Technology news

GUEST: The Fed has all but promised to increase rates at the March meeting, and if it does, there will likely be adverse repercussions. The Yellen Fed is on the precipice of making the same mistake the Greenspan Fed did when it tried to control capital market prices by increasing rates. Greenspan had the dot-com bubble of the ’90s that he wanted to address. Remember when eyeballs on websites were more important than corporate earnings, and companies changed their name to whatever.com just

The Weeknd has released a new video for “I Feel It Coming”, his second collaboration with French electronic music duo Daft Punk. It’s a gloriously retro music video that channels Michael Jackson and those science fiction films you’d find on VHS tapes at your local rental store in the 1980s.“I Feel It Coming” first dropped back in December on Weeknd’s album Starboy, and it’s an easygoing, retro number. The video doubles down on the retro feel, with

On the opening night of the SXSW film festival, Ridley Scott hosted a screening of his 1979 classic Alien along with a special bonus: a preview of footage from the upcoming Alien: Covenant. Normally, I don’t think there’s a ton of value in writing up preview footage, particularly in a review-style format. It’s always the best of the best, hand-picked to get people as hyped as possible, and let's face it: even the worst movie can have great moments.The 20 terrifying minutes of A

Gram Games was running out of cash in 2014, and then Istanbul-based company made its fortune. It released 1010!, a Tetris-like puzzle game that has been downloaded more than 100 million times. That game saved the company and helped it move on to other mobile game hits.
It is one of the rare success stories in the world in casual mobile games, and it is benefiting from the ongoing growth of the $40 billion mobile game business.
Now Gram Games has expanded to London, opening its first office

Now more than ever, the private spaceflight industry is filled with diverse companies looking to make their mark in the realm of space — either by launching rockets, mining celestial rocks, or building space habitats. But as these companies work to distinguish themselves, there’s one thing that seems to be tying them all together: their branding.
A quick glance at the logos of some of the most prominent spaceflight companies, including SpaceX and Orbital ATK, show just how similar th

GUEST: By now, business leaders across the globe are well aware of the recent announcement by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that it will temporarily suspend premium processing for H-1B visas petitions that are filed on or after April 3, 2017. The suspension promises to have a major impact on U.S. companies in the tech sector that frequently rely on qualified foreign professionals to fill vacancies on short notice.
According to the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Stu

Some drivers want to make their car stand out from the rest of the crowd. Burnie Burns, the creator of Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue, found a way to do just that with a neat vinyl wrap that made his Tesla P90D look as though it just drove out of a cartoon.In a video blog, Burns noted that he was inspired when his wife got a new pocketbook from a company called Jump From Paper. The company produces some neat accessories that are designed to look as though they’re two dimensional. Burns

Following the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, scientists have been working to develop ways to treat the deadly illness in order to slow down or outright prevent the next outbreak from occurring. While these treatments are often tested on animals, a group of scientists have been working to create an Ebola vaccine to protect primates in the wild. While the initial results are promising, regulatory changes and attitudes towards medical research conducted on primates could prevent further tests.
L

Girls in Tech, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that promotes girls and women in technology jobs, kicked off a global series of hackathons with its first event in Melbourne, Australia.
Dubbed Hacking for Humanity, the events encourage women-led teams to compete to create prototypes in a couple of days that can address complex social problems. The hackathons are aimed at using technology to benefit charities with technology, while also enabling impassioned women to engage in innovation and entre

GUEST: Every time I return to India to visit colleagues and family, I’m amazed to see how quickly smartphone adoption has overtaken the country. On my visit to Bangalore last month, seemingly every person I passed on the street was focused on their smartphone — not just tech workers in India’s growing middle class, but street vendors and food hawkers, who looked more eager to accept payment from India’s version of Square than cold hard rupees. It’s one thing to know

The connected denim smart jacket made in partnership between Levi’s and Google’s ATAP division now has a price tag, but its release date has been pushed from this spring to the fall. The jacket, which will cost around $350 when it goes on sale, is the first commercial product containing ATAP’s Project Jacquard technology, which uses conductive fabric to turn a standard article of clothing into a connected device of sorts that can send instructions to your smartphone. Think of i

Americans are having less sex — and it might be because more people don’t have a stable partner or spouse, or because we spend more time binge-watching TV shows and browsing social media. Either way, it’s bleak, guys.
A new study, published this week in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, shows that in the 1990s, Americans generally had sex from about 60 to 65 times a year; but by 2014, the average American had sex about 53 times a year. Millennials and Generation Z were a

