streaming TV service, you should sign up before that date — otherwise you’ll miss out on the promotional price. If you do start a DirecTV Now subscription by the 9th, you’ll

Vaping is more popular with teens than ever, with more than one-third of high school students reporting having tried e-cigarettes. And teens aren’t always using e-cigs for nicotine, according to a new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that dug into teen vaping behavior.To evaluate e-cig use, the CDC and the US Food and Drug Administration poured through surveys filled out by 17,000 middle and high school students across the US in 2015. About 38 percent of high school stu

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is polling Twitter users on what features they’d like to see from the company in 2017.
Everyone’s got ideas, like “get rid of the Nazis” and “reverse verification,” where everyone is verified by default. I love the internet.
Following in the footsteps of Brian Chesky: what's the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017? #Twitter2017— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016Anyway, the obvious thing people are a

Yo ho, yo ho, it’s a Pirate Warrior’s life for me.
I’ve been playing Blizzard’s digital card game Hearthstone since it came out in 2014. I’ve played a lot of decks. Some have been more successful than others. Lately, however, I took a small amount of pride in trying to make my own creations work. I wouldn’t just go online and use what everyone else was playing because some internet hive mind deemed it “top tier.” So what if I would lose more? It wa

The website of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources no longer says that humans and greenhouse emissions cause climate change.The new language says that causes of global warming are “are being debated and researched by academic entities.” It is not true that the causes of global warming are being heavily debated. Almost all climate scientists already agree that human-made greenhouse gases are responsible for climate change, and that global warming is a pressing issue. Bef

AI is everywhere. At CES 2017 next week, it will become even more prevalent.
Without giving away any secrets, it feels like there is something in the air already. Looking over my schedule, almost every meeting and test has an element related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. I know of one smart home company that is announcing a new AI system that knows when you are home and can adjust the lighting, security cameras, front door alarm, and heat automatically — no more opening

The Obama administration today announced new sanctions against Russia in response to the country’s widely reported role in hacks meant to influence the US presidential election.
Imposes sanctions on GRU and officials from the agency
The sanctions include penalties for five entities and four individuals. Included on that list are multiple officials from Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the country’s military intelligence unit tied to this year’s hack of the Democrat

Adam Ruins Everything, a TruTV show created by comedian Adam Conover, points out obvious problems in an effort to get some laughs. Segments from his show are often broken off into standalone videos that are tailor-made for viral success on the internet, pulling in millions of views while explaining things like the famous McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit.In a new sketch, though, Conover turns his sights on electric cars. He claims that electric cars “aren’t as green as you think,&r

After over a year of speculation, Ryan Gosling has signed on to star in the upcoming Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, Variety reports. The film will be directed by La La Land’s Damien Chazelle, from a script by Spotlight’s Josh Singer.The story is based on Armstrong’s official biography, First Man: A Life of Neil A. Armstrong, published by NASA historian James Hansen in 2005. The film will cover only the years 1961 to 1969, focusing on the first manned mission to the Moon. Acco

2016 has seen the release of some great Xbox One games, and now that the year’s drawing to a close, we’ve decided to round up a handful of the best ones to add to your wishlist this holiday season. Battlefield 1 Inspired by the events of the First World War, Battlefield 1 lets you armor up and take part in some of the greatest battles known to man. From storming the heavily-defended Alps to trawling through the scorching deserts of Arabia, this game has it all. You’ll also be

Don’t worry, Android owners. Soon, you too can get angry about paying $10 for a new Mario game on your device.
Super Mario Run is up for pre-registration on the Google Play Store. To ensure that that you get a notification when Nintendo launches the mobile platformer (read our review), you can sign up for alerts on the game’s market page. Once Super Mario Run launches on Android, you can grab it immediately as a free download, but then you will need to pay $10 to unlock the rest of i

If the word “Hatchimal” sounds like utter nonsense to you, you’ve come to the right place. The toy craze of 2016 has, for many Americans, been released from its temporary, concealed home beneath Christmas trees, and unleashed upon living rooms. It squawks, it waddles, and of course, it hatches. But what is it.
We’ve created a helpful FAQ, so that you better understand these creatures that combine the eerie artificial behavior of a Furby with the biological horror of birth

