Technology news

Mobile World Congress is fast approaching, and companies are teasing what to expect from the conference in ever-increasing numbers as we get closer to the event. That includes Huawei, which confirmed that the next iteration of the company’s P-series devices, the P10, will be announced later this month at MWC.There’s not much information about the actual device itself in the teaser, which tells viewers to “Change the way the world sees you,” along with a double eye motif t

VB LIVE: The more data you have, the better? Mozilla’s CMO says unchecked data collection is only making marketers lazy. In our latest VB Live event, you’ll find out how Mozilla uses lean data practices, and why they’re the real key to customer trust and business growth.
Register here for free.
“As marketers we’ve been talking about not just data, but big data, for almost a decade now,” says Jascha Kaykas-Wolff. “The promise of big data was absolutely en

Yesterday T-Mobile announced two significant improvements coming to its unlimited data plan, T-Mobile One. HD video and 10GB of high-speed hotspot tethering are now included as part of the base plan and no longer cost extra. But one lingering question remained: would the company continue on with the silly “HD day passes” that users were required to enable whenever they wished to stream high-definition video. Today, the carrier confirmed to The Verge that the answer is no.As of Friday

Google is facing antitrust scrutiny yet again, with South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) announcing that it’s investigating the U.S. search giant to determine if it obstructed mobile partner Samsung’s development of its homegrown smartphone platform, Tizen.
As reported by the English version of the Korea Times, investigators are focusing on the Anti-Fragmentation Agreement between the two companies by which Samsung agreed not to fork Android in developing its own operating

Most of you will be familiar with the Fifty Shades Darker character Christian Grey, even if you haven’t seen either of the two films about him, or read any of the books featuring him. You probably have at least a few thoughts about him, like “He’s wearing a nice tuxedo in that poster,” or “Given that this guy is objectively extremely attractive, it’s weird how much I don’t want to spend any amount of time in a room with him.” I don’t pretend

Berkshire Hathaway today disclosed that at the end of the fourth quarter of last year, it held 57.35 million shares of Apple stock. That’s almost four times as many shares that it had at the end of the third quarter: 15.22 million.
Berkshire Hathaway, led by legendary value investor Warren Buffett, also owns stakes in other major public companies, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Bank of New York-Mellon, Charter Communications, Delta, GE, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Kraft Hei

GUEST: In honor of Valentine’s Day, we took a look at the difference in usage between men and women on Facebook Messenger bots over the past two months.
Who uses bots more: Men or women?
On average, about 63 percent of bot users are men and 28 percent are women, with the remaining 9 percent unknown or undetected.
Men tend to be more engaged than women in terms of sessions per user per month  —  on average they have about 50 percent more sessions. Women, however, tend

LinkedIn is making it easier for recruiters to find candidates that they want, no matter the position or type of employment. The Microsoft-owned company announced on Tuesday a contractor search filter to make it easier to identify candidates specifically interested in those roles. Now recruiters can query based on those seeking full-time, part-time, internship, and contract jobs.
Called Contractor Targeting, it’s building on top of LinkedIn’s efforts to help identify the right p

You may encounter errors when attempting to play games on your Xbox One or Xbox 360 this evening.
Xbox Live isn’t function properly for many people today, according to complaints from gamers on social media. Many are reporting an issue where they have difficulty signing into Microsoft’s online gaming service. If they do get logged in, Xbox Live typically disconnects shortly after. Other people are primarily having troubles with parties where they can’t invite friends to join th

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Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, or Stitcher.You can go to the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show if you want, and you don’t even have to start your own zine to get a credential.
E3 is opening its doors to the public. The show will sell 15,000 tickets to non-industry people who want to attend when the event returns to the Los Angeles Convention Center

2016 was as good a year as any to start plotting VRs trajectory. Headset launches by Facebook-owned Oculus, HTC, and Sony etched 2016 in the history books as the year major players brought virtual reality to the masses. Consumers, for their part, offered limited resistance. With little in the way of social proof, giddy gamers rushed to drop cash on pre-orders. Then, they happily spent more money to upgrade their gaming rigs to specs more capable of running the resource-intensive contraptions. U

 Many things that used to be true primarily of the public market now happen within the world of private company investing, including the participation of mutual fund investors.
Now, you can add equity research reports to that list.
Goodwater Capital — a two-year-old, consumer-tech-focused venture firm is today taking the wraps off a detailed snapshot of pre-IPO Snap, parent of the… Read More

