Technology news

More than 600 pilot whales have washed ashore New Zealand’s South Island over the past two days. Officials and volunteers are working to return the ones that are still alive back to sea, but many have already died or were euthanized because of their injuriesA mass stranding of this scale is almost unprecedented
On the morning of February 10th, more than 400 pilot whales were discovered to have washed ashore a crescent of land on New Zealand’s South Island called Farewell Spit, accord

GUEST: Recent innovations around the autonomous car have shaken up the automotive industry. Manufacturers and their suppliers are all accelerating their work on the cars of the future, both regular human-operated cars and driverless or semi-autonomous vehicles. But beyond just issues of autonomy, these cars of the future are undergoing a fundamental shift in human-machine interaction. Consumers today crave more relational and conversational interactions with devices, as evidenced by the populari

GUEST: A few days ago we heard that Google is selling Terra Bella — the satellite startup it bought for $500 million in 2014 to Planet, Terra Bella’s key competitor.
The deal is a pivotal moment for the earth-observation market — a market that provides all types of industries with strategic intelligence based on satellite data, with many customers in the defense and intelligence space. (Other applications include providing big box stores with data on parking lot fill rates by t

Over the last couple of years, Starbucks has been finding new ways to make it easier for customers to order their drinks with its mobile phone app. If you use Amazon’s Alexa, you can now place an order before you even leave the house.
Amazon has added a new Skill to Alexa via its Echo device or FireTV stick: Starbucks Reorder. Once a user links their Starbucks account to their Amazon account, the Skill allows you to place an order for your Usual from one of the ten stores you last visited.

GUEST: The recent launch of Super Mario Run by Nintendo set a new record, with over 40 million downloads during its first four days on the App Store. While these numbers portray a very rosy picture of the mobile gaming industry, it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.
Over the years, retention has become a tougher challenge for app developers. A few factors are responsible for this. First, the freemium model enables users to download many apps without hurting their pockets. Second, memory

GUEST: Two hundred twenty nine. That was the number of private companies valued at a billion dollars or more—so-called “unicorns”—worldwide in January 2016, according to a report released by VentureBeat. The Wall Street Journal offered a more conservative estimate, but even there the overall trend was clear. In just two years, the number of unicorns worldwide had more than tripled, from 45 to 149.
To prophets of doom and gloom, there was only one explanation for the unico

We love fantastic maps, and recently, we recently came across an artist named Arlin Ortiz. He has been working on a project called Any Which Way: An Adventurer’s Atlas, a collection of wonderful fantasy maps. Arlin OrtizThese maps are distinctive, brightly colored works of art, featuring castles, islands, forests, and more. Ortiz told The Verge that he’s been drawing for as long as he can remember. “There were always art supplies around the house and my parents were very suppor

GUEST: Few things have come to symbolize our collective hopes for the future quite like the somewhat outlandish concept of flying cars.
Long portrayed in films and futuristic television shows as the height of consumer technology, the flying car has so far eluded even our most brilliant minds – but perhaps not for much longer.
Following the publication of a whitepaper on the subject of virtual takeoff and landing (VOTL) aircraft, Uber has hit the ground – er, sky? – running with

It has now been more than 15 years since Windows XP was released, and no one is less surprised by this than Smash Mouth. “Well the years start coming and they don’t stop coming,” frontman Steve Harwell prophetically sang on the band’s 1999 hit “All Star.” And indeed just two years later, Windows XP arrived, dazzling the world with a two-column Start menu, fast user switching, and a now-iconic landscape photo of Sonoma County, CA.
It also introduced us to a new

When Kellyanne Conway went before NBC’s Meet the Press and described statements made by Press Secretary Sean Spicer as “alternative facts”, it had the unintended consequence of driving up sales of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Since President Donald Trump has been sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, another dystopian novel has begun climbing the charts: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
Sales have risen 200 percent since last November

