Technology news

When it’s not busy trying to take over the travel industry, Airbnb engineers appear to be spending time on side projects to assist fellow developers. Today, the team launched Lottie, an open-source tool that helps add animations to native apps.Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time. “Lottie allows engineers to build richer animations without the painstaking overhead of re-writing them,” the team wrote in a blog pos

This morning, we learned that Denis Villeneuve, who directed Sicario and the heavily Oscar-nominated Arrival, not to mention the upcoming sequel Blade Runner 2049, has signed on to direct a new adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic novel about the machinations surrounding a desert planet which supplies the universe’s most valuable commodity. This is excellent news: Villeneuve is an outstanding director. But it’s also interesting because this could be the start of a much b

GUEST: Chatbots are invading the business world. Among enterprises, we’re seeing an uptick in their use for customer support automation by the likes of American Express, Royal Dutch Airlines, AT&T, and others across a wide swath of industries. And while customer support is the most obvious use case, bots today are underused as efficiency drivers, and they can have a much larger impact on all aspects of a business for those who learn how to leverage them.
In fact, with businesses increa

Apple is developing a new chip for Mac laptops that’s meant to improve their battery life while in sleep mode, according to Bloomberg.
The chip will reportedly handle some basic tasks, like checking for email and installing updates, while the computer is asleep. Apple currently relies on the MacBook’s main processor to handle these tasks, but by building a dedicated low-power processor, Apple could reduce battery consumption even further.
It could launch in a MacBook Pro later this y

PRESS RELEASE: SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 1, 2017– Sverica Capital Management LLC (“Sverica”) today announced the closing of the sale of Optiv Security (“Optiv”), a market-leading provider of end-to-end cyber security solutions, to KKR. This marks the culmination of a very successful partnership with Optiv, and its predecessor company, Accuvant Inc., during which the Company experienced extraordinary growth, increasing revenues more than 14x

Just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, today Domino’s Pizza opened its Facebook Messenger bot to allow people to make entire orders. Dom the pizza bot first made its debut last summer ahead of Pizza Hut.
Before today, you had to create a profile with Domino’s and configure preorder settings on Dominos.com. Now the full menu, including pizzas, wings, and other food, can be ordered without ever leaving Messenger.
The bot makes no use of a payments beta created for the Messe

AOC is a desktop monitor company with a reputation for making decent displays at low prices. The company’s latest Q2781 series is no exception; it’s 27-inch IPS monitor that starts at $499 with a 2560 × 1440 resolution and plenty of input methods in the form of two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and a D-Sub port, per AnandTech’s report. Plus, its got a neat design with a funky single-arm stand. But you’re not here for the regular, boring base version. You’re here

Polar Bear. Pronghorn. Beluga. Iron Man. No, these aren’t the names of a terrible Avengers reboot. Rather they are the codenames used by General Motors for its fleet of self-driving cars currently being tested in California. Thanks to the Golden State’s requirements that everyone testing driverless cars on its roads submit an annual report, we now know that GM, one of the country’s oldest and most storied car companies, has some pretty big nerds working for it.GM says it has 20

Facebook announced its earnings for the fourth quarter and full year 2016 today. The company has shown steady growth in its revenue and user base since going public, collecting healthy profits along the way. This quarter was no different, with a reported $8.8 billion in revenue and $3.56 billion in profit. More than 1.23 billion people now use the social network every day, and 1.15 billion log in from mobile devices each day.
Analysts had projected fourth quarter revenue of $8.51 billion, a 46 p

How a person tells a story could be interpreted in a multitude of ways — telling yourfriend about your awesome new car can come across as excitement or a brag, depending on the listener. To help detect the sentiment behind speech, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a wearable app that can parse conversation to identify the emotion behind each part of the story.
The app, built into a smartwatch for this research, collects physical and speech data to analyze the overal

Microsoft today announced that it has started to release a new Windows 10 preview build for PCs that’s available to people participating in the fast ring of the Windows Insider Program. Currently the build is only available for 64-bit PCs; ISO files for the build will arrive for 32-bit PCs by the end of the week.
Build 15025, which follows build 15019, doesn’t have a huge number of enhancements, but it’s notable for its inclusion of some new accessibility features.
First up, th

Facebook ($FB) announced on Wednesday fourth quarter earnings, generating $8.81 billion in revenue and an earnings per share of $1.41.
By comparison, Wall Street analysts had expected the social networking company to pull in $8.51 billion in revenue and an EPS of $1.31.
“Our mission to connect the world is more important now than ever,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “Our business did well in 2016, but we have a lot of work ahead to help bring people

Barnes & Noble is recalling its newest Nook tablet’s power adapter, only a few months after its release. The adapters’ casing apparently sometimes comes off, thereby exposing a metal prong. This, obviously, poses an electric shock hazard. The recall release says only around 147,000 units are affected. I don’t think the new Nook sold so well.
Users can register online for a free replacement adapter, as well as a $5 Barnes & Noble gift card. They’ll also get a prepa

The jury has come in on one of the first major lawsuits for the burgeoning virtual reality industry.
Facebook’s Oculus VR must pay $500 million to ZeniMax Media, but not because the former stole any proprietary information from ZeniMax (parent company of Fallout and Skyrim publisher Bethesda) to get the Rift head-mounted VR display to work. Instead, the jury found that Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey violated a non-disclosure agreement that he had with ZeniMax, and that violation serves as

 Online lending firm SoFi announced today that it has acquired Zenbanx, a startup that offers banking, debit, payments and money transfer services to users online and through a mobile app. The combination of the two will allow SoFi to move deeper into the financial lives of its customers. While today it focuses on student-loan refinancing, mortgages and personal loans, integrating Zenbanx… Read More

While you won’t have to pay to play games online with the Nintendo Switch when the system launches March 3, that fee is coming later this year. But Nintendo is now suggesting it won’t charge as much as some of its competitors.
Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima told Japanese business newspaper Nikkei that the Nintendo Switch Online service will have an annual fee somewhere between 2,000-to-3,000 yen. That’s equivalent to around $18 to $27 per year for access to online multipl

The Verge store has been up and running now for just over two months, and we’re only getting started. Today we’ve having our first big update to the store — let’s call it version 1.1 — which includes new shirt designs, a sticker pack, and fitted versions of all our original shirts!The biggest thing about this update is that the two new shirt designs are our first seasonal shirts. This season’s designs, the Gradient Square and Color Palette, are only going be o

Twitter said that it would begin making good on its promise to curb harassment, and has started today by giving users the ability to report offending tweets, even if the author has blocked them.
Considered to be one of the most requested features, the use case may not immediately make sense. If there is someone, say my colleague Jordan Novet, who has shown a pattern of harassing me on Twitter and has blocked me — I won’t be able to see what he writes about me. The pattern o

Oculus has been ordered to pay half a billion dollars in a lawsuit with games company ZeniMax. According to Polygon, a jury awarded the sum after determining that Oculus executives violated a ZeniMax non-disclosure agreement in the early days of building the Oculus Rift VR headset. But it also decided that Oculus wasn’t guilty of misappropriating trade secrets, another of ZeniMax’s charges. Polygon writes that the $500 million award is composed of $200 million for NDA violation, plus

Gun violence at schools increases when jobs disappear, according to a new investigation of school shootings that took place between 1990 and 2013. This troubling relationship means that more, not less funding should go to schools and communities during economic downturns to prevent and protect against possible attacks, the authors of the study say.
Adam Pah, a research professor at Northwestern University, decided to study gun violence at schools when the school where his mom works erected bulle

If you’re having a hard time finding the PlayStation VR, GameStop is ready to help.
The retailer announced today that it is receiving more PlayStation VR to sell to customers. It will offer them as a part of two different bundles. Both will come with the PSVR headset, a PlayStation 4 Camera, and two Move motion controllers. One bundle comes with Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, a first-person shooter/horror game, while the other includes the minigame collection VR Worlds.
PlayStation V

GUEST: Many technological trends come and go; the great ones last forever, and the not so great fade away, barely remembered as a fad. Not all technologies are purposeful, but when they are, they make our lives easier, neater, and smarter. This article presents an honest evaluation on conversational agents (bots) and where (we think) they stand in the future.
Whether you are a business owner or simply a customer, you must have encountered bots in your daily life. From online shopping (conversati

Researchers have pinpointed 83 rare genetic variants that may directly affect a person’s height. These variants, described in a study published today in Nature, don’t occur very often, but some were found to be associated with height differences of up to two centimeters (0.78 inches).Experts have been hunting down the genes that affect height as far back as the 1800s
Scientists have long known that the genes people inherit are instrumental in determining how tall or short they become

Take-Two Interactive has acquired Spain’s Social Point, a free-to-play mobile game developer of titles such as Dragon City, for at least $250 million.
The deal is a major step for Take-Two, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto and other big console and PC titles, to move into free-to-play mobile games. Overall, mobile games are a $40.6 billion market, according to a report released today by SuperData Research and Unity Technologies.
The transaction includes $175 million in cash and $75 m

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report today, in which all the companies that are actively testing self-driving cars on public roads in the Golden State disclose the number of times that human drivers were forced to take control of their driverless vehicles. The biggest news to come out of this report is from Waymo, Google’s new self-driving car company, which reported a huge drop in disengagements in 2016 despite an almo

Crytek’s downsizing continues, and this time it’s the company’s publishing team that is dealing with the pain.
The company announced today that it is laying off 15 people from its publishing team in its Frankfurt, Germany headquarters. These staffers worked on Crytek’s Warface free-to-play shooter, which did not caught on with a significant audience. This is part of an ongoing reshuffling at the publisher following financial difficulties where it failed to pay some e

For the first time, scientists have been able to extract DNA from ancient East Asian bones and compare it to the DNA of the people there today. It turns out that modern East Asians, unlike Europeans, are very genetically similar to their ancestors — and this information tells us more about the origins of farming and how populations migrated or stayed put.About 40 years ago, the Soviets excavated the 7,700-year-old remains of two women — one in her 20s, one in her 50s — from a c

AT&T is paving the way for 5G in the US, starting with an initial rollout in its Austin and Indianapolis markets later this year, the company announced at an event in San Francisco today. The telecom is calling this new high-speed network “5G Evolution,” and it’s supposed to reach initial top speeds of 400 Mbps, or about 40 times faster than a standard cellular data connection.AT&T says 5G Evolution will hit 400Mbps
This isn’t true 5G, which is supposed to hit 1Gb

Calling Hayao Miyazaki the “Walt Disney of Japan” is reductive, but not entirely inaccurate. The co-founder of Walt Disney Productions and the co-founder of Japan’s famed Studio Ghibli are dramatically different as animators and storytellers. Miyazaki’s characters have always been willing to venture into darker, more bizarre fantasies than Mickey and Co., and Miyazaki’s overall tone is warmer and less antic. But as businessmen, both spearheaded the creation of produ

Video game giant Activision Blizzard has started a new consumer products division and hired former Mattel and Disney veteran Tim Kilpin as that group’s CEO and president.
Above: Tim Kilpin, CEO and president of Activision Blizzard’s Consumer Products Division.Image Credit: Activision Blizzard
The Santa Monica, California-based game publisher said the move will further leverage its content and create new ways for audiences to connect with the company’s franchises and characters.

Facebook chief operating officer and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg deftly avoided making any politically charged remarks at the Watermark women’s conference in Silicon Valley today, even after being pressed repeatedly on whether she felt compelled to take more action in the era of a new government administration.
“I think we don’t know what’s going to be effective yet,” Sandberg told Recode’s Kara Swisher, who conducted the interview. “It’s very e

Mobile games hit a new record by generating more than $40.6 billion in worldwide revenue in 2016, up 18 percent from a year ago, according to research by SuperData Research and Unity Technologies. That money is equal to all global movie box office sales during the same time, the companies said.
Mobile games now account for half of the entire global digital games market. The year’s big hits included new titles such as Pokémon Go and Super Mario Run. The report examines the combi

On a sunny afternoon last May, the most written-about traffic crash of 2016 occurred on US Highway 27 outside Williston, Florida. A tractor-trailer hauling blueberries for delivery to a local farm was making a left turn onto NE 140th Court when a black Tesla Model S traveling in the opposite direction drove underneath the trailer at 74 mph, tearing the roof off and killing the driver instantly.
It was one of more than 30,000 traffic fatalities in the US last year, but this one received special a

One of the biggest surprises of the Nintendo Switch reveal was that the device would feature a paid online service, a first for Nintendo. Now we have some idea of just how much that will cost — and it’s relatively inexpensive.
In an interview with Japanese newspaper The Nikkei, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima said that the service would cost between 2,000 yen and 3,000 yen per year, putting it in the $17–$26 range. Though details are light at the moment, the service will c

If you ever feel like you made a big mistake at your job, just remember that at least you didn't make that mistake on national television.
News Be Funny compiles the best news bloopers from every month into one video for our enjoyment. This month features your usual newscaster slip ups, anchors that can't stop laughing and passersby stealing the spotlight with background shenanigans.
It's hard out there for a newsperson.Snapchat filter stops toddler's tears right in their fluffy bunny tracks
Se

In a major breakthrough, a team of European researchers has developed a high-tech solution to give a voice to the voiceless. 
By using a brain-computer interface, the team from the Wyss Center in Geneva successfully communicated with patients suffering from complete locked-in syndrome (CLIS), a devastating neurological condition. The researchers published their findings in a new paper published in PLOS Biology. 
SEE ALSO: Severe burns can heal faster with this 3-D skin printer
Those af

Mobile, once Facebook's greatest flaw, is now the social network's greatest success thanks to its ownership of four of the world's most powerful apps. 
That's not enough. Now, Facebook is working on further integrating these apps to dominate your smartphone experience — while simultaneously building for the next platform.
"For a while it didn't make sense to do multiple standalone apps," said Scott Stanchak, New York Times managing director of platform operations, "but Facebook proved

Multi-photo Instagram galleries are finally coming soon — and for everyone. Currently, only advertisers have the ability to publish several photos in a single post, which users can swipe through horizontally. But inside the latest beta release of Instagram for Android is evidence that this same feature is making its way to the app’s 600 million users.
Instead of tapping on a photo, you long-press. From there, a prompt instructs you to select up to 10 images or videos. You can apply a

Advertising mobile apps faces a lot of friction. You have to advertise it, get someone to tap on the ad, download the app, and then start to actually use it. A lot of people drop out before they ever finish that process. But that’s just one of the problems that 1App is addressing with its cloud-based version of Android.
The Menlo Park, California-based startup has taken the disruptive cloud-streaming technology and applied it to the problem of app discovery. Now you can use

A lawsuit battle between Johnny Depp and his former business management company has revealed more about the actor than any interview with Barbra Walters or Oprah Winfrey ever could. 
Depp, who originally sued The Management Group for misconduct and claimed they grossly misused his finances, received a countersuit from the management company, who claim that they did all they could to manage Depp's lifestyle, but that his outrageous spending was to blame.
The suit was filed on Jan. 31, and di