As our homes get filled with more and more smart devices, a universal method of controlling them all is slowing becoming more and more important. Some solutions, like Amazon’s Alexa, involve using voice commands. Others, like the Sevenhugs smart remote, feature a touchscreen to automatically adapt to whatever it is you’re pointing at.
The Turn Touch remote is far less technically advanced than either of those two examples. But what it lacks in functionality, it more than makes up for

Encrypted communication app Signal is bringing video calling to both its Android and iOS users in a new update today. But with the refreshed app also comes support for CallKit on iOS, which introduces an apparent privacy issue into an app otherwise considered secure.
CallKit, a new iOS 10 feature, makes Signal act more like the regular phone app. It allows Signal calls to be answered from the lock screen and lists those calls in a user’s “Recent Calls” list. But while it might

A Microsoft executive is calling for rules to police cyberattacks carried out by governments. On the Microsoft blog, company president Brad Smith outlines a potential treaty of rules against cyber threats. He believes a treaty and a neutral officiating body would hold governments of the world responsible when cyberattacks are committed: We need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to implement the norms needed to protect civilians on the internet in times of peace. The

Sólfar Studios has launched its ground-breaking Everest VR virtual reality climbing experience on the Oculus Rift and Touch platform.
VR is going through its trough of disillusionment at the moment, but Everest VR could very well break even on its investment, said Thor Gunnarsson, cofounder and head of business development at Sólfar, in an interview at the Casual Connect Europe event last week in Berlin. Adding the new platform will be a big help in heading toward profitabilit

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates fears President Trump’s “global gag rule,” a policy that blocks funds to organizations that offer abortion advice and care in foreign countries, may endanger millions of woman and children. Gates, alongside his wife and co-chair Melinda, voiced criticism of the rule in an interview published today in The Guardian.The two philanthropists oversee the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest and most charitab

Over the weekend, the president received a controversial intelligence briefing on a public Mar-a-Lago terrace — and now, the House Oversight Committee wants to know whether the unusual setting resulted in a security breach. In a letter sent by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the House Oversight Committee today asked Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus for more information on possible security risks incurred by the public briefing.
Among other demands, the letter asks for more information about

We keep hearing that dating apps are killing love, ruining relationships, and bringing about the dating apocalypse. That would be pretty concerning, since 15 percent of adults, and nearly 30 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, use some form of mobile or online dating platform. We’ve seen this kind of mistrust before about technology taking the place of family members or community — and it turns out that couples who meet online seem to do just fine.One of the things that has people so con

Facebook may have put new tools in place that allow third-party checkers to flag dubious news stories, but that doesn’t mean that the social network will try to stop people from sharing “fake news.”In an on-stage interview today during Recode’s Code Media conference in Southern California, Facebook vice president of partnerships Dan Rose said that, “at the end of the day, if people want to share stories that have been flagged with their friends, that’s ultimat

GUEST: When we asked dozens of venture capitalists where they see the most potential for applied artificial intelligence, they unanimously agreed on health care. Technology has already been used to incrementally improve patient medical records, care delivery, diagnostic accuracy, and drug development, but with AI we could achieve exponential breakthroughs.
Deep learning first caught the media’s attention when a team from the lab of Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto won a Merck d

Scientists may one day genetically engineer humans — as long as the gene-editing technology is used to prevent babies from being born with diseases or disabilities, a science policy group said today in a report.The 21-member committee — which was created by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine — argued that this particular use of genetic engineering should only approved when there isn’t a “reasonable alternative” available. And

In late January, an exciting and unlikely project showed up on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter: a request for $900,000 to make a video game adaptation of Apocalypse Now, officially blessed by the film’s director Francis Ford Coppola. The page described the game as a survival-horror adventure with a sophisticated branching narrative, allowing players to create their own storyline for protagonist Benjamin Willard — whether that meant single-mindedly pursuing the rogue special for

Facebook has announced plans to roll out an app for the biggest screen in your home so you can consume your favorite cat videos and long form content shared across the social network. A dedicated video app for the television will be launching soon and will be available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung smart TVs to start with. Additional platforms will become available in the future.
When the app is installed, you can view videos that are shared by those you follow, including brands, frie

 There’s nothing quite like the atmosphere of a college hackathon. Amidst the free t-shirts and apps to help you find parties on campus always lie a few hidden gems for those with the patience to hunt. ThirdEye, one of those gems forged out of PennApps, UPenn’s hackathon, is being acquired today by TheBlindGuide for an undisclosed sum. Started by three current Penn… Read More

