Technology news

On Sunday, Nilay and Dieter brought The Vergecast to Austin, TX for South by Southwest 2017 and streamed it live on Facebook.Today we did it again! This time, we welcome culture reporter Megan Farokhmanesh and senior editor Chris Plante on to talk about what happened so far in the culture world at SXSW, most notably the film festival.Also, with addition to more tech news that’s happened since Sunday, we open the floor for questions from the audience.For those who prefer audio only, here&rs

Ever since Donald Glover shouted out Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” at the Golden Globes earlier this year, the song has topped charts and become an early contender for hit of 2017. That means it’s gonna be parodied, and with Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast remake hitting theaters soon, a mashup was in order. Nerdist went all out for this video, and seeing Belle dab with her friends made my day.
Considering the film is only getting mildly positive reviews, I can

Google has officially brought a Pocket-like Read Later feature to the latest version of Chrome for iOS, as rumored by 9to5Mac last week. The feature works a lot like Apple’s Reading List feature in Safari — there’s a new “Read Later” icon that appears on the share sheet in Chrome, which saves articles locally on the device to read later, even without an internet connection. Articles saved to the Reading List are accessible through the menu on Chrome the same way one

A big investment is helping a long-awaited sequel make it through development.
Starbreeze announced today that it has agreed to publish System Shock 3, the upcoming first-person, sci-fi role-playing game. The original System Shock, which came out for PC in 1994, was one of the first games to combine aspects of the first-person shooter with RPG elements. The producer of the first System Shock, Warren Spector, is working on the third installment with Otherside Entertainment. Starbreeze is investin

A three-year-old girl in Pennsylvania died Saturday morning after being caught in a fire started by an exploding hoverboard. CNN reports that a US Consumer Product Safety Commission official says it’s the first death in the nation linked to a fire from one of the notoriously unsafe devices.
The fire, which started Friday night in a home in Harrisburg, sent several others to the hospital. The girl’s father and a teenage boy were both released, while two other young girls remain in cri

Huawei hasn’t officially announced its P10 Lite yet, but after numerous rumors, the phone now appears to be available to preorder in Europe. Only the Italy-based online retailer Monclick has it for sale, as first reported by HDBlog. The listing says the phone will be available starting on April 11th.
We don’t have a photo of the device, but we do have an idea of its specs:
Android Nougat
5.2-inch Full HD display
Octa-core CPU
4GB RAM, 32GB internal storage
12-megapixel rear-facing ca

Netflix has picked up The Other Side of the Wind, the final project of legendary Citizen Kane director Orson Welles, The New York Times reports.Netflix’s involvement was rumored for nearly a year before this announcement. There was also speculation that Netflix was simultaneously working on a documentary about the film’s belated completion, but that has not been confirmed.
The Other Side of the Wind was left unfinished following Welles’ death in 1985, but seemed like it was clo

PDP makes pretty great Energizer-branded recharging stations for console game controllers, but even certified accessories can run into problems. Today the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of the Xbox One 2X Smart Charger, which was sold at pretty much every major retailer — Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, etc. — until just last month. The recall includes approximately 121,000 units sold in the United States, plus 7,250 in Canada and 2,560 in Mexico.Th

GUEST: The classic example of “crowd wisdom” dates back to 1906, when Sir Francis Galton observed a contest in which attendees were asked to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair in England. In what many consider to be the first experiment on crowd wisdom, the average of the 800 guesses was within one pound of being correct.
Consider that these kinds of experiments can now be done digitally – across cultures and time zones and fairly instantaneously. The classic experimen

Like many corporations, Uber is not a fan of unionization. The main front in the ride-share / unionization battle is currently in Seattle, where Uber filed suit against the city in January to challenge the city’s authority to implement a law that would allow ride-share drivers to unionize.
Both in Seattle and elsewhere, Uber reaches out to its employees — or, more accurately, its independent contractor drivers — to share information on a variety of topics through podcasts, volu

Microsoft has changed its mind about what to do next with the SwiftKey virtual keyboard apps for Android and iOS, which became property of Microsoft as a result of an acquisition last year. At the time, Microsoft said that in the months to come it would talk more about how it would “integrate SwiftKey technology with our Guinness World Record Word Flow technology for Windows.”
Some people took that to mean it would integrate SwiftKey’s technology right into Word Flow, a perfect

Gogoro is expanding the electric scooter-sharing service it launched in Berlin last August. The Taiwanese company will add 800 scooters to the network starting April 1st, bringing the total available number to 1,000.
The company — which is run by former HTC executive Horace Luke — started the scooter-sharing program last year as a trial with Coup, a subsidiary of electronics giant Bosch. That partnership will continue, and pricing will remain the same after the expansion — &eur

We are coming off a major console launch, and an event like that can significantly affect the business of selling games. And retailers that are prepared for it can take advantage of that to boost its web traffic and its sales, and that’s exactly what happened with the Nintendo Switch.
Every major retailer in the United States saw an increase in their web and mobile traffic from Nintendo’s site and from searches for the Switch, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb. GameStop and Toys

One of gaming’s biggest science-fiction franchises has returned with intense combat and exploration.
Mass Effect: Andromeda launches March 21 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, and I’m sinking my Gorn-like talons into it right now. I can talk about the first mission, but I’ll attempt to avoid story spoilers — if you want those, check the video above. Like in previous Mass Effects, you are part of a group of quasi-military explorers. Unlike the original trilogy, And

After first testing the feature with Android beta users, Snap is updating its main iOS and Android app to allow people to create widgets of their best friends’ Bitmoji. These shortcuts immediately open a text chat with that friend. For iOS users, the widget will only show up on the Today screen, as pictured above. Android users, however, can put the Bitmoji widgets wherever they like on the home screen.
I added my friends to Today (which you access by swiping to the right on your home scre

One of the most high-profile speakers at this year’s SXSW conference was supposed to be FBI director James Comey, who was set to be interviewed by Newseum CEO Jeffrey Herbst. It would have been particularly timely as well: shortly before the event, President Donald Trump’s baseless wiretapping accusations reportedly drove a rift between the White House and Comey, who allegedly asked the Justice Department to publicly refute Trump’s claim. Naturally, this meant that Comey was re

GUEST: Every company wants to find ways to be more relevant in their customers’ lives, whether that means making their online shopping experience more personalized or providing exceptional service. When Domino’s Pizza introduced Amazon Echo ordering capabilities, it addressed a tangible consumer benefit: the ability to order their favorite pie without lifting a finger.
Domino’s is just one example of how companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive consumer engagem

Sex toys may have gotten smarter with the integration of apps and big data over the past few years, but for the most part they’re still heavily manual. And probably for a good reason! Different people prefer different kinds of pressure levels and movements! But if the act of using a sex toy has become too much work for you, Fleshlight wants to fix that.Introduced at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January and on display again at SXSW, the Fleshlight Launch is an automated stro

Apple has been found guilty of fixing the price of iPhones in Russia for several years.
Russia’s antitrust regulator, the Federal Antimonopoly Service, said today that Apple’s local subsidiary coordinated the price at which businesses were allowed to sell its phones. If sellers tried to discount an iPhone, Apple would email them and ask for it to be changed; failing to do so could have led to their contract being terminated.
Apple’s Russian subsidiary could be fined
Apple is sa

Back at CES, Samsung showed off a concept for what it calls the Frame, a TV designed to seamlessly blend into a background and display artwork when not in use to further enhance your living room decor. Today, the company announced that it will actually be releasing the Frame this spring.
While it’s nice to know that the admittedly impressive Yves Béhar-designed screen will be making its way to market, Samsung is still being extremely coy about details. There’s no price, no spe

A British company called Windhorse Aerospace thinks it’s figured out the key to solving humanitarian crises: edible drones. Its unmanned Pouncer prototype that’s currently in the works will have a wingspan of nine feet and be constructed of various “foodstuff” to drop supplies and then itself into territories in need of aid. This drone could be built of honeycomb or compressed vegetables, with salami serving as the landing gear, according to a new interview in the Financi

Blizzar’d biggest fans need to set their calendars and alarms.
Blizzard announced today that tickets for BlizzCon 2017 will go on sale online in two batches on April 5 and April 8. BlizzCon is a fan event that takes place in Anaheim, CA every year. This year’s convention will go from November 3 to 4. Tickets cost $200 each.
On April 5, tickets go on sale at 7 p.m. Pacific. On April 8, you can purchase them at 10 a.m. Pacific.
BlizzCon gives Blizzard a venue to make announcements for

I was reminded, as I watched a live stream of Tag Heuer’s shouty boss build hype for his company’s second Android Wear watch, just how difficult it is to make a good smartwatch. As users, we expect all the thinness, lightness, and versatility that we’re used to from smartphones, but married to the always-on time display and two-day battery life of a mechanical watch. And we’re only willing to pay impulse-purchase prices.It’s a recipe for nightmare compromises, and t

In January, Samsung unveiled its 2017 lineup of QLED televisions, promising that the displays would provide the “best picture quality,” an “invisible connection” cable, and a smarter features including an enhanced Samsung One Remote Control app that provides Google Chromecast-like functionality. The TVs are now on sale throughout the United States for a retail price of $2,799.
“Our 2017 lineup is ushering in a new era for television. This year, we are taking smart f

As has apparently become tradition, Microsoft is once again celebrating Pi Day with some mathematically themed deals. In honor of everyone’s second-favorite circle constant, Microsoft is offering up to 31.4 percent off a selection of computers.None of the computers are super high-end machines, but if you’re looking for a decent budget laptop at a discount, this could be a good place to start. We’ve rounded up the best Pi Day-specific deals below, but Microsoft is also running s

Google today announced another expansion of Project Sunroof, its web app for showing how much money you can save by installing solar panels at home. Now people can check locations in areas within all 50 U.S. states.
That’s up from 42 states in May 2016, 9 states in December 2015, and just 3 metro areas in August 2015, when Google first announced the initiative. Now Google has determined how much solar power panels can collect on more than 60 million buildings across the country, 

V-Moda is a company best known for its good, bass-rich headphones. The Remix is the company’s newest product, and serves as a natural extension of the V-Moda pedigree into a new line of Bluetooth speakers.V-Moda is touting the Remix’s ability to output clear and accurate sound, including a rear-mounted bass reflex port to assist in realizing the company’s signature bass performance. My colleague Vlad Savov was able to listen to the Remix in person, and reports that it offers an

Google today announced an update to Gmail for Android that has been a long time coming: the ability to send and request money. You can download the latest version of the app now from Google Play.
Google first added the functionality to Gmail for the web in May 2013, long before Google Payments was formed to handle all your financial information. That means it took the company almost four years to bring the feature to Android, for whatever reason.
To use the new feature, just tap on the attachmen

In this week’s episode, Travis and Stewart interview the CMO of IBM Watson, Stephen Gold. We talk about cognitive computing, AI, machine learning, and more, discovering how long we have before the robots take over and kill us all (just kidding, kind of).
In the news, we reveal funding rounds for two AI marketing tools, talk about the Snapchat IPO aftermath, the latest Instagram Snapchat-like feature, and touch on the WikiLeaks Vault 7 disclosures. Better keep that webcam covered, right Tra

Samsung unveiled an iPad Pro competitor called the Galaxy Tab S3 last month. But while it showed off everything about the tablet, it declined to give details on pricing or availability — finally, we’re getting one of those.
Best Buy currently has the Tab S3 listed for $599.99. That price includes the S Pen stylus, but it doesn’t include Samsung’s keyboard case. The keyboard will sell separately for $129.99, which brings the price for the full package up to about $730. Sam

Uber has announced a handful of API partnerships designed to help drivers file their taxes.
The ride-hailing giant first announced its Driver API (application programming interface) in October, to serve as a way for developers to create useful services for Uber drivers by connecting to third-party apps. This was in addition to the existing developer platform offered for rider-focused services since 2014.
The Driver API gives access to drivers’ profile information, including rating, picture

 Like Twitter, Snapchat’s pitch is that it’s more than just a social sharing and messaging app — it’s a place to consume media, too. Today, the company is expanding its original content lineup via a new deal with VICE, which will see the media company producing original shows for Snapchat. This kicks off with a VICELAND-produced series called “Hungry Hearts… Read More