The developer of a popular Android Twitter app is leaving the company. After working at the social media site for a year and a half, Joaquim Vergès announced that he is joining game video streaming site Twitch, noting that he’s joining the company’s Android team.@joenrv following my video games passion, I'll be joining the @Twitch Android team on Monday!— Joaquim Vergès ⚡ (@joenrv) March 10, 2017In 2012, Vergès created Falcon Pro, one of the better An

GUEST: Sony doesn’t need the Super Bowl.GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention analytics from 10 million smart TV screens, to bring you a monthly report on how gaming brands are spending. The results below are for the top five spending gaming industry brands in February 2017.
Gaming industry spend skyrocketed in February thanks to Super Bowl LI — four of the brands on our chart ran ads during the big game, with PlayStation being

Last week, Marine veteran Thomas Brennan published a report through The Center for Investigative Reporting that revealed the existence of a secret Facebook group used by Marines to share naked pictures of service women. Now, the Marine Corps investigation into the group and its members has expanded to encompass all of the other branches of the US military, according to Business Insider.
Brennan’s report set off an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) into hundre

The growing need for tech designers is driving the industry to seek out multi-disciplinary talent and leading to more inclusive hiring practices. Highlighting this trend, John Maeda, former design partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has published a new report on what companies are looking for.
In the third annual “Design in Tech” report, Maeda found a hunger for qualified designers among small and large tech companies — Amazon, Google, and Facebook have collectivel

Another day, another fun internet thing that uses neural networks for facial manipulation. This time it’s DeepWarp, a demo created by Yaroslav Ganin, Daniil Kononenko, Diana Sungatullina, and Victor Lempitsky, that uses deep architecture to move human eyeballs in a still image.First spotted by Prosthetic Knowledge, DeepWarp is focused on realistic “gaze manipulation.” The authors of the demo acknowledge that similar projects already exist (like the smile-manipulator FaceApp), b

Everyone's been freaking out about Jordan Peele's Get Out for a couple weeks now, but you'll have to excuse me for doing it again here because I just saw it last weekend and, yeah, it's just as fantastic as everyone's saying: scary, smart, hilarious, and surprisingly thrilling.
Peele tweeted that you have to see the movie "with the theater energy" or "you'll miss the full intended experience." And he's definitely right — the movie is designed to elicit communal cheers, shrieks, and laugher

Ryan Gosling’s Apollo 11 film First Man now has a release date. The movie is slated to hit theaters on October 12th, 2018, according to Deadline.Based on the astronaut’s official biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, by NASA historian James R. Hansen, the movie will only cover the years between 1961 and 1969 as Armstrong and his crew prepare for their histori Apollo 11 mission.The film will reunite Gosling and La La Land director Damien Chazelle, while Spotlight directo

Immigration. Women’s equality. Transgender rights.
These are just three of the most recent social issues that have found their way into the spotlight of our political consciousness. They aren’t new to the scene, as people has been lobbying for either side for decades, but they’re being paid particular attention because of actions taken by the Trump administration.
As the United States finds itself more divided than ever, technology companies are wading into the political waters

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an important game. For one, it’s the key launch title for Nintendo’s ambitious new platform, the Switch, making it a title largely saddled with the burden of selling customers on another piece of Nintendo hardware. But Breath of the Wild is also the biggest thing to happen to the Zelda series in years, a bold reinvention that mashes the franchise’s iconic structure with a vast open world to explore.
Last week at the Game Developers Con

I must apologize in advance to the society for the prevention of cruelty to dinosaurs. In a recent demo of CloudGate Studio‘s Island 459 virtual reality game, I kicked a little dinosaur known as a Compsognathus, which resembles a dinosaur version of a chicken.
It was in self-defense, as the little critter was trying to eat me. So I kicked it with my foot, and dinosaur in the game went flying away. That was because CloudGate outfitted my shoes with HTC Vive Tracker sensors, which can turn a

During UploadVR’s interview with HTC’s president of Vive in China Alvin Graylin last week, I asked if the company had any more plans for add-on peripherals for its VR headset — like its upcoming Vive Tracker — in 2017 and beyond. In response, he pointed out that there could be “hundreds” of accessories for the HTC Vive this year because of that Tracker.
“I think the Tracker is already creating new peripherals that we don’t have to design,&rdqu

