Technology news

Slack is adding more talent to its developer advocacy group, bringing on board Bear Douglas to lead the effort. Previously, she served in the same capacity while at Facebook and at Twitter, so her expertise in building relationships with third-party developers will come in handy for a company that’s been expanding its reach into the enterprise as of late.The move reunites Douglas with April Underwood, the former director of product at Twitter and now plays an important role within Sla

Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s two companies, have joined an amicus brief filed by 97 tech companies in support of the state of Washington in its lawsuit against the federal government. The suit is challenging an executive order signed by President Trump that would temporarily halt issuance of travel and work visas to citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries. The two companies were noticeably absent from the brief, which included nearly every big-name tech company when it was filed over

Playing a lot of World of Warcraft can now help you unlock that Mercy skin in Overwatch that you’re craving.
Blizzard has changed the way the WoW Token works. The WoW Token is a special form of currency used in World of Warcraft. Players can buy them with real money and then sell them in the in-game auction house, where other players can spend in-game gold to buy them and use then redeem them for 30 days of subscription time to the massively multiplayer online title. Basically, it giv

If you are not yet convinced that augmented reality is something to get behind, let this demo of Portal on Microsoft’s HoloLens headset change your mind. Created by Kenny W., a developer who regularly shares his AR-based projects on YouTube, the video shows you what it’s like to play the classic puzzle adventure in mixed reality.
The demo comes complete with a Companion Cube that you, thankfully, do not have to toss in an incinerator. Rather, you can shoot orange-and-blue portals on

VB LIVE: Mozilla CMO Jascha Kaykas-Wolff will be joining our upcoming VB Live event, “Lean data for marketers: How your org can stand out among lazy competitors.” Join the roundtable to 
Register here for free.
Today’s marketing has a dirty secret: it’s gotten lazy. During the past decade the number of marketing technology tools has exploded to well over 3,000. Overwhelmingly, those tools have focused on collecting, organizing, and finding insights from data. In

 f you’re looking for a great camera with interchangeable lenses, then I would immediately advise you to look at Canon and Sony offerings so you can start building personal expertise. But if you can already shoot and want something unique, then by all means buy a Leica — like the company’s latest, the M10 — which costs about as much as a Ducati… Read More

GUEST: Any video gamer knows how boring NPCs (non-playable characters) in digital worlds are. Their behavior is simple and predictable and their words entirely scripted by a staff of writers. This makes them uninteresting opponents and unsatisfying companions.
We’re far more likely to emotionally attach to lifelike characters, like the emo robot sidekicks in the Star Wars franchise, but crafting believable, autonomous entities you can actually interact with is no easy feat.
Character

British car company Morgan is famous for making stylish retro three-wheelers like the all-electric EV3, which the company debuted at the Geneva Motor Show last year. But what’s a Morgan owner to do when their underage child also wants to live the three-wheeled, zero-emissions life? Today, there’s an answer to that highly specific and privileged question: the EV3 Junior.The EV3 Junior is, unsurprisingly, a smaller and tamer version of the EV3 that Morgan made specifically for kids. Th

Chance the Rapper just released a new video for “Same Drugs,” a track off last year’s Coloring Book. As he is known to do, Chance tried to switch up the industry standard by premiering the video on Facebook Live — except it wasn’t exactly live. The video, a strange, woozy, puppet-filled thing, was prerecorded and then streamed directly from Facebook in high-def before moving over to YouTube.
For an artist like Chance the Rapper, who has a relatively young following,

 Nearly 100 companies filed an amicus brief stating their opposition to President Trump’s immigration ban on Feb. 5. Zendesk intends to join those companies in a court filing this afternoon, sources tell TechCrunch. The software company plans to sign on to the amicus brief via a filing this afternoon in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Trump administration is appealing… Read More

 Nearly 100 companies filed an amicus brief stating their opposition to President Trump’s immigration ban on Feb. 5. Zendesk intends to join those companies in a court filing this afternoon, sources tell TechCrunch. The software company plans to sign on to the amicus brief via a filing this afternoon in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Trump administration is appealing… Read More

After white nationalist Richard Spencer got punched during Trump's inauguration, even The New York Times asked if it's okay to punch Nazis. To highlight what some see as the inherent absurdity in this debate, game developer Ramsey Nasser used id Software’s open-source Wolfenstein assets to make Dialogue 3-D.Where Wolfenstein 3D asks you to slay Nazis with extreme prejudice, Dialogue 3-D politely demands well-meaning liberal gymnastics before you press the trigger. Dialogue 3-DHere are some

Today, PIQ — a company that makes an advanced sports tracker—announced that it’s taking its smart device ambitions even further, showing off prototypes of what it claims are the world’s first smart skis and kiteboard. While the current version of PIQ’s Robot tracker requires wearing the device separately, or manually mounting it to the board, the new kiteboard and ski prototypes streamline that process by directly integrating the sensor into the respective boards.Th

