Technology news

Get ready to shed some tears.
The Met Gala was filled with some truly memorable outfit choices and celebrity couple sightings. But the social media posts from Humans of New York also made a splash. 
SEE ALSO: Teen Phenom Sloane Stephens Upsets Serena and Gets Her Twitter Wish
The account featured some quotes from celebrity couples who attended the gala including Ryan Reynolds with Blake Lively and Evelyn McGee-Colbert on husband Stephen Colbert. However, the post showing Reddit creator Alex

Sales of the Apple Watch have nearly doubled year over year, CEO Tim Cook announced on the company’s earnings call today. So far, Apple has refused to give out exact sales numbers for the Apple Watch, as it does for its iPhone and iPad, and has instead bundled the wearable device into its “other devices” category that includes Beats products, AirPods, Apple TV, and accessory sales.
Frankly, it’s a smart move by Apple. The admission by Cook is likely a response to major co

While Tesla’s cars don’t spew greenhouse gases, experts are still concerned about the environmental impact of their batteries.
That’s what makes the fact that two Tesla executives are now in charge of a recycling company so interesting. Tesla cofounder/CTO Jeffrey Straubel and head of special projects Andrew Stevenson are both listed in an SEC filing as the executive officer and director of Redwood Materials. 
SEE ALSO: Trump wants to kill the energy program that helped ma

Media critics at times berated CNN for its endless coverage of then-candidate Donald Trump as he campaigned for the White House in 2016, and some have even called the relationship symbiotic — the network needed ratings, and Trump needed airtime.
But for as much as CNN's fortunes have improved in the age of Trump, there are some indignities the network won't suffer, such as a commercial calling it and other media outlets "fake news."  
SEE ALSO: Alex Jones plays a character on Infowars

Fourteen-month-old Brandon Emery unwittingly locked himself in the car last week during a shopping trip with his mom. Don't worry, though — he made it out just fine. And he seems to have had an extremely fun experience.
According to CBS News, the toddler climbed from the backseat into the front of his mother's unlocked car while she unloaded groceries at a store in Bude, United Kingdom. After she closed the trunk, but before she got back into the car, Brandon pushed the "lock" button. Whoo

Twilio ($TWLO) is raising a flag to caution shareholders about a potential impact on future revenue. During the company’s first quarter earnings call, chief executive Jeff Lawson warned about a change with one of Twilio’s largest customers: Uber. He said that contributions from the on-demand ride hailing service has started to decrease, from 17 percent last quarter to 12 percent this quarter, and Twilio “expects contributions to decline further” — it expects th

Mmm....fattening. 
YouTuber Andrew Rea, whose channel is dedicated to showing people how to make novelty foods from their favorite TV shows and films, has finally created Homer Simpson's three-ingredient Frankenstein waffle from the Season 4 episode "Homer the Heretic," the famous "Space Age Out-Of-This-World Moon Waffle."
While we don't recommend actually making this monstrosity because one of the three ingredients is a bunch of caramel that would undoubtedly ruin your waffle maker (and n

Apple’s second quarter earnings results are in, and the company reported iPhone sales of about 50.8 million units for a revenue figure of $33.2 billion. That’s not a big deviation from last year, in which iPhone unit sales were just 1 percent higher. But the interesting takeaway is that while unit sales decreased, revenue increased. Sure, by just 1 percent, from $32.9 billion, but the shift here means Apple is making more money on each iPhone sold than it has in years prior.Apple is

GUEST: Everyone and their mother is racing toward AI these days. Spending on the technology was already at a hefty $640 million in 2016, and analysts predict it’ll reach $37 billion by 2025. While we’re all ultimately working together, there’s still fragmentation in the industry as competing schools of thought grapple for supremacy. How do you build a thinking machine?
Thousands of developers have worked for decades to discover the right methodology to create machine learn

NBA champion LeBron James has already hinted that, if he wins again in the coming weeks, he might not make the traditional post-season White House team visit now that Trump is president. 
But he—nor the other seven teams currently in the playoffs—may never need to, thanks to the immersive virtual reality experience offered by The People's House. 
SEE ALSO: SpaceVR, SpaceX to launch VR camera into space, bringing the astronaut experience to all
Produced by the Felix & Pa

