Technology news

Tesla is rolling out its Autopilot software to Model S and Model X cars built since October, which are equipped with second-generation Autopilot hardware, according to a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The cars have been without a litany of safety features that are available in many older Tesla cars. The Autopilot software is being deployed to eligible Teslas over-the-air, and owners will not need to do anything special for the software to be downloaded.However, new Teslas still will not have al

Oscar Werner, president of Tobii Tech, gave me a rundown of the company’s eye-tracking technology for games at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month. And I’m finally getting around to relating that experience. With those demos, I’ve got a better idea about whether this will be the next great user interface for games.
Stockholm-based Tobii’s platform tracks your eye movements and uses them to control a computer.
Above: Oscar Werner, president of

Gigapixel imagery can capture an incredible amount of detail, whether it’s a stunt for a car promotion or if it’s used to capture every detail in fine art. CNN has released a new image of yesterday’s Presidential inauguration, allowing you to take in every detail of the event.
These sorts of pictures have been taken before: The Washington Post and The New York Times released massive pictures of President Obama’s inauguration in 2013, which highlighted notable attendees or

 Twitter chief Jack Dorsey today apologized for what he says were technical problems causing some Twitter users to involuntarily follow the @POTUS account as it was handed over to Donald Trump. As Sarah Perez reported here yesterday, Twitter users were bewildered as to why they were forced to follow the Trump @POTUS account, and many accused Twitter of doing the new administration’s… Read More

GUEST: I’ve been talking to some of my banker friends* about their thoughts on the M&A market for 2017 under the new Trump administration. The general consensus is that there will likely be more M&A this year for the following reasons:
1. The Trump administration is projected to be very business friendly and will likely take the following steps that will lead to more cash in hand for larger corporations:
Repatriation of cash trapped overseas in low tax jurisdictions. The idea here

GUEST: I’ve been talking to some of my banker friends* about their thoughts on the M&A market for 2017 under the new Trump administration. The general consensus is that there will likely be more M&A this year for the following reasons:
1. The Trump administration is projected to be very business friendly and will likely take the following steps that will lead to more cash in hand for larger corporations:
Repatriation of cash trapped overseas in low tax jurisdictions. The idea here

Lord of the Rings and X-Men actor Ian McKellen has been outspoken about his politics and activism, and it’s no surprise that he took part in today’s Women’s March in London. What’s even better is the sign that he carted along.Sir Ian McKellen's sign is EVERYTHING#WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/XS3hQ14Mir— my baker street boys (@shxrlocked) January 21, 2017Yep, that’s the Captain Picard facepalm meme, in protest sign form. Given his friendship with Patrick Stewart

The Sundance Film Festival reported this afternoon that its box office had been briefly been shut down due by a cyberattack.We have been subject to a cyberattack that has shut down our box office. Our artist's voices will be heard and the show will go on.— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 21, 2017Site visitors were greeted with a message announcing the outage:
Sundance Film Festival has been subject to a cyberattack, causing network outages that has shut down our box office. No

Google’s Tilt Brush app is evolving from a new way for artists to create into an important new tool in a developer’s arsenal.
Back in October 2016 the search engine giant open-sourced the Tilt Brush Toolkit, a set of scripts that allows developers to utilize .tilt files (your saved creations) in various ways, bringing them into other applications. It was an important first step in turning the software from an enjoyable creation app into something that has genuine use in the cont

When the official presidential Twitter handle changed hands yesterday, a number of users began to notice that they were following the account, even if they hadn’t followed it or had recently unfollowed it.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, when the accounts were transitioned from one to the other, those who followed @POTUS before the inauguration (at noon) ended up following two accounts: @POTUS and @POTUS44.If you were following @POTUS before 12pET, by end of day you'd be following *t

GUEST: Startups in Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius don’t attract as much capital as the ones located in the top hubs in Europe — London, Amsterdam, or Berlin — but these Eastern European tech hubs are on the rise, and early stage investment in the region has surged from $10 million to $283 million in just five years.
This growth should accelerate even further, since new accelerators, coworking spaces, meetups, mentoring opportunities, and

I went to Los Angeles last week and visited a fabled place called the Super Mall. It’s a dingy spot where I got a bad manicure and almost bought an airbrushed T-shirt. It was a time. While there, I also found a few phone case retailers and decided to buy a furry blue case for my iPhone. This is my review of that case after a week of use.
Let’s first address the case’s aesthetic. Nilay Patel says it gives him a ‘70s vibe. Lizzie Plaugic says it looks like some kind of crea

EXCLUSIVE: Rumors have been spreading lately about where Jay Leek, former managing director and chief information security officer (CISO) at Blackstone, will be heading next. His pick? ClearSky, an under-the-radar venture capital firm based in Palm Beach, Florida, where he will be managing a $300 million fund dedicated to cybersecurity.
After stepping down earlier this month from the venerable private equity shop, Leek may raise a few eyebrows with his choice of new home. ClearSky has been cloak

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has released a new report that outlines some of his expectations with Apple’s 2017 iPhone. The expected updates include some structural changes, in addition to new biometric identification technology.Details from the note were published today by MacRumors.
Kuo, a notable analyst with a good track record when it comes to predicting Apple’s hardware changes, outlined that Apple could be improving upon its 3D Touch ID technology for this year’s

Carnival Corp. unveiled an ambitious plan to use its Ocean Medallion wearables and Ocean Compass Internet of Things Network earlier this month at CES 2017, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas. It was a very interesting example of a non-tech company embracing technology to provide consumers with ongoing experiences, rather than one-time products.
The wearables can do everything from unlocking your cabin door to allowing you to pay for drinks and receive them anywhere on the ship. One of the key

GUEST: The console crushed all it’s competitors in terms of digital attention
GamesBeat has partnered with attention analytics company iSpot.tv, which measures TV advertising in real-time, to bring you a monthly report on how gaming brands are spending their TV ad dollars and which commercials are generating the most digital response (iSpot measures actions across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all major search engines). Below are the top five most-engaging gaming industry brands from Dece

Some weeks, you really need the pick-me-up of a movie, and for a lot of us, this is one of them. So while it's not exactly a long-term solution, I finally caught La La Land this week, and it's one of the few things that's been able to take my stress level down in a good two months.
I'm not usually a fan of musicals, but there's just something about La La Land’s long-take dance sequences, careful choreography of actors and camera, and the wonderful, bright colors peppered throughout every s

Mary Barra, the CEO and chairman of General Motors, believes that one way to build up more women leaders in the auto industry is to reach teenage girls who are interested in math and science. To that end, GM is investing in a new partnership with Girls Who Code, a nationwide after-school program that supports girls’ interest in STEM programs. Barra says the $250,000 grant is only the beginning to supporting the non-profit organization that provides free after-school program in schools, uni

Today, millions of women across the world are taking part in the Women’s March movement, to “send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights.” The marches are taking place in over 60 countries, spanning every continent — even Antarctica.Zunas shared a picture of the group on Twitter earlier this morning, who bore signs reading “Seals for Science”, “Save the Whales”, and &

Kumail Nanjiani is arguably best known for his role as Dinesh Chugtai on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but I suspect regular readers of The Verge — folks fascinated with technology and the culture that unspools around it — probably know his work on Adventure Time, Bob’s Burgers, The X-Files, and The Indoor Kids. That last one isn’t a movie or television show, but a (now defunct) podcast Nanjiani hosted with his wife, the writer and producer Emily Gordon.The Big Sick is the

This time a year ago, Amazon’s Alexa had a little more than 100 skills. Today, there are more than 7,000, and new skills are being added fast. Last November, Amazon launched the Alexa Skills Marketplace to allow the owners of devices that speak to Alexa to share, shop, and enable skills on Amazon.com.
Here are five skills released within the past week that are worth checking out.The Late Night Poet
This skill reads you poems that are then sent to the Alexa app in case you want to read