If the year 2015 saw Netflix and Amazon go head to head in the video-streaming realm, this year we’ve seen more of the same, as the two companies ramped up their respective efforts to capture the cord-cutting video generation.
Here, we take a look back at some of the notable developments in the worlds of Netflix and Amazon in 2016.
Going global
In January, Netflix launched in 130 new markets, taking the service truly global and giving the company a serious leg up on rival Amazon, which was

Yesterday, Dilbert creator Scott Adams issued a challenge to scientists with all the arrogance of someone who believes the main trait Hillary supporters have in common is being bullies:Climate Science Challenge. Find a scientist -- just one -- who says the climate prediction models are credible: https://t.co/SpJcVPcHmJ— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) December 28, 2016Adams was once known mostly for creating a comic strip about working in a cubicle, but for the last few years has mostly been

REVIEW: People are gearing up to say good riddance to 2016, and as the Earth completes another revolution around the sun, we’re all eager to try our hand at predicting the next big thing. Will virtual reality, on-demand services, and bots shine again in 2017? Or will the spotlight turn to messaging apps, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence?
Here are 15 startups that I believe are worth watching over the next 12 months. This is the latest in a series of

Breitbart News tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos will be publishing a book through Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions imprint, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He was reportedly paid a $250,000 publishing advance for the book, which will be autobiographical.
Yiannopoulos told THR that he met with Simon & Schuster “top execs” earlier this year and “spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” expecting to be asked to le

Amazon has been working on getting a drone delivery program off the ground for a while now, but some new patents show the company isn't out of wild ideas. As TechCrunch reports, Zoe Leavitt, an analyst for CB Insights, has discovered a recent Amazon patent for an "airborne fulfillment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery" — i.e., a giant flying drone mothership zeppelin warehouse.I just unearthed the Death Star of #ecommerce via @cbinsights... AMZN patent for airborn

Ding Lei, a top executive at Chinese tech giant LeEco and “global CEO” of Faraday Future, has stepped down from overseeing Faraday Future, sources tell The Verge.Faraday Future never had an official CEO — the company has gone almost two years without naming one — but sources tell The Verge that Ding helped run things from his perch at LeEco, a major investor in FF. He joined LeEco in 2015 as chairman of LeSupercar and was seen as the company’s second most prominent

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Analysts noticed a big, big issue when they looked at the data in the most recent state of mobile marketing report, says Stewart Rogers,

Facebook developers have crafted a version of the Atom open-source text editor that can be deployed in a web browser. Atom in Orbit, as the new technology is called, is now available on GitHub under a BSD-3 Clause open-source license, and a demo app lets you take the tool for a spin.
The new tool — which a spokesperson stresses is more of a hack or demo than a full-bore open-source release — builds on Facebook’s Nuclide IDE, which itself runs on top of Atom. Atom has a user bas

Roughly 177,000 people are expected to converge on Las Vegas next week for the Consumer Electronics Show. CES 2017 will have around 2 million square feet of exhibit space, and I’ll be there checking out the event with VentureBeat writers Ken Leung and John Brandon. We’ll all be trying to figure out what the big themes of the show will be.
John Curran, managing director for communications, media, and tech at Accenture, has come up with his annual predictions of the prevailing themes a

Before throwing your Wii U in the closet as you wait for the Switch, why not enjoy some nostalgic racing?
Nintendo announced today that Mario Kart 64 is coming to the Wii U’s Virtual Console digital store this week. Mario Kart 64, which came out in the U.S. in 1997, was one of the most popular games for the Nintendo 64, selling 9.87 copies.
Now, you might ask, “Hey, I already have the newer Mario Kart 8 for Wii U. Why would I want to play an older game?” Well, Mario Kart 6

