Technology news

Nick Woodman grins when he recalls his first trip to CES. “I would have driven the Penske van, unloaded out back, wheeled in our Ikea furniture and constructed the booth ourselves, all five of us.” Eight years later I’m seated across from GoPro’s founder and CEO in a theater, part of a two story structure with lounge and meeting rooms that company built for CES. “I feel fortunate that I didn’t have build this booth like the old days,” he joked.
Despite t

 Things are looking up for biotech and health device startups wanting to cash in on VC dollars or go public this year. According to Silicon Valley Bank’s latest report on healthcare investments and exits, a conservative 2016 has set up 2017 for a hearty boom.
Though biopharma M&A activity declined slightly last year and IPOs declined more than 30 percent, according to the report… Read More

I don’t know much about teens, but I’m told they have short attention spans and enjoy EDM music. They’re probably not into wearables, but regardless, tech companies are trying to turn them into wearable freaks. Mighty Cast is releasing a wearable later this month that it thinks will appeal to the post-millennial generation. The Nex Evolution is a combination fitness tracker / smart home controller that relies on a unique blinking light interface.
Instead of a screen, the Nex ha

The wireless router has earned a bit of a reputation in recent years as a playground. It’s where certain tech companies, those typically with outlandish ideas and poor taste, experiment with just how gaudy and ridiculous they can make the simple act of handling internet traffic over a home network. These monstrosities tend to manifest as multi-arm, arachnid-like beasts that feel more at home in a deep sea fishing slideshow than anywhere remotely close to your computer setup.Case in point:

A US District Court Judge has sided with Paramount and CBS in a copyright lawsuit involving the Star Trek fan film Axanar, which had raised over a million dollars via crowdfunding. The filmmakers had argued that Paramount’s lawsuit was premature because the film hadn’t been created yet, and that they could proceed because Axanar fell under fair use. The court rejected both claims, but did allow the case to proceed with a jury to determine whether or not the project was substantially

President Obama’s entire social media presence as POTUS is now available in a single online archive. The administration today launched The Obama White House Social Media Archive, a searchable collection of everything the president and his administration posted on Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest during his two terms in office.According to ArchiveSocial, the platform on which the archive is hosted, this includes more than 100 social media profiles associated with

Apple never shows up to CES, but the last couple years, it’s still managed to have a quiet presence through HomeKit. That’s true this year, too, but it’s been really quiet, failing to drum up anywhere near the excitement of something like Amazon’s Alexa.
HomeKit is Apple’s platform for letting all kinds of third-party smart home gadgets — from security cameras to ceiling fans — talk to each other through your iOS devices. It’s done a great job of m

During T-Mobile’s Q&A session after the company’s CES event today, I asked CEO John Legere about the resurgent rumors of a potential merger or combination with SoftBank/Sprint under President Donald Trump and a new FCC. He described that combination as “a potential future outcome” of a new administration and friendlier regulatory environment.
Legere was heavily critical of Sprint’s position in the US wireless market during his earlier stage presentation, but res

TBS is exploring new formats for Conan O’Brien and his late-night talk show Conan. Turner CEO John Martin told The Wrap at CES last night that the nightly show has taken a beating in the ratings as it competes with series like The Daily Show, but a weekly offering could help it stand out.That quote was later clarified in an interview with TBS President Kevin Reilly by The Hollywood Reporter. Reilly explains the company has no current plans to change the show from daily to weekly, but that

TBS is reworking Conan, Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show, into a weekly format. Turner CEO John Martin told The Wrap at CES last night that the nightly show has taken a beating in the ratings as it competes with series like The Daily Show, but a weekly offering could help it stand out. It’s not clear yet when the change will be made.
‘Conan’ has some of the lowest ratings in late night
Conan, which first premiered on TBS back in 2010 after O’Brien’s

Fit and seal are crucial to getting the best sound out of your earbuds. But getting a perfect seal typically requires a time-consuming (and expensive) process of making a custom molding of your ear. A few startups have tried to make this process easier in the last few years, but Colorado-based Decibullz is one of the first ones to deliver on that promise.Decibullz is showing off its newest products here at CES — wired and wireless headphones with wings around the earbuds that you can easil

Chipolo showed off the Sticker and the Clip, the company’s two newest Bluetooth trackers at CES 2017, which it claims are the world’s smallest and thinnest trackers. The two products join the existing Chipolo Plus (“The loudest tracker in the world”) and the plain old Chipolo Classic (which sadly doesn’t have any superlatives tied to its name).
The Sticker will be theoretically be able to constantly recharge itself over the air
The Sticker is a tiny tracker device t