9to5Mac today reported, and The Verge has independently verified, that Apple is planning to adopt a new Ultra Accessory Connector (UAC) for its Made for iPhone accessories program — though it’s actually just a new application for an old plug, and its goal isn’t to compete with Lightning or USB-C, but to make them work better together.
The new-old connector is the same 8-pin plug you might have seen (and probably ignored) with your Nikon camera. People familiar with Apple’

Human skin can be morphed into genetically modified, cancer-killing brain stem cells, according to a new study. This latest advance has only been tested in mice — but eventually, it’s possible that it could be translated into a personalized treatment for people with a deadly form of brain cancer.The study builds on an earlier discovery that brain stem cells have a weird affinity for cancers. So researchers, led by Shawn Hingtgen, a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel

Late last month, Uber sued the city of Seattle, challenging the city’s authority to implement a landmark law allowing drivers in the gig economy to unionize. It was an opening shot in what is likely to be a long and costly legal battle.
Uber’s legal challenge comes at an awkward time for the ride-hailing juggernaut. The company recently named 2017 “the year of the driver” and has said it will devote energy and resources to improving its relationship with the hundreds of t

 Optometrists don’t make it easy to buy new lenses for a favorite old pair of glasses or shades. Especially shades! Who even does that? Lens replacements through an optometrist can cost more than a new pair altogether, especially when it comes to sunglasses. A new startup out of Westwood, Calif. called Lensabl is on a mission to keep your favorite frames on your face. Whether the old… Read More

Last summer, Pokémon Go players descended on Milwaukee County parks in droves, and those Poké masters allegedly left quite a mess. This has prompted a response from the people in charge of those public spaces.
The Milwaukee county board passed an ordinance last week that will require Pokémon Go developer Niantic to acquire a permit to use the county’s park locations in the location-based monster-catching simulator, according to the Milwaukee Journal

GUEST: Imagine: Humans waging an epic battle against technology, with human intelligence inevitably subjugated by artificial overlords. Plenty of folks would line up with front-row tickets and popcorn in hand. But it’s also the very real manifestation of a universal fear — jobs relegated to machines, livelihoods handed over to bots.
But when we take a closer look at bots and other forms of artificial intelligence, our worst fears are a far cry from the truth. We’ve built bots t

In 2015, the internet fell in love with a Super Bowl halftime hero. It wasn’t headliner Katy Perry, or special guests Lenny Kravitz and Missy Elliott, who were also attached to the show. It was Left Shark, a costumed backup dancer who won hearts with offbeat, out-of-sync dance moves. Now that Super Bowl 51 has passed, we finally have a meme mascot to rival Left Shark: Lady Gaga herself, the headliner for 2017’s spectacle.During her 13-minute performance, Gaga — dressed to kill

 Desktop Metal has raised $45 million in a Series C round of venture funding to develop desktop 3D printers that make metal objects. The company aims to bring metal-making capabilities to smaller businesses and designers who couldn’t afford, or find the space, for previously available technologies. GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) led the investment, joined by BMW iVentures and… Read More

 Desktop Metal has raised $45 million in a Series C round of venture funding to develop desktop 3-D printers that make metal objects. The company aims to bring metal making capabilities to smaller businesses and designers who couldn’t afford, or find the space, for previously available technologies. GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) led the investment, joined by BMW iVentures, and… Read More

New York City-based VC firm Union Square Ventures (USV) announced today that it has invested in Tucows, a 23-year-old company that has been publicly traded for over 15 years. It is currently trading on the Nasdaq at $48.30 per share.
In a blog post authored by partner Brad Burnham, USV said it had made a substantial investment in the Ontario, Canada-based internet and telecommunications company. This is the first time USV is making an investment in a public company, an uncommon practice amo

Google just announced a small but important user experience change to its Accelerated Mobile Pages platform, or AMP. The company explained in a blog post today that it will start allowing users to copy or share an AMP article’s source link instead of the Google-specific URL. Until now, the service, which offers up more simplified and less data-intensive versions of publishers’ articles, had basically made this impossible.
“Many users have requested a way to access, copy, and sh

Forget about the Super Bowl (as exciting as it was).
Twitch announced today that Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, a member of the professional League of Legends team SKT T1, broke a record on the livestreaming site today for an individual streamer by attracting 245,100 concurrent viewers to his channel. This was also his first broadcast ever on Twitch, which has over 100 million users a month.
Faker is one of the most popular players for one of the world’s most popul

Facebook is being pressured by a group of shareholders seeking the removal of company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg from the board of the directors. A proposal has been put forward claiming that an independent chairperson would be better able to “oversee the executives of the company, improve corporate governance, and set a more accountable, pro-shareholder agenda.”
The idea for Zuckerberg’s board ousting comes from Facebook shareholders who are members of the consumer w

An enormous Tesla-installed power storage facility is up and running at Southern California Edison’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California. The facility, announced last fall, holds enough energy to power 15,000 homes for four hours — 80 megawatt hours of electricity with a peak output of 20 megawatts.
It’s designed to reduce the need for “peaker plants” — electricity generation facilities that run when electricity demands are particularly high, such as o

