Technology news

GUEST: Back in early 2009, many brands realized for the first time that iPhone apps could be a branding vehicle. Suddenly, there was a frenzy of activity as marketers rushed branded apps to the marketplace.
In 2017, history seems to be repeating itself. In this case, many marketers are quickly building “Skills” on Amazon Echo. Such Skills include ordering a pizza on Domino’s, fetching an Uber, and connecting to your FitBit. In early January, Amazon announced it had 7,000 Skills

Mobile World Congress convened this week in Barcelona for four days of talk, demos, and product launches aimed at getting the world totally psyched about the connected future.
There was a healthy dose of virtual reality, though it seemed the industry had decided that its best use just may be for product demos. There was a flood of announcements related to 5G networks. And yes, there were even some gadgets.
Here are some photos that capture the madness of 100,000 people marching across a mas

LEVL, the device that can tell you how much fat you’re burning by analyzing your breath, is now available to consumers in the Seattle area. The device made its debut way back at CES 2016, and now it’s finally making its way to consumers. The LEVLhome works by detecting the amount of acetone in an exhaled breath, which is an indicator of fat burned, and converting that into a quantifiable number on the companion app. The LEVLhome costs $699 for the device, and will cost an extra $49 a

GUEST: Snap’s much-anticipated IPO has generated a great deal of enthusiasm in the tech and financial communities, as well as here in Los Angeles, the company’s home town. And, for good reason. It is one of the largest tech IPOs in recent memory, and the company is one of the only viable challengers to Facebook’s social media dominance. Indeed, it is the largest U.S. tech IPO since Facebook’s. But with that status come challenges. Now that Snap is a public company, not on

The fast pace of technology is bleeding into every aspect of contemporary life, including the artists trying to make sense of the surrounding world. The Verge visited The Armory Show and the NADA art fair during New York Art Week, where both established and emerging artists are experimenting with digital technology and its impact on the arts. We spoke with emerging artists about the way screens, science, and cyberpunk culture informs their work.The fairs run through Sunday, and you can see a sch

Eve Online creator CCP Games is 20 years old this year, but Iceland’s biggest game company is still reinventing itself. This week, the company announced its 12th virtual reality title, Sparc.
The game is a virtual sports title that is reminiscent of the disc-throwing scene in the film Tron. It’s just one more sign of how CCP is all-in when it comes to virtual reality. I talked about the game with Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, in an interview at the Game Devel

After months of assembling and testing inside Bugatti’s Atelier in Molsheim, France, the first production Bugatti Chiron super sports cars are on their way to three owners in Europe and the Middle East, the company announced this week.I visited the Atelier last year and spoke to Christophe Pichon, general manager of the Molsheim facility and Bugatti board member for production and logistics, about what it takes to build a single $2.6 million Bugatti Chiron.
It takes five months to build th

Early this morning, President Donald Trump sent out a string of Tweets, alleging that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower to undermine his campaign, and questioned the legality of such an action.Trump’s tirade seems to have originated from allegations in a Breitbart article, which sums up the conspiracy theory as follows: the Obama Administration monitored Trump Tower during the campaign, continued to do so, and allowed information such as the so-called Trump Dossier and Mich

GUEST: My firm fell into venture somewhat recently. Even though we started working with, and taking equity in, Uber during its Series A, we also started working with, and taking equity in, several dozen startups over the last 18 months and have only deployed capital four times. We’re still relatively new to this world. Eighteen months in, one clear impression I’ve developed is that the venture and startup community waste vast amounts of time having coffee and networking.
On any given

Legendary’s upcoming monster movie Kong: Skull Island hitstheaters next week, and Google is having a bit of fun with it by plotting the film’s titular location on Google Maps.
You can find the island on Google Maps, just south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Sadly, the actual island isn’t displayed on the map; it’s just a point in the middle of the ocean. You can leave a review, though.The company has done some fun stuff with its maps before, bringing its Street View

Queen wasps pass down their personality to worker wasps, says a new study in which brave scientists poked wasps with paintbrushes.For the study, published in the journal Animal Behavior, scientists gathered 30 wasp nests and poked the queens using a paintbrush. There were a variety of reactions: Some flew away after being poked twice. (Smart.) Some didn’t care, staying where they were even after being poked 50 times. And some — the wasps that I personally identify with — got ma

Just after Netmarble acquired Marvel Contest of Champions, it has a big headache on its hands in the form of a player revolt.
South Korea’s Netmarble acquired the Vancouver studio of Kabam, the maker of the Marvel game, in a transaction that closed last week. The studio launched a Patch 12.0 for the game, and it triggered an outburst of anger from players, who vented on sites such as Reddit. And those once loyal fans who generated more than $450 million in revenue for the game are quite ma

Red Bull is announcing a Street Fighter V esports tournament that will find North America’s next top amateur esports athlete.
The Red Bull Proving Grounds 2017 will hold qualifying competitions in 11 cities.
With the growing popularity and success of last year’s Red Bull Proving Grounds, the tournament has expanded into two seasons and added 5 new Red Bull Proving Grounds qualifying stops.
Competitors angling for a shot at the pros will compete in Orlando, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chic

There’s no end credits scene playing at the end of Logan (which is fine by us), but there is a taste of Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool 2 playing before the film. The long teaser, titled No Good Deed, is an extended bit that takes no small amount of inspiration from another notable superhero franchise.Reynolds shared the video this morning on Twitter, and it’s a fun one. Hearing an altercation, Wade Wilson runs to change into his costume, finding a nearby telephone booth. He changes to