To be honest, I didn't know we could do this yet. Welcome to the future, Paul. SCiO is a miniaturized near-infrared spectrometer, which detects the molecular signature of things. It was Kickstarted a couple years ago, and now it's been miniaturized small enough to fit inside a phone. Specifically, it's inside the new Changhong H2.
The sensor works by bouncing infrared off an object and registering the unique molecular fingerprint that bounces back. It's not so fancy that you can just point it at

This year at CES, HDR support is the buzzword heard from almost every single TV manufacturer, culminating in this frightening-looking slide from LG which proudly promised its set would be compatible with all four major HDR standards.
Things aren't quite as problematic as they seem
As a consumer, that many different video standards is a daunting idea that brings to mind the format wars of yore (think VHS vs. Betamax or Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD). Fortunately, while the fact that there are now four stand

T-Mobile says that from this month forward, all of the postpaid plans it sells will offer an unlimited amount of data. John Legere, the company’s CEO, says the change reflects the way that people have begun using mobile data, where it’s in frequently the primary way they access the internet.
“The internet was meant to be unlimited,” Legere said at an event in Las Vegas today. “Why the hell are carriers still selling the mobile internet this way?”
“Unlimi

At a media event coinciding with CES 2017 in Las Vegas, T-Mobile just announced what it’s been teasing in recent weeks as Uncarrier Next. It’s not quite as radical or “big” as Music Freedom or Binge On. Instead, T-Mobile is getting much more transparent about the hidden taxes and fees that often hike up a consumer’s wireless bill. The carrier isn’t getting rid of those costs; beginning January 22nd, T-Mobile is including them in a flat, all-included T-Mobile O

Xiaomi has just announced its new television set, the Mi TV 4. The Mi TV 4 is a high-end set that features a 4.9mm thick frame, virtually no bezel, and a modular system that separates the panel from the rest of the electronics. In addition, the Mi TV 4 features Xiaomi’s “Patch Wall” software, which is said to be an AI system that can predict content based on what you’ve watched already. It comes with a soundbar that has 10 speakers, two wireless speakers, a subwoofer, and

 At this year’s CES Hardware Battlefield, Japet announced Atlas, a device designed to tackle back pain, which is the No. 1 cause of employee sick leave. Antoine Noel and Damien Bratic met at engineering school. The pair worked together developing robotic hands for children with disabilities, before parting ways to start on other projects in health technology. Bratic started work on… Read More

Car companies love to say they got there first. It appears Honda may be the first major automaker to show a concept vehicle designed for the ride-sharing market. The NeuV, which was announced Thursday at CES, is an acronym for the New Electric Urban Vehicle. NeuV [noo-vee] is based on the premise that self-driving, electric cars can be put to work rather than sitting idle nearly all the time.Honda says the two-seat vehicle could be programmed to pick up and drop off passengers when its owner isn

Anime has many meanings, depending on who you are.
Anime is lazy childhood afternoons watching Dragonball Z, or getting up early before school to watch Pokémon. It’s Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and the collected works of Studio Ghibli. For some people it’s gritty cerebral action movies, like Ghost in the Shell and Akira. For others, anime is the avatar image of a Twitter troll.
To paraphrase the original Crunchyroll fan: anime contains multitudes. But unfortunately, ani

If CES is a preview of the future, then give me more of this particular flavor. Dell today announces a new 32-inch, 8K desktop monitor with 1.07 billion colors, aluminum construction, 100 percent coverage of the AdobeRGB and sRGB color gamuts, and a monster $4,999 price. The UP3218K has a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (for a pixel density of 280ppi), which is as many pixels as you’d get from four 4K displays or 16 Full HD panels.
Speaking to The Verge ahead of Dell’s unveiling at CES, th

Making a distinctive and uniquely appealing desktop PC is a daunting task nowadays, but not an impossible one. Dell’s approach to this challenge, unveiled with the 2017 XPS 27 all-in-one, is to go for audio overkill. This new desktop has six speakers staring down the user — four covering the mid and bass frequencies, plus dedicated tweeters in each corner — along with two more down-firing, full-range speakers and a pair of passive radiators. I say overkill, but audio has been g

The most exciting part of Microsoft's Surface Studio — an all-in-one PC announced back in October — was its ability to fold down from a traditional, upright monitor position into a sloped surface much like a drafting table, allowing artists and designers to use it like a giant drawing surface.
Now Dell is taking the idea of a digital drafting table and offering it to anyone with a PC. It's unveiling a product today called the Canvas, which is a sloped monitor — not an all-in-on

 Pokémon GO might have been the most talked about “Go” game of 2016, but the world of AI remains fixated on another Go — AlphaGo.
Last spring, Go-playing AI AlphaGo made headlines when it defeated world champion Lee Sedol. Now AlphaGo is in the news for another reason. DeepMind’s freak of computing has been anonymously vanquishing the world’s top Go players… Read More