The organizers behind the Women’s March, who orchestrated last month’s post-Inauguration Day protests, announced a forthcoming general strike on Twitter this morning. The proposed date of the strike, dubbed “A Day Without A Woman,” is still to come.On January 21st, millions of anti-Trump protesters gathered in Washington D.C. and around the world to share their support for women’s rights and equality. And the past two weeks have seen thousands of people rallying tog

 It’s easy to forget that even with the fanciest of machine learning models, we still need humans in the trenches cleaning input data. Descartes Labs, a startup that combines satellite imagery with data about our planet to produce insights and forecasts, knows this all too well. The company ended up building its own cloud-based parallel computing infrastructure to clean and process… Read More

After an expected debut at Mobile World Congress on February 26th, LG’s flagship G6 smartphone reportedly won’t go on sale in the United States until well over a month later on April 7th. That’s the date VentureBeat expects the G6 to arrive on US carriers — hopefully to better fortunes than the underwhelming G5 from last year.The G6 will be released in South Korea much sooner on March 9th. So at least in that region, the smartphone will have a significant lead over Samsun

I remember there was an arcade by my childhood home that had a virtual roller-coaster ride. The machine would move up and down and side to side in an attempt to re-create the feeling of being on a real roller coaster, but you were really just inside a loud arcade. It was the best ride, hands-down. Koei Tecmo Wave’s new VR Sense sounds like the exact same ride except with the ability to re-create wind and “stimulate the senses.” Koei Tecmo Wave says the new arcade machine brings

The Super Bowl is one of those rare events that still attracts a live television audience of tens of millions of people, and that continues to make it a massive venue for gaming publishers to tell people about their games. Only it’s the free-to-play game makers on mobile, console, and PC that actually drop the cash to buy these spots.
World of Tanks publisher Wargaming spent an estimated $5 million to market its free-to-play vehicle-based shooter during the Super Bowl. 

 Google today is rolling out a change to its AMP integration in Google Search that will let you view, copy and share the publisher’s own link to the webpage in question, instead of the AMP URL. The decision to make this change follows some backlash from publishers who believed Google was stealing their traffic by changing their own URLs to those that had “Google” in… Read More

 Google today is rolling out a change to its AMP integration in Google Search that will let you view, copy and share the publisher’s own link to the webpage in question, instead of the AMP URL. The decision to make this change follows some backlash from publishers who believed Google was stealing their traffic by changing their own URLs to those that had “Google” in… Read More

A generation ago, during a heated presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush called opponent Michael Dukakis a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” It was meant as a way to paint Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, as a far-left extremist. And it worked: the line became the campaign’s signature insult, and after a series of Dukakis missteps, Bush won with 53.4 percent of the popular vote.
After the events of the past two weeks, it’s hard to imagine Bush’s wor

On November 10th, two days after the election of Donald Trump, a Reddit user posted an image to a subreddit for supporters of Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader running for president of France. “I understand you require memes,” the user, globalism_sux, wrote. “I bring you Pepe Le Pen. Rare, from across the pond.” The image attached to the post portrayed Pepe the frog as Le Pen — with long blond hair and a dark blouse — against a tri-color, French flag backdro

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that smart TV maker Vizio has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a case involving the TVs’ data collection techniques. Vizio allegedly collected data on what people viewed on 11 million of its TVs and then shared the data with third parties without informing people about the data collection or receiving consent.
As part of the settlement with the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General, Vizio must also delete data that it collected

Valentine’s Day is a pretty good holiday, as you’ll get candy from somewhere no matter what and you’ll also look at the calendar and say “huh, February is halfway over... winter is pretty much done.” I don’t want to wade into the debate about whether V-Day makes single people feel lonely or why capitalist consumption has to be involved in all our expressions of affection, because for one I never feel lonely (that’s what films and radio are for?) and for

Samurai Jack, the mythical tale of a time-traveling warrior from legendary animator and director Genndy Tartakovsky, is back for a fifth and final season on March 11th. Now, we’ve got our very first trailer showing a now-ageless Jack stuck forever in the future. According to early interviews with Tartakovsky and details from Adult Swim, this final chapter takes place 50 years after the events of season four. Jack is stuck is the techno-dystopia brought on by the demon Aku, and he’s s

Earthfall is a lot like Left 4 Dead. But instead of shooting zombies, you are shooting aliens who came out of a meteorite that hit the Pacific Northwest. The game might very well seem derivative, but developer Holospark is taking care to make sure that the title has its own unique signature.
For starters, the game has a lot of backstory about the aliens and what they’re doing with this meteorite invasion of Earth. Each co-op mission that you play will reveal another piece of the puzzle, an

TomTom has launched a new fitness tracker called the Touch Cardio. Essentially a cheaper version of TomTom’s Touch Fitness Tracker, the Touch Cardio features a heart rate monitor and will track your steps, sleep, calories burned, and active time.The company says the Touch Cardio also features a more fashion-friendly design than its predecessor, and will work with TomTom’s new fitness app. The TomTom Touch Cardio will retail for £89.99, or about £40 less than the Touch Fit