GUEST: The VR industry finds itself positioned this year somewhere in what Gartner’s Hype Cycle refers to as the trough of disillusionment. This is a time where, as it gains momentum, the industry needs to rally together and push its ecosystem to the next stage of market adoption.
The established hardware players like HTC, Oculus, Google, and Samsung have the most at stake and the most to lose, but it’s the startup community that’s driving market adoption by creating conte

With the Nintendo Switch now out in stores, iFixit has torn one apart to see what’s inside. One thing’s for sure: it’s quite a bit more complicated than the NES Classic Edition.While there’s a bunch of parts to be taken apart, the tablet is the most interesting. Opening it up the team observed that it “looks like a computer! Battery, heatpipe, thermal paste, fan. It’s all there.” iFixit noted that the 16Wh battery seemed to be a priority, but also that i

So the Oscars happened. I haven't seen all the year's Best Picture nominees, but I can't imagine liking one more than Moonlight — the fact that it's so far from a traditional Hollywood film makes its win all the more exciting.
I also caught up on Hidden Figures last weekend, since it was the last nominee I really wanted to see. The film's just as wonderful as everyone's saying — it somehow manages to be energetic, fun, and funny while also dealing in a very serious way with racism, s

dbrand, a company that makes custom vinyl skins for a variety of devices, is warning Nintendo Switch owners to avoid buying a wrap for their device. The reason? The adhesive can damage the outer coating of the device.The company highlighted the issue in a post to Reddit, in which its designers first noticed the issue with a pre-production model. “After a couple of prototypes, we saw minor indications of the outer coating beginning to peel off.” The company also found that the regulat

As a kid, my parents had a no TV policy, and by proxy, no video games. Some of my friends had the big gaming consoles with which they introduced me to Mario and Sonic on the occasional sleepover. But when it came to the world of games, I felt mostly left out.
My first exposure to gaming as a hobby — and to the fantasy genre in general — camefrom Link. My parents got me a Game Boy for Christmas in 1993, and it came with The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. When I asked them re

Created by Sahil Lavingia, founder of commerce startup Gumroad, Donatemates is a new service for creating donation-matching campaigns on the fly.
The site lets you start a fundraising campaign — say, for Planned Parenthood — pledge to match donations up to a certain dollar amount, and track and share incoming donations.
On social media, matching campaigns are a relatively common phenomenon. Lavingia tells VentureBeat that he hopes to give

(Reuters) – Technology companies have been a driving force behind the U.S. stock market’s recent record rally, and despite mounting evidence of stretched valuations the sector remains a top pick for investors expecting a wave of capital expenditures by U.S. corporations.
Corporate tax cuts and reduced regulations planned by President Donald Trump will give companies reason to spend more on cloud computing, factory automation and smart connectivity that will directly benefit Silicon V

(Reuters) – Ride services company Uber for years has used a secret tool to avoid authorities in markets where its service faced resistance by law enforcement or was banned, the company confirmed on Friday.
The New York Times first reported the existence of the program, called Greyball, which uses data from the Uber app and other methods to identify and circumvent officials who aimed to ticket or apprehend drivers in cities that opposed its operations.
Rides hailed from a location near a ci

Another former Uber engineer has stepped forward with sexism allegations against the tech company.
But this story is different from Susan Fowler’s account in a major way: the harassment came from a woman. “I wasn’t dealing with some white guy in power,” wrote Keala Lusk in a Medium post published Friday.
In the post, Lusk details disrespect and sexism she reportedly faced during her time at the company. She shares an email she sent to Uber’s human resources departme

If you don’t have a Nintendo Switch by now, you’ll probably have to continue waiting at least a few more days.
Nintendo’s latest console launch has come and gone (read our review of the hybrid home/handheld device), and the Switch is now mostly sold out at physical retailers like Target, ToysRUs, and Walmart as well as at online stores like Amazon, but you won’t have to wait long to get another chance to pick up the system because new shipments should hit retail locations

We’re still waiting for President Trump to weigh in definitively on the ongoing H-1B visa reform debate, but his administration just introduced a new change to the system that may be seen as hostile to the tech industry. In a press released posted this evening to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website, the Trump administration said it was instituting a temporary suspension of what is known as premium processing for H-1B visa petitions. The change is slated to take effe

Google today enhanced its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) public cloud infrastructure offering with new virtual machine (VM) instances that boast up to 64 virtual central processing unit (CPU) cores, effectively providing more computing power for applications. They’re available now in beta for all users and projects out of Google’s data center zones that run Intel’s Haswell and Broadwell chips.
There are three available flavors in the Google Compute Engine (GCE): a standard instanc

Now that Nintendo Switch consoles are arriving (though not for everybody), we have finally found out exactly what you can and can’t do with them when it comes to save files and downloaded games. The answer: not very much at all.
Polygon has pointed out all the various problems, which amount to a system that’s significantly more locked down than the competition. It seems as though Nintendo wants to limit everything to a single console rather than to your online Nintendo account &mdash

The Nintendo Switch is out, and let’s say you want a little Blaster Master action to go along with your adventures in Breath of the Wild. That’s understandable, but that game isn’t out on the American eShop store. But when has something like ever stopped you?
Nintendo has dropped region locking for the Switch, and that means you can get games from other countries on your new console. This is especially cool because the Japanese store, for example, has nearly twice as many games

The new Zelda game is incredible, and it is also complicated. Breath of the Wild has interlocking systems that enable you to do some incredible things, but you may find yourself overwhelmed when you start. And I’m here to help.
Before we get into it, a piece of advice: Don’t sell the loot you collect unless you’re sure you don’t need it. You can sell the items you craft, like food or elixirs, but you will have a use for just about anything in your inventory. And you don&r