Facebook announced a suite of new changes to its video platform today, including a new setting that will autoplay videos with the sound turned on by default. This change means that, if your phone is not set to silent and you haven’t disabled the feature in Facebook’s mobile settings panel, every video in the News Feed will have audio fading in as you scroll past it. The switch from muting videos by default follows a multi-month testing period that first surfaced last August.Facebook

The horror, the horror.
Francis Ford Coppola’s film studio American Zoetrope and his game developers have canceled the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the Apocalypse Now PC game and have shifted their fundraising efforts to the ApocalypseNow.com website.
In doing so, the developers pre-emptively ended a campaign that wasn’t going to hit its target, as 2,730 backers had pledged only $173,097 of a goal of $900,000. For Kickstarter, campaigns are all or nothing. If you don&rs

The Apocalypse Now video game’s Kickstarter campaign has been canceled — in its place, the developers will begin crowdfunding on their own website. “The new platform will serve as a rallying point for the community and represents the team’s long-term commitment to both funding the project and sharing details of the development process,” the developers explain.
The Kickstarter campaign originally launched on January 25th, with the goal of raising $900,000 to partiall

Facebook is indeed building a video app for television, the company said today. Confirming a Wall Street Journal report from two weeks ago, Facebook said the app would initially be available for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung smart televisions, with additional platforms to follow. “Our video app for TV is a new way to enjoy Facebook videos on a bigger screen,” the company said in a blog post. “With the app, you can watch videos shared by friends or Pages you follow, top

Facebook is announcing out a series of major updates to video on the social network today. Some of them welcome, others not so much. First the bad: Facebook will now begin to autoplay sound on videos, so prepare for a cacophony of noises as you simply try to catch up with your friends’ lives. In Facebook’s defense, it says it’s heard positive feedback from after testing it out for a while (since August, at least), and it will be rolled out “slowly.” 

When it comes to drones, Amazon seems to have no shortage of ideas. In December, The Verge reported that Amazon filed a patent for a flying airship warehouse designed to expedite drone deliveries.Although it may not be as wild as an airship, CNN reports that the US Patent and Trademark office granted Amazon a patent for a new method to deliver packages via drone: parachutes.Drones will “radio a message” to deploy package parachutes
The patent shows that drones will deploy packages &l

Scientists have unearthed the fossil of a pregnant reptile from the time of the dinosaurs. It’s a wild find, because the embryo found inside the 240-million-year-old fossil was not inside an egg, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. That means that, unlike most reptiles and all birds today, this ancient marine reptile didn’t lay eggs but evolved to give birth to live young, just like we do.Called Dinocephalosaurus, the reptile was a relative of dinosaurs, an

Nintendo hasn’t made a Game Boy Player-equivalent for its 3DS hardware that enables you to play those games on a television, so the company’s unofficial modding community is stepping up to do this.
You can play your 3DS games on an Xbox One using a Universal Windows Platform app for Xbox One called UWPStreamer. With this program, which you can find on the Xbox One store, you can beam a 3DS game to a television over your wireless network and then control them with an Xbox One con

Thanks to the work of an intrepid group of marine researchers, tracking sharks is as easy as following someone on Twitter. OCEARCH is dedicated to the study of great whites and tiger sharks, tracking them to compile data on their behavior. Each shark’s location is updated when their dorsal fins breach the surface. Their tracker sends a signal to a satellite, or a “ping” as the researchers call it. OCEARCH researchers briefly capture each shark, holding them on a lift for 15 mi

Florida-based augmented reality startup Magic Leap, which has prided itself on near-total secrecy, has been accused of sweeping sexist discrimination and blatant misogyny under the rug as well. A lawsuit, filed yesterday in Southern Florida District Court by former marketing head Tannen Campbell, alleges the company fostered a hostile work environment for women, and that top leadership actively obstructed attempts to alleviate the problem and reprimand offenders.The complaint, available here and

Shaman’s reign of terror on Hearthstone may end even before the beginning of the next year of Standard.
Blizzard announced today that it is changing some cards in a patch coming near the end of February. Hearthstone is a free-to-play digital card game available for PC and mobile. Two problem cards, the neutral pirate Small-Time Buccaneer and Shaman weapon Spirit Claws, will suffer nerfs (a term used when a developer deliberately weakens something). Hearthstone is t

Someday, watching videos of cars driving themselves will become boring and commonplace. But we’re not there yet. This video, shared by self-driving startup Drive.ai, shows the company’s technology at work on a rainy evening in Mountain View, California, near Drive.ai’s headquarters.
This video is particularly interesting as it’s one of the few that we’ve seen show a car driving in poor weather. Last year, Ford showed off its cars driving in snow in a closed, control