One of the first things artist Shaun Gladwell tells me about his new virtual reality installation, Orbital Vanitas, is that I am about to enter a real human skull. “Some people think it’s like, a fantasy skull,” he tells me. But no, every inch of its structure is based on what’s really under our skin.
I hadn’t really thought to worry about skull accuracy in a Sundance VR short, but it does feel like it matters — it’s one of the things that makes Orbital

I can probably count the number of times I’ve sworn on one hand — which might not be such a good thing, says a new paper suggesting that people who swear more tend to be more honest.For a study published this week in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchersran a three-part experiment to find a connection between foul language and telling the truth. Overall, they found that the more you swear, the more you honest you tend to be, and this holds true at both the individ

Augmented and virtual reality are slowly but surely being integrated into shopping experiences worldwide. At CES for example, Gap and Asus teamed up for an AR shopping app that may point toward the future of mobile shopping engagement.
And previously we covered Adidas and their promotion of a new soccer shoe using virtual reality throughout Europe. Now, a Nike store in Paris is letting customers get a look at different shoe colors using augmented reality.
While the GAP application allows cu

GUEST: Over the past half year, bots have been a widely discussed topic. Experts and the media heavily discussed all the possible benefits, the future, and the value bots could create for businesses and consumers. Arguably, the tipping point was Facebook’s F8 conference in April. Since then, many developers and consumers have massively experimented with bots and tested their limits to find the most suitable use cases for bots.
During this trend, the U.S. market has proven to be highly inte

Just in time for his inauguration, London-based fintech firm Trading.co.uk is launching an app that will generate trading alerts for shares based on comments made on social media by Donald Trump.
Keeping one eye on the U.S. President-elect’s personal Twitter feed has become a regular pastime for the fund managers and traders who invest billions of dollars daily on world stock, currency and commodity markets.
Trump knocked several billion off the value of pharmaceutical stocks a week ago by

PRESS RELEASE: WEST HILLS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 21, 2017– Source Photonics, a leading provider of optical components and modules, today announced that Francisco Partners has completed the sale of the company to a private equity consortium led by Redview Capital and Asia-IO, with participation from investors including TR Capital, Axiom Asia and Aberdeen Asset Management. Source Photonics is a global provider of communications and data connectivity components and module

Two year old federal net neutrality rules, which prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing websites and online services, could be an early casualty of the new Trump administration.
On Friday, Politico reported that the incoming president had decided to elevate current Republican commissioner Ajit Pai to be the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which adopted the rules. Pai met with Trump in New York on Monday.
Pai, 44, has been outspoken in his opposition to

That didn’t take long. A petition for new US president Donald Trump to release his tax returns has already appeared on whitehouse.gov, the administration’s official website. In fact, it’s the first petition to appear on the newly-updated website. How is it possible that the new website of President Trump, who has refused to release his tax returns to date — in fact, went as far as saying he was “smart” for not paying them — would even show such a petitio

Apple filed a $1 billion lawsuit against supplier Qualcomm Inc on Friday, days after the U.S. government filed a lawsuit that accused the chip maker of resorting to anticompetitive tactics to maintain a monopoly over key semiconductors in mobile phones.
Qualcomm is a major supplier to both Apple and Samsung for “modem” chips that connect phones to wireless networks. The two companies together accounted for 40 percent of Qualcomm’s $23.5 billion in revenue in its most recent fis

Earlier today, Android Police spotted a new feature getting rolled out to some Android devices called “Instant Tethering.” The idea cribs from one of the best features that Mac and iPhone users enjoy: instead of pulling your phone out and manually turning on tethering, you can just turn it on directly from the device that needs internet. On the Mac, you just click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar and select your iPhone. On Android, it seems like it can pop up a request if you aren&rsqu