GUEST: Investor activity is showing that the tech scene in Israel is hotter than ever. Figures from IVC Research Center and accounting firm KPMG Somekh Chaikin indicated that 2016 set the all-time fundraising record for Israeli high tech. Last year’s total climbed to $4.8 billion, exceeding the 2015 figures by 11 percent, The startups of Israel raised $3.8 billion in investment money in the first nine months of 2016, a 27 percent increase over the first nine months of 2015.
There’s m

We called HP’s Spectre x360 the best Windows laptop of 2016 when we reviewed it back in December, but noted that there wasn’t a high resolution display. That’s going to change with a couple of new upgrades, according to Neowin.
The 13.3 inch models are now available from Best Buy, which offers a 4k Ultra HD option that will run you $1,600 (with 16GB RAM and 512 storage), while models with the existing screen resolution will go for $1,199 (8GB RAM, 256GB storage) and $1,350 (16G

If you haven’t paid attention, there’s a surprisingly strong genre of browser-based games dubbed .io games. The name comes from the .io extension files, and one big hit is Miniclip’s Agar.io.
Agar.io debuted in April 2015, developed by a single Brazilian developer, Matheus Valadares. It’s a simple browser-based game where you play as a single-cell animal moving around a kind of graph paper environment. You swallow other cells and creatures so you can grow.
The casual game

I love movies that take place in pretty much a single location. There's something really wonderful about watching a director make use of a limited space and budget and creating a compelling world out of something far more limited than what you see in a typical movie.
The latest I watched was Queen of Earth (it’s on Netflix), which is about the friendship of two women (and the devolving sanity of one of them) during an escape to a lake house. The single location does so much to convey the f

If you own a first or second generation Kindle, you might want to hold off before you perform a factory reset. That’s because Amazon appears to no longer allow those devices to register with Amazon accounts, according to The eBook Reader.
The eBook Reader noted that devices that are currently registered remain so, but if users purchase a new device from a secondary market, or perform a factory reset, they could be out of luck. This means that while first and second generation Kindle owners

If you own a first or second generation Kindle, you might want to hold off before you perform a factory reset. That’s because Amazon will no longer allow those devices to register with Amazon accounts, according to The eBook Reader.
The eBook Reader noted that devices that are currently registered remain so, but if users purchase a new device from a secondary market, or perform a factory reset, they could be out of luck. This means that while first and second generation Kindle owners can b

On Friday, President Trump tweeted a quote from an article that was, for him, an odd news source: the legal news blog Lawfare. Citing the article, without any context or a link, he called this week’s court decision blocking his travel ban “disgraceful.”
LAWFARE: "Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute." A disgraceful decision!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2017Was Trump reading Lawfare? The answer see

Cameras began rolling for Marvel’s upcoming ensemble film Avengers: Infinity War back in January. To commemorate the occasion, the company has released a production trailer featuring interviews with some of the crew and cast of the ensemble flick.The trailer gives us our first glimpse of what to expect from the film, and opens with a brief explanation of the Infinity Stones, which have been featured in a number of the preceding Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The clip also gives us a tast

GUEST: After almost a decade in corporate venture capital, I’ve concluded that my world is highly misunderstood in the venture and startup ecosystem.
CVC is a large and growing player in the venture industry. According to CB Insights, corporate VC firms invested $18 billion in North America in 2015, which is roughly 25 percent of all venture investments that year. Yet I continue to be surprised by the outdated thinking that drives some very smart entrepreneurs and investors to di

(Reuters) – The new chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission under President Donald Trump is keeping under wraps his strategy to revise or reverse the Obama administration’s “net neutrality” rules, but emphasized he is committed to ensuring an open internet.
Ajit Pai, 44, a Republican lawyer who has served as a FCC commissioner since 2012, strongly opposed former Democratic President Barack Obama administration’s 2015 net neutrality rules that reclassi

It’s impossible to overstate the value of online privacy nowadays, especially with major hacks relentlessly dominating news headlines. That’s fueling a rush for virtual private network (VPN) providers — and you’ll find few as powerful as VPNSecure. Right now, you can nail down a lifetime of complete online protection for just $39 from TNW Deals. With VPNSecure’s network of more than 46 servers worldwide, you’ll be in the hands of a service that safeguards you

(Reuters) — Amazon.com Inc. warned on Friday that government actions to bolster domestic companies against foreign competition could hurt its business, in a possible reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.
In a routine description of regulatory risks in its 2016 annual filing, the world’s largest online retailer said “trade and protectionist measures” might hinder its ability to grow.
That language has not appeared in Amaz

The parent company behind Subaru—the Japanese automaker that produces the popular Outback wagon and has mastered the art of pulling on consumer heartstrings with ads featuring dogs—now has a permit to test self-driving cars on public roads in California.
Subaru’s parent company is Fuji Heavy Industries. FHI announced in November at the L.A. Auto Show that it is changing its name to Subaru Corporation. The name change will occur in April.
The California Department of Motor Vehic

US intelligence officials reportedly uncovered information of a plan to send whistleblower Edward Snowden back to the United States to face trial. According to a senior intelligence official, the “gift” would be an attempt to curry favor with President Trump, who previously called Snowden a “spy” and “traitor” who deserved to be executed. A second source confirmed the intelligence, according to NBC News. For Snowden, the extradition would mean he’d

Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality startup, is not so secret these days. An image of a prototype device was just leaked to Business Insider, which says the source referred to the device as "PEQ0,” a stand-in derived from an internal prototype naming scheme used by the company.As the photo makes clear, the AR tech looks very much like a prototype, and one that needs significant work. It appears that backpack-style computing device is worn on the back and then tethered to a set of gog

 Today’s Stories Prince returns to Spotify and Napster this weekend
WhatsApp now supports two-step authentication
Amazon’s Tap speaker gets a hands-free update in defiance of its name
Beats X bring Apple’s wireless headphone tech to a tethered form factorCredits
Written and hosted by: Anthony Ha
Edited by: Joe Zolnoski
Filmed by: Matthew Mauro
Teleprompter: Tomas… Read More

Those cables that are holding you down in virtual reality may soon go extinct.
Valve expects wireless technology to come to the HTC Vive and the wider, high-end PC-powered VR market this year. Devices like the TPCast already exist. This is a dongle you add to the Vive that wirelessly beams the HDMI signal to the VR head-mounted display and powers it with a battery. It isn’t on sale yet, but Valve thinks that will change soon — and then the company expects that tech will end

Music fans missing the late singer Prince, rejoice! On Sunday, some of his music finally returns to popular music streaming sites. Starting on February 12 – also the date of the Grammys – Prince’s music will be available through a number of streaming services. Among those confirmed are Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Napster. The list of music includes 18 studio albums and six compilations. You won’t be able to listen to his entire discography,

Amazon’s latest artificial intelligence tool is a piece of image recognition software that can learn to guess a human’s age. The feature is powered by Amazon’s Rekognition platform, which is a developer toolkit that exists as part of the company’s AWS cloud computing service. So long as you’re willing to go through the process of signing up for a basic AWS account — that entails putting in credit card info but Amazon won’t charge you — you can try

Russian officials have discussed the possibility of extraditing whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US as a way to improve political relations with President Trump, according to NBC News. The report cites an unnamed US official who has analyzed intelligence reports pertaining to Russia’s plans to “curry favor” with the new administration. During his campaign, Trump called Snowden a “traitor” and plainly stated that he should be executed for treason if he ever sets f

Game developers take notice – it’s about to get easier to publish your game on Steam. Valve today announced that it’s closing down Steam Greenlight in favor of the more straightforward Steam Direct. For game developers, this means easier access to the store, and for users, no more voting for games. Publishing a game on Steam Direct would require the developers to jump through some hoops. Valve wants them “to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or