Technology news

If you’re not too keen on waiting for the next Patch Tuesday to get your hands on Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, you can manually install the new version of the OS through the company’s website. Microsoft announced last week in a blog post that it would make the update available as a manual upgrade about a week prior to the official release, and it’s made good on the promise by enabling it through the Windows 10 Update Assistant. Go here to download Assi

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the only woman living onboard the International Space Station at the moment, is on track to break a big spaceflight record: at the end of April, she will have spent more cumulative hours in space than any other US astronaut. But now it looks like Whitson’s going to rack up even more flight time in lower Earth orbit than originally planned. NASA announced today that Whitson will be extending her stay on the ISS by an additional three months, adding even more ho

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
In the summer of 2016, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said his firm could give clients a free, automated investment service as part of a future bundle of digital-banking products. Well, he just revealed the bank is following through on that promise and building one.
SEE ALSO: Video gaming becomes a scholarship sport
“We are currently developing some exciting new products and services, which we will be adding to our suite and roll

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every chance I can, I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this in

Open source technology permeates throughout our society, playing an important role in much of the technological advancements in the world, such as the WordPress blogging platform. Developers recognize the value of these projects, but there is some grumblings about how there should be ways for project contributors to be remunerated for their contributions.
Currently, developers have the option to solicit funds to support their efforts using PayPal or some other payment mechanism, but supporters m

The Nintendo Switch game console costs about $257 for Nintendo to build, according to a report by Japanese teardown firm Fomalhaut Techno Solutions.
That’s pretty close to the console’s retail price of $300, and it leaves very little margin for Nintendo, considering that the retailers also get a profit margin. While Nintendo may still make money, it is moving closer to the razor and razor blade model, where it makes money on the software.
Fomalhaut took the console apart, and it anal

It's barely been five months since Google Home arrived to take over homes and there are already whispers of version 2.0.
According to a report from The Information, Google's working on an upgraded version of Home that'll also double as a Wi-Fi router and mesh network.
SEE ALSO: How to order a pizza with Amazon Alexa or Google Home
To put it in simpler terms, the next-gen Google Home could be half speaker/Google Assistant (what it currently is) and half Google Wifi. Instead of buying and setting

A recently discovered vulnerability in a Wi-Fi chipset could be exploited to take over devices without users’ knowledge. A Google researcher publicly disclosed the bug in a blog post this week, which accompanied news from both Apple and Google that they’re patching devices in response. In his post and as detailed by Ars Technica, Gal Beniamini demonstrates how he exploited a Wi-Fi SoC manufactured by Broadcom to execute malicious code by solely being within the same Wi-Fi range of th

Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 is reportedly facing delays—but at least it may be less expensive than we thought.
There have been several reports that the upcoming 10th anniversary iPhone could cost upwards of $1,000 due to a number of hardware changes, including an OLED screen,  a stainless steel frame and glass back, and more. 
SEE ALSO: The Mac Pro is getting a major do-over
The iPhone 8 will likely be between $850 and $900 for a 6 GB model, according to a note UBS sent to investor

GUEST: One of the main arguments the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari makes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that humans differ from other species because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers, united in cause and spirit not by anything real, but by the fictions of our collective imagination. Examples of these fictions include gods, nations, money, and human rights, which are supported by religions, political structures, trade networks, and legal institutions, respectivel

Emirates is offering Microsoft Surface tablets loaded with Microsoft Office to its premium cabin customers for use in flight. Emirates is joining Qatar and Etihad Airways in giving flyers a way to get work done after the US and UK banned inbound travelers flying from a number of Middle Eastern countries from carrying electronic devices larger than a smartphone into the cabin.
The Dubai-based airline says customers can bring a USB stick with them on board and plug into the loaner tablets. The ser

Most people know that get-thin-quick diets don’t work and just lead to a cycle of weight gain and loss. But these schemes are not only ineffective — yo-yo dieting can raise the risk of dangerous health problems for people with coronary disease.For a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers looked at data from almost 10,000 men and women with coronary artery disease. All of the participants were between 35 and 75 and half were taking a drug to lower ch

Picturing Kendall Jenner stopping a fashion shoot to join a protest IRL like in that terrible Pepsi ad requires a bit of imagination considering you can count the number of times she’s spoken out about causes on one hand. The same goes for other members of the Kardashian/Jenner clan.
Kendall and Pepsi were rightfully dragged over the ad that dropped Tuesday that showed her joining a vague protest filled with diverse young people and suggested Pepsi just might be the thing to save us from a

Hindsight: It's 20-20! And it must be especially sharp today for Kendall Jenner and Pepsi, as they're both experiencing the neither sweet nor fizzy taste of putting one's foot in one's mouth.  
If you're not living in a cave out of the range of cell service, you know by now that the global soda empire paid Jenner, a global celebrity, to be in a Pepsi commercial so comically tone-deaf and embarrassing, it's been mocked around the world from the moment it was released (when it wasn't also cau

Who would have guessed Tracer got her catchphrase from Torbjörn?
Blizzard has released the newest issue of its Overwatch digital comic series, showing players a rare glimpse of how the team operated and interacted with each other before it fell apart. Overwatch the game takes place after the group’s disbandment, and the team-based shooter doesn’t feature much in the way of a plot. But these comics give players a better look at the colorful cast of characters.
The story seems to

Microsoft will reveal details of its Project Scorpio video game console tomorrow with Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry site.
Microsoft officials confirmed that they have given an exclusive on the news to Digital Foundry, despite our pleading and crying and anger about why GamesBeat didn’t get the scoop. (If anyone else wants to leak the news to us, you are welcome to do so). Microsoft tells us they aren’t doing interviews after the reveal.
The news is expected to focus on the hardwa

In a bombshell blog post today (via OMG Ubuntu), Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, announced the company will stop investing in its "Unity" user interface for Linux and instead move back to GNOME as a default for the next major version of Ubuntu. This also ends work on Ubuntu phones, which has been a major focus for the company in recent years.
"The choice, ultimately, is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company," Shuttleworth writes.

Crosley gets you, Star Wars fans. For Record Store Day this year, the company is releasing a special edition of its portable Cruiser Deluxe turntable. An image from Star Wars: A New Hope’s iconic movie poster will encase the player, thereby making it a themed item.
Is this enough to get someone to spend more than $100 on a turntable with poor Amazon reviews? Probably, although we aren’t going to recommend that you buy this thing. We’re just telling you that it exists and that R

The hot new trend in aeronautics these days is VTOL (pronounced vee-tol), which stands for “vertical take-off and landing.” These aircraft are known colloquially as “flying cars,” but we should probably think of them more as drones crossed with helicopters. Uber is working on a VTOL project, as is Airbus, DARPA, and Google co-founder Larry Page. Because nothing says “I’m very rich and I hate traffic” like a flying car project.E-volo, a German aviation st

STALKER is one of those secret best games of all time. It has a small-but-adoring group of fans who will praise it any time its name or any game like it comes up. Now, STALKER is getting a modern facelift thanks to Crytek’s game-making tools.
A group of fans are rebuilding the classic, systems-based shooter in Cryengine, and the results are impressive. In a pair of videos posted by the Achieved With Cryengine YouTube account, you can see the open-world survival-horror action looking c

One of the biggest questions for Pebble owners following the company’s acquisition by Fitbit last year has been how long their watches would keep working going forward. And while Pebble had announced at the time that Fitbit would be “going out of its way” to keep the smartwatch platform’s software and services running through 2017, there hasn’t been much news of what would happen past that point, especially given that a fair portion of Pebble’s software is clo

Not only are developers and publishers debuting one amazing game after another in 2017, most of those releases are finding huge audiences as well.
Nier: Automata, a sci-fi action role-playing game from Square Enix, has surpassed 1 million copies shipped to stores and sold digitally through Steam on PC and the PlayStation store on console. The publisher revealed that it has reached this milestone just a month after the game’s March 7 launch.
This is the sequel to Nier, a 2010 RPG for PlaySt

GUEST: Computers, like many other technologies, were originally made for the 1 percent.
More than 50 years ago, people would be as likely to touch a computer as to perform brain surgery. It wasn’t until Apple created the Apple II, specifically marketed to the masses, that computers began to penetrate the American market. And it wasn’t until many years afterward that computers (including tablets and smartphones) became truly present in the global market.
The trajectory of compute

Today Google officially launched YouTube TV, a premium cable bundle with companion Android and iOS apps. Google first announced YouTube TV back in January. Now people can take it for a one-month free trial before the $35 ($39.99 on iOS) monthly subscription price kicks in.
Out of the box, the app lets you stream shows on ABC, Bravo, CBS, Comcast SportsNet, Disney Channel, ESPN, Fox, Fox News, Fox Sports Networks, Fx, MSNBC, NBC, and USA. You’ll be able to watch YouTube Red Originals as wel

 The timing was perfect. Just as startups were settling into NYU and ffVC’s new brains-meet-money accelerator, “AI Nexus Lab,” Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence. In a stroke of luck, the startup that would become Uber’s AI lab happened to have been raised by NYU Tandon’s Data Future Labs. Uber’s interest in Geometric helped solidify New… Read More

Now if only we knew what a “dokkan” is.
Bandai Namco announced today that its mobile game Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle has passed 150 million downloads globally. The free-to-play title launched for iOS and Android in 2015. The Dragon Ball franchises is one of the biggest anime hits in Japanese history, and the series has also found a following outside of the country.
“Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle brings the popular Dragon Ball Z anime series to mobile devices with beloved c

The next generation of Google smart speakers may include mesh Wi-Fi, an anonymous source told The Information.
Mesh Wi-Fi strings a Wi-Fi connection together with the use of multiple routers to create a more consistent coverage area. It also gets rid of a problem that plagues all smart speakers today: Get too far away from Wi-Fi and service is interrupted.
Unlike many routers today, mesh Wi-Fi kits often involves the use of two to three devices. More consistent Wi-Fi access means more consistent

How long will we remember the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared back in 2014? About 45 years, say scientists who used Wikipedia page views to develop a new way of studying our collective memory (the memory we share as a society).
For a study published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed Wikipedia page views to monitor how frequently people visit topic pages after a news event. In this specific study, the team collected page views of airplane crashes from 2008 to 20

In the world of on-demand services, everything is available at your request, be it cars, house cleaners, food delivery, parking valets, or a place to stay. So why shouldn’t there also be a place to do instant bus rental? Sharethebus is addressing this particular need for event organizers and destinations, and on Wednesday, it has raised $5 million in funding to support its efforts.
The Canadian-based startup is also undergoing a name change — it’s now known as Bus.com.
Fou

Double Fine Productions will kick off another Amnesia Fortnight game jam soon, and this time it will do so with fan voting enabled by Humble Bundle.
By purchasing the Amnesia Fortnight 2017 Humble Bundle (a package of games that benefits charity) before Friday, fans will be able to vote for projects pitched by Double Fine team members during the company’s internal employee game jam known as Amnesia Fortnight.
The fans will also get a bundle of old Amnesia Fortnight prototypes to play, as w

Eyeo, the parent company of popular ad-blocker Adblock Plus, today announced that it’s acquiring a service called Flattr that lets readers tip websites. Flattr was created in 2010 to give news websites and other online media ventures a virtual tip jar to allow readers to contribute a few cents or dollars to help support creators, instead of viewing ads and receiving the content for free. Eyeo first announced a partnership with Flattr last year, and since then Eyeo says the two companies ha

Google announced today that a public YouTube Go beta is now available for users to try out in India. The new app is a redesigned version of the YouTube Go app announced last September, which is specifically focused on offering an improved experience in areas with poor connectivity.
To that end, YouTube Go has a few standout features from the regular YouTube app designed to help reduce data consumption. First and foremost is the ability to control your streaming by offering the option to download

When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hit theaters in 2016, a lot of the visual effects conversation centered on how the filmmakers digitally re-created actors Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher to reprise the roles they played in the 1977 original. While those effects are striking, there’s also another quiet revolution going on in visual effects, one that’s often just out of view.
That’s the way evolving technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and even interactive light

Venture capitalist Tim Chang and science fiction novelist Eliot Peper will speak about the inspiration that happens between real-world tech and science fiction at our upcoming GamesBeat Summit 2017: How games, sci-fi, and tech create real-world magic.
GamesBeat Summit 2017 will take place on May 1 and May 2 at the historic Claremont resort hotel in Berkeley, California, just a short distance from San Francisco. You can secure your seat here. Register today and receive 20

“Giant. Robot. Duel.” — three words that shook up the internet back in 2015, when an American team of engineers named MegaBots challenged their Japanese counterparts, Suidobashi, to a fight by mecha. Two years later, it looks like the duel might finally be happening, with MegaBots today announcing a rough date for the event: August 2017.Since the original challenge, the MegaBots team has been busy building up their bot, broadcasting their progress on YouTube and even collaborat

European food delivery startup Deliveroo has today unveiled a new platform that enables restaurants of all sizes to open in new locations without committing to costly public premises.
With Deliveroo Editions, the London-headquartered company is putting its arsenal of delivery data to use through identifying customer demand and specific cuisine shortages in certain areas — it’s about spotting gaps in the market. Deliveroo then asks eateries, be they small independents or nat