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Samsung has always had a history of ups and downs, and that was none more evident than in 2016. The year started out remarkably strong for the company, and it put out impressive products that turned out to be huge hits with the buying public. But Samsung pushed its luck and got burned — literally.
Samsung came out the gate running in 2016 with its Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, launched in March. The pair proved to be the best smartphones Samsung had ever made, complete with great design, class-le

ANALYSIS: Perhaps no word could make me cringe more in recent years than the one that had come to define this recent period of startup euphoria: Unicorn.
The term may have been briefly useful, back when one or two private companies exceeded $1 billion in valuation on paper a few years ago. But, as with so many things in the tech world, the industry has a way of taking a moderately interesting concept and running completely amok with it.
When it seems every startup is a unicorn (or at least

Microsoft used the past year to put some of its failures behind it, and paint a clearer picture of its future. That future looks a lot like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and universal apps everywhere, and the software giant has been laying strong foundations towards it in 2016.
While HoloLens was announced in 2015, Microsoft started shipping the head-mounted display to developers earlier this year. Microsoft is pushing its idea of mixed reality with devices like the HoloLens, but t

There’s a lot going on with the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone, a dizzying array of things to consider. The first is that it’s massive, barely qualifying as a phone, with a 6.4-inch display and hard, chamfered edges that make it feel like a weaponized phablet. The second thing to consider is that this a Lenovo phone. For people in China, India, or Vietnam, this is not an anomaly. But in the US, where we prize our high-priced iPhones and Samsungs and various other Android phones, Lenovo

For Apple, the year 2016 may be best remembered as the year the headphone jack was stripped away from the iPhone, without any real apology, by one of the few organizations that has the power and gall to kill popular consumer tech standards and call it “courage.” It was a year of awkward product launches, and it seemed that every new gadget was also coupled with disappointment.But 2016 was also the year that gadgets weren’t necessarily the most important thing at Apple. The comp

Apple has a sticky problem on its hands, and until it’s resolved, it’s throwing a wet blanket over the experience of millions of people using iMessage and its new App Store.
Stickers are like emojis you can buy or download from the iMessage App Store and share in iMessage. If you’ve perused the marketplace since the launch of iOS 10 in September, you’ll know that they’re everywhere, and that there are increasingly stickers of all kinds.
There are cats

After a few bumpy updates and a lot of spit and polish, Windows 10 has shaped up to be a pretty solid OS: fast, stable and delightful to use. We’ve rounded up 10 great new and updated apps for 2016 that you can use to do things like enjoy your media collection, take notes, work on your photos and design projects, and stream your gaming highlights. Let’s dive right in. OneNote If you’re looking for a comprehensive note-taking tool, Microsoft’s OneNote is an excellent choi

Depending on who you believe, CES is either the most important tech event of the year, full of innovation, big announcements, and blowout parties, or totally dead. PR representatives spend months emailing hype about their products before the show begins, while jaded tech journalists trudge back from the Las Vegas Convention Center every year burned out on gimmicky gadgets and 15-hour work days. But for me — who after three years on The Verge has still never been to a CES — the show m

Earlier this month, the New York Times offered some bad news for the more than 180,000 people preparing to descend on Las Vegas next week for the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show:
Gadgets are dead!
This will no doubt come as a shock to the companies set to launch an estimated 20,000 new gadgets when the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 starts on January 5. For perspective on what Times columnist Farhad Manjoo dubbed the “Gadget Apocalypse,” I called up Shawn D

Today President Obama is planning to announce a response to Russia’s hacking of U.S. elections, and security experts are starting to get nervous.
In a statement, Intel Security’s chief technology officer, Steve Grobman, warned that retaliation could have unintended consequences, including inciting actual war.
“The administration, fellow lawmakers, and general public must understand the potentially catastrophic consequences of a digital cyber conflict escalating into a kine

Because Sprint is based in my hometown of Overland Park, Kansas, I’ve got a soft spot for it and find myself rooting for the company even as it has struggled in recent years.
Still, I was surprised to hear President-elect Trump crow this week that he had convinced Sprint to create more jobs in the U.S.
“I was just called by the head people at Sprint, and they are going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate