Technology news

Hollywood has been facing stagnating ticket sales, intense competition from streaming services, and an IP-focused studio tentpole monoculture for years. None paint a particularly rosy picture for the future, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that one sentiment stood out above all others at this past week’s CinemaCon: denial.
CinemaCon is the annual trade show put on by the National Association of Theatre Owners, where movie studios, exhibitors, and related vendors come toget

If it looks silly and appears within 24 hours of April Fools' Day, it's a fair target. Therefore, our latest object of scorn is the hipster-ready augmented reality concept device called the MonoLens. 
SEE ALSO: Okay, fine fine, Google's April Fool's Day pranks are pretty great this year, here are all of them
The device is exactly what it sounds like: A single lens that hangs off your face and delivers all the wonders of augmented reality, without the cumbersome load of real augmented realit

GUEST: Well-known author Malcolm Gladwell defines the tipping point as “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
The idea of using AI-powered technology to fuel digital marketing and customer experience has been around for years, yet recently it seems that every leading newspaper and tech blog is buzzing with AI stories. Major analyst firms too have been predicting an AI investment boom. IDC, for example, is fore

What came first, the face or the emoji? Okay, there's a clear answer here — but Facetune's new Memoji app by Lightrick lets you make photos and selfies look more like classic emojis.
Forget the real tears and slap on a cartoon water droplet! Why make a kissy face at the camera when the app can do it for you? Also, there's a unicorn filter, and it's magical.
SEE ALSO: The new emoji coming this year include broccoli, a T. rex and this oddly sexy insect
Memoji, released on Friday, will give t

It’s pretty surprising that SoundCloud for iPhone and iPad didn’t work with Google’s Chromecast before today, but here we are. The app’s Android version has supported the feature since 2015, but SoundCloud has gotten around to adding Chromecast integration on the iOS side with today’s free update now in the App Store.Users on both platforms can also now cast songs from SoundCloud Go+ — the company’s paid subscription service and Spotify rival. That chang

Pornhub just took five years off a lot of people's lives. 
The porn site played a pretty mean and also hilarious April Fools' Day joke on its users. 
SEE ALSO: The Most Popular Time for Porn: America's Handy Infographic
Anyone who clicked on a Pornhub video on Saturday got this message: Image:screenshot/pornhubHow kind of them! "No need to manually share your video to your friends and family ever again." 
Of course, the "thanks for sharing" feature was a joke, which another m

The above tweet comes from May 17, 2012, almost five years ago now, with John Carmack showing off the early prototype of the Rift he received from Palmer Luckey. This tweet helps mark the beginning of a journey that drove interest in VR to include millions of people.
A lot can change in five years. Now, the stakes are raised with billions of potential customers being pursued by the world’s biggest technology companies.
We were surprised when we heard in December Oculus co-founder and

“INORI (prayer)” is a dance performance video that uses real-time facial projection mapping to change the look of the dancer’s faces. Over the course of about one minute, the dancers are made to look like skulls with empty eye sockets, big-toothed clowns, and terrifying dolls with their jaws unhinged.
As Prosthetic Knowledge points out, the project is a collaboration between artist Nobumichi Asai, the design studio WOW, and the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Watanabe Labo

GUEST: According to Clarium Capital founder Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs should look for secrets where no one is looking and turn them into business opportunities. Thiel says it best in his book: “The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.”
One of those hidden paths leads to Africa, a market that remains unknown to most VCs. And yet African startups are expected to raise more than a billion dollars by 2018. According to Partech Ventures, the VC funding

Terrorists have “developed innovative ways” to conceal explosives in electronic devices that are capable of avoiding detection by some airport security systems, according to a report from CNN. The finding from US intelligence and law enforcement agencies was a factor in the recent US ban against carry-on electronics larger than a smartphone on direct flights from eight Muslim-majority countries. The bomb-hiding laptops can be successfully “turned on long enough” to avoid

Does It Hold Up is a chance to re-experience childhood-favorite books, movies, TV shows, video games, and other cultural phenomenon decades later. Have they gotten better like a fine wine, or are we drinking cork?
The last time I saw the original 1995 Ghost in the Shell film was when I was in college, more than a decade ago. It was the most recent DVD release, which at the time looked amazing on my convex curved CRT TV. What stuck out to me at the time were the action scenes — they’r

Snap’s public offering marked the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Alibaba in 2014. This milestone has put a spotlight on the social media company, with public investors digging into their long term growth potential and path to profitability. One of the increasing concerns about Snap is user growth. While Snapchat boasted 50 million new daily actives users in 2016, their growth slowed down considerably at the end of the year, only adding five million new users in Q4. This halt coincided wi

The more time we spend on our phones, the more text messaging seems like a natural artistic medium, a modern outgrowth of the epistolary novel. You can see it in the fake text message web fiction genre, in games like Sarah is Missing... and in the silly quasi-interactive thriller that a smartphone writing app has somehow seduced me into creating.
The app I’m talking about is called Tap, a recent extension of the existing trend of text messaging fiction platforms. It’s following on th

In the past couple of years, there were a lot of stories about how Moore’s Law was slowing down. That was a reason for financial panic, as it suggested that technological progress was slowing and that the global economy could suffer as a result.
Only it wasn’t really true. Gordon Moore, Intel’s chairman emeritus, predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double every couple of years. That prediction held up for decades, but it appeared to slow down as Int

Ask anyone to tell you where a smartphone's fingerprint reader should be and, though the answers will vary, you'll never be told "off center, right next to the camera lens on the back." But lo and behold, that's exactly where Samsung plopped its fingerprint scanner on the new (and otherwise delightful) Galaxy S8. It's a perplexing decision if we consider it as a deliberate design choice, but reports ahead of the S8's launch, which now seem validated by the device itself, suggest that it was a la

EXCLUSIVE: Color Switch keeps breaking milestone after milestone, as publisher Fortafy Games is announcing today the mobile game has been downloaded more than 150 million times. And Fortafy has now decided to open up a mobile game publishing business.
Color Switch has proven to be amazingly viral. It has 20 million more downloads in the past three months, according to Zeb Jaffer, cofounder of Fortafy, which is a small independent mobile game publisher based in Dubai and Sydney, Australia. The co

Samsung has had quite a week with the debut of the Galaxy S8 — now available for preorder — but if you’re not looking to spend $720 to $850 on a phone (or any product, for that matter) we’ve rounded up our five favorite deals of the week.As my colleague Nick Statt pointed out earlier this week, Amazon is giving Prime members $30 to $50 discounts on nearly its entire e-reader line. Until April 3rd, they’re offering $30 off Kindle, $30 off Paperwhite, $50 off Voyage (

Cats seem to dominate the internet, but does looking at Grumpy Cat actually make you feel better?Don’t be so quick to say “yes, obviously.” People love cat videos and, in fact, cat videos consistently have one of the highest views per category on YouTube. But while it may be taken for granted that looking at cute animals improves mood, researchers have wondered whether looking at cats when we’re supposed to be doing something else makes us feel guilty for procrastinating.

All-electric racing series Formula E heads back to Mexico City today for the second time ever. The 20-car showdown will take place at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on a 2.1-kilometer course that weaves the drivers in and out of the famous Mexican race track. It’s the fourth race in the young series’s third season, one that has been dominated in the early going by Renault driver Sebastien Buemi.Last year’s race in Mexico City was pretty exciting — you can see

It’s a new month, which means there is another stack of books hitting bookstores to check out.I recently finished John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, and I had a lot of fun reading it. I’ve largely enjoyed the books that I’ve read from him, and I had the chance to chat with him back in February about this new one.
It’s a very utilitarian space opera novel, one that’s fun to sink into, but it isn’t quite as serious as books like Ann Leckie’s Ancill

It’s Friday night, and PlayStation Network isn’t alright.
Sony’s gaming service is offline for many PlayStation console owners, according to the PSN status page. Hundreds of gamers are reporting difficulties using the service as well on social networks like Twitter. This outage is preventing players from logging onto PSN, and that is giving people error messages when they attempt to boot up games that rely on a connection to a server. Even players who can get onto the service a