Two seemingly unrelated things happened Monday that actually point directly at the future of the internet:
1. Verizon was scooped into admitting that it’s going to rename the combined zombie corpses of AOL and Yahoo “Oath,” which is a terrible name that comes second only to Tronc.
2. President Trump signed the bill that allows ISPs to share your browsing data without permission.
This is everything Verizon and AOL have been working toward over the past few years. Like every othe

VB LIVE: Every fourth consumer now has an ad blocker in place, making influencer marketing no longer just a nice-to-have.  Catch up on our recent VB Live event on influencer marketing to learn how to get  the best results from any collaboration. Access this VB Live event on demand right here.
In the age of viral content, social influence is paramount. It is the fastest way to capture a user’s attention and convert him or her to a lead. In fact, according to a March

Microsoft is planning to refresh its Windows 10 design in an upcoming update due later this year. While the software maker is starting to roll out Windows 10 Creators Update this week, the focus on the company’s Windows 10 efforts will rapidly shift to this future update shortly. We’ve seen a number of concept screenshots of Microsoft’s plans for its Windows 10 design refresh before, and today another screenshot has leaked.
Tom Hounsell published a new Windows 10 Start menu des

Amazon has confirmed plans to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore across from the Empire State Building, bringing its total number of announced but as-of-yet unopened stores in New York City up to three.Publisher’s Weekly reports that a sign reading “Amazon Books Coming Soon” has gone up in the 34th Street storefront, adding that an Amazon rep said the store will open this summer. The store has also been added to the Amazon Books website. This would presumably make it Amazon&rsqu

Solid state drives may be more durable than their magnetic, disk-based hard drive counterparts, but quickly transferring data to and from the drives can still wear them out, causing failure and data loss. Especially if you're doing something like filming 4K video, which needs to be able to quickly write data to an SSD at a constant rate without error.
Sony’s new G Series Professional SSDs, however, are specifically designed for just that kind of scenario, according to Engadget. The company

Google today is providing more information about its tensor processing unit (TPU), the server chip that it uses in house to perform artificial intelligence (AI) computing workloads more efficiently. Google has been using TPUs internally since 2015. The company disclosed the existence of the TPU last year but hadn’t said anything more about the technology until now.
In addition to publishing a paper on the TPU, Google’s David Patterson is also giving a talk about it today at a Nationa

Dojo Madness, a Berlin-based esports big data startup, announced today that it has raised a $6 million in funding.
The company will use the money to expand its data-driven products, including its Sumo coaching apps for training League of Legends players. No longer a niche pastime, the global esports audience will reach nearly 400 million in 2017, split equally between devoted esports enthusiasts and occasional viewers. This audience is projected to grow 50 percent over the next three years,

PRESS RELEASE:Rhonda Landers brings executive leadership in financePROVIDENCE, R.I.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 5, 2017– NanoSteel®, the leader in nanostructured steel materials, today announced that Rhonda Landers has joined the organization as Chief Financial Officer. Ms. Landers will lead the company’s financial operations and play an integral role in corporate strategy development. She is coming to NanoSteel at an important growth stage for the company, following a Seri

Relic Entertainment and Sega Europe announced the official open beta weekend for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III is coming 10 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, April 21, and will last until 10 a.m. Pacific on Monday, April 24th. You can register now here.
The title is one of the highly anticipated games for the PC that will give a boost to the resurgent real-time strategy genre.
The open beta will pit players against each other in Dawn of War III’s tense, chaotic multiplayer. This game mode h

Sony is expected to deploy the PlayStation VR headsets in arcades in the Japanese market, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
A new “location-based entertainment” division at Sony Interactive Entertainment will lead the initiative and find partners in Japan. VR arcades are starting to become popular in Japan as testing grounds for new innovations in gaming, and VR headset rival HTC Vive is also opening VR arcades in places like China.
Since VR can still be pretty expens

Messaging services are being highly touted as the next medium for customer service as they offer brands a way to not only deploy human agents, but also implement artificial intelligence to address requests. But what if companies want to use AI in areas besides chatbots or on Twitter? Kylie is a startup that’s making its public debut claiming that it can “clone” a brand’s social media presence and automate responses across Twitter, Zendesk, Salesforce Chatter, and other se

Amazon’s Alexa skills are now able to obtain information about a user’s location. Available today, the Device Address API gives skills developers the ability to factor location into services provided. The Device Address API is not a location tracker like GPS, but rather shares the address of the device owner.
“Your skill, for example, can deliver food and groceries to a customer’s home or provide directions to a nearby gym,” said Alexa evangelist Jeff Blan