Technology news

GUEST: The term “serverless architecture” is a recent addition to the technology lexicon, coming into common use following the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda in 2014. The term is both paradoxical and provocative: In fact, there really are servers backing “serverless” technology, but the term illustrates one of IT’s biggest headaches, server administration. Serverless architecture offers the promise of writing code without the worries of ongoing server ad

Amy Jo Kim is a famous game designer who helped fashion some wondrously creative titles such as The Sims, Rock Band, and Covet Fashion. And now she is extracting what she calls “Game Thinking” from the process of making games and she’s applying it to other kinds of product design.
In years past, a superficial version of this was called “gamification.” But it turned out to be a bust, largely because it’s hard to bolt on game-like features onto products that are

GUEST: It’s time for corporate boards to add “startup engagement” to their CEOs’ job descriptions.
CEOs know it’s important to engage with startups, but startlingly few seem to do it themselves. Too often this critical responsibility is shrugged off to other company departments, including innovation, business development, marketing, and PR. This is just not enough.
Startup engagement needs to be taken seriously at the very highest levels of every corporate organizat

GUEST: Last week’s F8 conference is still generating a boatload of excitement, especially over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an era without smartphones or televisions. While Zuck is right to believe AR and VR will have an important place in tomorrow’s ecosystem, he may be missing where their replacement value will be. Even worse (and this is uniquely ironic, coming from the world’s largest social network), Facebook is completely missing the intrinsic social need that dr

We liked Rogue One when it hit theaters, but had some problems with it: We felt that the film’s central character, Jyn Erso, was thinly defined, as was much of the rest of the cast. Lessons from the Screenplay agrees, and in a new video essay, highlights how the two latest Star Wars films differ in how their characters interact move the story along.In Rogue One, Jyn’s family is torn apart when she was a child, and when we meet up with her as an adult, we learn that she’s been t

GUEST: Recent history alone should be enough to prove that enterprise tech is a far more stable, profitable category than consumer tech. Take for instance the dozens of successful exits (either through acquisition or IPO) in the U.S. enterprise tech space in just 2016 and 2017. By contrast, the U.S. consumer tech space has seen only a handful of successful outcomes over the same time period.
Above: 2016 and 2017 acquisitions and IPOs of U.S. based companies without previously successful exits. A

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. We’re currently reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
Back in 2012, the Tribeca Film Festival hosted the world premiere of a tiny indie horror film called Resolution, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and written by Benson. The film’s desaturated, grubby poster made it look exactly like the torture-porn movies that were already ou

GUEST: Startup numbers have surged, and so have VC investments, according to data released earlier this month by Dow Jones VentureSource. But that’s not necessarily good news.
I’ll get to the downside in a minute. First, let’s take a look at the data and the causes for the surge. According to the VentureSource data, in January 2004, there were just 5,350 venture-backed companies in the U.S. By March 31, 2017 that number had ballooned to 16,064. While I expected an increase, the

Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, a major film from Indian director S.S. Rajamouli, debuted this week. And it is accompanied by a new mobile game from Moonfrog Labs, dubbed S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Game.
The mobile game is a major release on Google Play and the Apple App Store. To create it, the Bangalore, India-based mobile game publisher Moonfrog Labs turned to Mark Skaggs, co-creator of FarmVille, who moved to India in 2016 to work on games for the Indian market at Moon

Young crayfish can get drunk — and they get drunk a lot faster when they’ve been hanging out with their friends, new research says. So, extroverted crayfish may want to consider pacing themselves this weekend.Crayfish are basically miniature, freshwater lobsters, which makes them an unusual model organism for trying to understand a behavior — drinking alcohol — that we really only care about in humans. They’re not mammals. They don’t even have backbones. But,

GUEST: The biggest economic story in Europe right now has nothing to do with populism, Brexit or Trump. It’s not something that’s happening in the boardrooms of our multinationals, and it’s not something happening in the political corridors of power.
The most interesting story in Europe right now is happening in the coworking spaces and coffee shops of our leading tech hubs. It’s the untold story of the pan-European technology boom, and it’s going to be one of the k

Nintendo has been noncommittal when it comes to virtual reality, even though it filed a patent late last year that could turn its Switch console into a VR device. A YouTube blogger decided to take matters into his own hands, and found a way to demonstrate the potential the Switch holds for VR.In his video, Nintendrew explained that he wanted to see how VR would look on the device. He took his Switch and slotted it into a Durovis Dive 7 headset, but he noted that any tablet-sized headset would pr

This week, Mac DeMarco asked his fans to send him some fan fiction about himself. You’re supposed to send it in via DeMarco’s website, but I’ve decided to publish my submission publicly, because I already work for a website.
Mac DeMarco is standing near the edge of an in-ground pool, trying to pinch a polyethylene foam noodle with his big toe and the one next to it. As he opens and closes his toe-claws, the noodle floats away.
“Dammit,” Mac mutters.
His pool is litt

While the White House Correspondents’ Association held its annual dinner last night, Full Frontal host Samantha Bee threw her own event, Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and used sketches based on The Man in the High Castle, The West Wing, and SNL to lambast the Trump Administration.The most elaborate of the sketches came from Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history show set in a timeline in which Japan and Germany won the Second World War. In it, B

The Nintendo Switch has been out for over a month now, and it’s still going strong. I play mine almost daily, even after finishing the full main story in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. New games are coming out every week, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe this Friday, and the portability and versatility make it easy to pick up and play in tons of situations. But the one big thing Nintendo doesn’t have their toes in yet that the rest of the gaming world appears to have embraced

As if to underscore the point of the climate march, Washington DC was muggy-sticky and unseasonably hot. It was a perfect backdrop to the signs reading “Make the Earth cool again,” “It’s getting hot in here,” or “the Earth is melting.” The People’s Climate March was rather cheery, as attempts to save the world go. When I arrived early, I was treated to a larger-than-life puppet show. Cardboard and papier-mâché pipelines — taller

FEATURE: Smart ovens are now a thing, as are intelligent beds, connected doorbells, and internet-enabled fridges. Everything, it seems, is now “smart” and “connected” — and soon the windows in your home or office could be hit with the smart stick too.
There has been a flurry of activity in the smart glass realm over the past few months, and two Californian companies in particular are knuckling down to bring self-tinting windows to companies and residencies

Update 7:20AM ET, April 30th: Sunday morning, SpaceX stopped the launch of its Falcon 9 less than a minute before take off, citing an issue with one of the sensors on the first stage. The company will try to launch vehicle again tomorrow at 7AM ET.
On Monday, SpaceX is slated to do its very first national security mission for the US military — sending a spy satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. Dubbed NROL-76, the secretive payload is scheduled to go up on the compan

Eye tracking is one feature that could could benefit the performance and affordability of high-end virtual reality headsets. The HTC Vive should become the first mainstream headset to put that theory to the test.
A Chinese startup known as 7invensun (pronounced seven-in-ven-sun) is announcing it will be releasing  a new eye tracking module for the Vive next month. The module is called the aGlass and it will be available for “limited pre-order sales” next month, according to

(Reuters) – A sea of protesters swarmed in front of the White House on Saturday to voice displeasure with President Donald Trump’s stance on the environment and demand that he rethink plans to reverse the climate change policies backed by his predecessor.
The Peoples Climate March, the culmination of a string of Earth Week protests that began with last Saturday’s March for Science, coincides with Trump’s 100th day in office, the end of the traditional “honeymoon&rdq

Trolling is mostly dumb, but sometimes it's an art. 
President Donald Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and, as he was speaking, someone tossed a bunch of tiny Russian flags, confetti-style, in front of the cameras streaming his speech to news networks. 
SEE ALSO: Russian refugees read powerful testimonials of gay men who escaped Chechnya
As far as protests go, it certainly earns points for creativity. The Trump campaign and administration officials have had a lot of

 Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities around the country marking President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office with protests against his environmental policies. In Washington, organizers of the climate march estimated some 200,000 people showed up to march, clogging  the streets and snarling traffic on a sweltering day where temperatures threatened to break records.… Read More

Attendees at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles will notice that a familiar structure has faded from the show’s sweeping skyline of corporate booths. The familiar black monolith bearing the Oculus logo will not be making an appearance at E3 2017.
Oculus has confirmed that it will not have a booth at E3 this year. This marks the first time since 2014 that Oculus will not be hosting a booth at one of the year’s biggest international trade show

Look, let me start by saying Leonardo DiCaprio has done a lot to combat climate change. 
He produced a climate change documentary titled Before the Flood that dropped in 2016. He has a foundation "dedicated to the long-term health and wellbeing of all Earth’s inhabitants." The foundation has given $61 million to causes that align with that mission statement. He talks about climate change all the time. And, also, he was among the ~200,000 people in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to prote

"I assume I'll be having sex today."
Those are the first words out of Conan O'Brien's mouth upon being presented with an opportunity to try the new virtual reality game Wilson's Heart on Oculus Rift. 
Of course, the game has nothing to do with sex, but O'Brien's theory is that VR is headed in one direction: sex. Therefore, the entire video demonstration features O'Brien taking every opportunity to figure out how his VR experience can somehow turn into sex, from fiddling with the privates o

Turkey has blocked access to Wikipedia.org for at least 12 hours in a crackdown on free speech, the BBC reports.
Closely following Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s latest power grab — the controversial referendum victory Trump more or less endorsed — the country cut off access to Wikipedia over accusations that the site was “running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena” and “supporting terro

REVIEW: You know the PC gaming-peripheral market is booming when everyone is making a mechanical keyboard and a mouse with a bunch of extra features.
Like Razer, Kingston, and others, Creative Labs wants to capture the attention (and the cash) of people who play a lot of games on PC. To do that, the company already has a handful of excellent speaker systems and external USB sound cards, but now it also has a keyboard-and-mouse set to go along with its other products. The Vanguard K08 keyboa

Merriam-Webster defines its new word, "sheeple," as those who are "easily influenced." 
I'm sure plenty of groups of people qualify as said "sheeple." I, for example, am easily influenced by any shop selling doughnuts, and I'm sure many people are like me. But the dictionary chose Apple fans as its mental image.  
SEE ALSO: Wake up, sheeple: Your favorite political insult is now officially a word
Here's their example:Are you an iPhone owner with a battery case worth about $100? Then yo