 The nine startups participating in Singularity University’s accelerator program presented this afternoon at Moffett Federal Airfield just outside Mountain View, CA. Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, aims to make it more feasible for people to address hard science problems and those that require a global reach. Startups backed by… Read More

NEW YORK (By Barbara Goldberg, Reuters) – Connecticut would become the first U.S. state to allow law enforcement agencies to use drones equipped with deadly weapons if a bill opposed by civil libertarians becomes law.
The legislation, approved overwhelmingly by the state legislature’s judiciary committee on Wednesday, would ban so-called weaponized drones in the state but exempts agencies involved in law enforcement. It now goes to the House of Representatives for consideration.
The

One of gaming’s most popular development tools is getting a ton of improvements as the company responsible prepares for the future.
Unity 5.6 is now live, and developers can expect a lot of changes from this latest update. Unity Technologies has also reconfirmed that this is the end of the Unity 5 “cycle.” Moving ahead, the company is switching to a different version-numbering system that will instead incorporate the year. Unity 2017 updates will begin rolling out soon.
As for

April Fools’ Day is upon us, and like every year, Google is doing its best to outdo itself. The restructuring that put Google under the new Alphabet parent company didn’t have an impact on last year’s gags, so we’re expecting the usual: Jokes ranging from ridiculously lame to very clever, spanning the simple blog post or video to the elaborate gag or new feature.
Google’s various divisions always create more practical and impractical jokes than any other tech firm,

‘Place‘ is a collaborative canvas — and Reddit’s newest April Fools’ day social experiment — that challenges millions of users to work together in order to create something beautiful. Or, draw a bunch of dicks and meme references. The experiment is available on desktop, iOS and Android and it’s essentially a cooperative canvas, where each user gets a single pixel to paint with. You can use your pixel to start a new drawing, or add to someone e

It’s been a long week, and no doubt a downer for some of us. So if you need a dose of cheer, check out the latest Google Doodle. This adorable pic, showing a group of friends of different races, religions, and body types, is titled “A Peaceful Future.” It’s the work of Sarah Harrison, a 15-year-old from Connecticut and the winner of the Doodle 4 Google contest. The contest, aimed at American children, started last year. The kids were asked to draw what they saw for

If milking a virtual cow sounds harmless enough to you, then you must be new here. In 2017, everything’s offensive, even the innocuous act of deriving dairy from a fake cow. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), an organization which itself has come under fire for animal cruelty, has taken issue with one of Nintendo’s launch titles for the Switch. 1-2 Switch, which our own Napier Lopez got to take for a spin prior to the console’s launch, features a minigame

SoundCloud has updated its iOS app with support for Google Chromecast. The company previously only allowed casting through its Android app, but has extended it and added new features along the way.
“With SoundCloud and Google Chromecast, you can stream everything you want, the way you want, through your TV and speakers,” SoundCloud wrote in a blog post.
Now that the iOS app is on par with the Android version, SoundCloud users won’t be limited to listening to audio tracks and re

Whenever a new console launches, third-party peripheral manufacturers are quick to jump onto the market with new products. The Nintendo Switch is no different, and I want to look at these extras to give you an idea of which ones you should consider and which you can avoid.
Of course, everything is going to depend on your own needs, but here’s what I think is best for most people from the two brands I looked most closely at: PowerA and SnakeByte.
Recommended
PowerA Nintendo Switch Ever

Several of the most popular internet service providers are stepping over themselves to tell customers that, no, they aren’t going to sell your browsing history. Following Congress’s repealing of internet privacy rules, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have all posted blogs reassuring customers that they won’t sell private information. Verizon is very firm about its commitment to privacy: Let’s set the record straight. Verizon does not sell the personal web browsing hi

Eventbrite, the event ticketing startup valued at just over $1 billion, has acquired Nvite, a smaller competitor. Nvite, based in Washington, D.C., had raised $1 million in funding in 2014 from a group of local investors.
An Eventbrite spokeswoman confirmed the deal and provided the following statement:
We’re excited to welcome Nvite to the family to join us in our pursuit to of helping millions of Eventbrite customers better market themselves and their events. They’ve been a valuabl