For most of us, the world of high finance and international markets is both hugely mystifying, yet seductively alluring. Whether you’re looking to break in as an investment manager or just get a firmer grip on your own financial options, the New York Forex Institute Training and Certification Course (on sale now for $25 from TNW Deals) will give you the background you need to decode all those Wall Street figures. Over 12 lessons featuring 36 hours of content, you’ll learn the ropes

Facebook today announced the launch of a voice search feature for its Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset and Samsung’s Gear VR headset.
It’s available now in beta for people who use English as their primary language, the Oculus team said in a blog post. “This feature lets you perform voice searches from Oculus Home to intuitively navigate games, apps, and experiences,” the Facebook subsidiary said.
I tested out the feature on an Oculus Rift just now, and it does wor

Think twice about connecting those sex toys to the Internet: A vibrator company has agreed to pay up to $10,000 to U.S. customers who used a smartphone app that relayed their data to the firm’s server.
In a settlement filed Thursday in Chicago federal court, the Canadian company called We-Vibe agreed to pay $5 million CDN (about $3.75 million) to resolve privacy claims regarding “adult sensual lifestyle products” that transmitted customer data.
The toys in question, with names

(Reuters) – Zander Dejah, 25, pays $1,900 a month rent to live in a downtown San Francisco house with at least 40 other people, many of whom sleep in bunk beds.
Dejah is a resident of The Negev, a communal living space that styles itself as a home for millennial tech workers to brainstorm ideas, write code and create apps, even if they have to share toilets and bathrooms with dozens of others.
Houses like The Negev, located in a neighborhood known as “SoMa” or South of Market,

Microsoft this week unveiled Project Lively, an Office add-in that can automatically refresh files when other people update them. It’s the latest thing to come out of Microsoft Garage, an operation that develops experimental apps for Android, iOS, and other platforms.
It’s notable because it introduces sensible modern functionality — almost like Office’s real-time co-authoring, except it doesn’t have to be in real time, and, more interestingly, it doesn’t rely

“Don’t force it.” “Grease it good.” “Dip the tip.” The innuendoes came thick and fast — see?  — at Crave’s “Build Your Own Vibrator” workshop. When co-founder Michael Topolovac opened the presentation by saying “Thank you for coming,” a voice from the back said, “No pun intended.” A room of about 40 people — mostly women and a surprising amount of men — were instructed on how to put

One of the leading software companies in the game livestreaming sector is combining a number of its tools into one service with the goal of helping broadcasters.
SplitmediaLabs, which operates the Xsplit game-broadcasting app, is updating its Player.me platform to incorporate a number of features to enable streamers to create live video and to manage their online presence across most major broadcasting sites. Player.me connects to Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Hitbox, and Beam, and you can start a

 The newest Zelda game, Breath Of The Wild, is — and I say this without any attempt at being hyperbolic — an instant masterpiece. I won’t go so far as to call it the best game of all time — but if such a title can exist objectively, this one is certainly in the ring. It’s rare to see something like this thrust into the world and have it so quickly and widely… Read More

I’ve struggled a lot to find the right fitness wearable. Smartwatches don’t always have a heart rate sensor, and when they do, it’s often poorly implemented. I like Fitbit’s Charge 2 a lot, and the new Alta HR looks sweet, but sometimes I just want something that looks and feels like a watch. Enter the Steel HR by Withings (now owned by Nokia), a fitness tracker that uses a traditional analog face along with a tiny embedded LCD. It’s not exactly the most power

ANALYSIS: It was a show of bullishness to rival last week’s run-up in Snap stock: The Bitcoin price suddenly jumped more than $100 on Friday morning, trading above $1300 per unit for the first time.
For a fleeting moment at about 8:27 a.m.—more than an hour before the U.S. stock market even opened—the price of Bitcoin spiked more than 10% from the day before. The blockchain-based virtual currency briefly touched a new record price of $1325, continuing its recent surge amid anti

If voice interfaces are indeed the future, Sophia Yeres — of Brooklyn-based Huge Inc. — today gave us a peek of what that evolution looks like. Alexa, Siri, or Google’s aptly-named ‘Assistant’ are what’s available, but it’s what’s next that’s worthy of awe. Each of the above, like it or not, is a gimmick more than a workhorse. There’s utility, but none are indispensable, and each gets it wrong nearly as often as they get it right. But