I had a really nice slingshot as a kid. Not a Y-shaped stick with a rubber band on it, but a seriously legit metal slingshot with an arm brace and everything. But it had nothing on the Assolar SS-12, which I just saw on The Gadgeteer.
Look at this thing!Officially listed on Amazon as the "Assolar SS-12 Multi-function Super Power Stainless Hunting Laser Slingshot, Hunting Bow with Adjustable Spring and Quality Rubber Bands," this slingshot has a spring mechanism to amp up the power of your shots,

Canadian company Kobo has announced a new version of the Aura H20 e-reader, the first water-resistant e-reader, which was originally released in 2014. But while the new $179 Aura H20 borrows the name from its predecessor, it has much more in common with the Aura One that was released last year — and that’s a good thing.The new Aura H20 is rated IPX8 water resistant, meaning you can submerge it in two meters of water for up to an hour. It shares the same overall design as the Aura One

Apple sold 50.76 million of its iconic iPhones during the first three months of 2017. That helped the company generate $52.9 billion in revenue, a 4.5 percent increase from the same period last year. The number of iPhones snapped up by consumers was essentially flat, shrinking by 1 percent over the second quarter of last year. But the average sale price per smartphone climbed, helping power the company to more than $11 billion in net profit.When asked about flat iPhone sales, Apple CEO Tim Cook

Apple reported $52.9 billion in revenue and $2.10 earnings per share for the second quarter of 2017 today.
That’s both more and less than investors hoped to see from the iPhone maker ($52.97 billion revenue, $2.02 earnings per share), but expectations weren’t that high to begin with, by Apple’s standards.
Luckily for Apple, as long as phone sales don’t totally tank, the numbers don’t really matter much

I have written before, and will likely write again, about the frustrations of Apple’s MacBook Pros, which only offer USB-C ports. That’s why I’m almost mad to see something like the PowerUp, a new USB-C charger for Apple’s MacBook Pros (or anything, really) that is so obviously clever it’s annoying that it’s a third-party solution and not the in-box charger.
A USB-C charger with three legacy ports built-in
The PowerUp comes as a crowdfunded Indiegogo project f

Longtime Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson is out. The Etsy board is replacing him with board director Josh Silverman starting May 3.
Dickerson had served as Etsy’s CEO since 2011. Before that he was the company’s CTO, and before that, he was a Yahoo.
Dickerson is losing his spot as chairman of the board as well. New York investor Fred Wilson will take his spot.
In Etsy’s Q1 2017 earnings press release today, Dickerson said, “The Board decided that it was time f

Twilio ($TWLO) has reported its first quarter 2017 earnings, revealing that it generated $87.4 million in revenue, a 47 percent annual increase, with a non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.04.
Wall Street analysts had expected the company to report $83.6 million in revenue and a non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.06.
Shares in the company were down 1.34 percent for the day to close at $33.93. In after-hours trading, Twilio’s stock fell sharply more than 27 percent, largely due to weaker g

One of Valve‘s most visible public faces has moved on from the company.
Above: Faliszek (middle) with Valve founder Gabe Newell (left).Image Credit: Chet Faliszek
Chet Faliszek, writer on games like the Half-Life episodes and Portal, left Valve more than a month ago. For over a decade, Faliszek worked at Valve as one of its primary storytellers. Most recently, however, he has worked as Valve’s virtual reality ambassador. Faliszek would travel to events like the Game Developers C

The fight over net neutrality is starting to heat up — and the big difference between this time and 2015 is that big ISPs seem incredibly emboldened to say whatever they want without any regard for the truth. For example: here’s some sponcon from Verizon, where someone named Jeremy “interviews” Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman about what the FCC is up to and the resultant backlash, and Silliman says a bunch of things that are just flatly not true. How not true? He c

Elbow is a clever, perhaps too clever, cassette player concept that was unveiled by the "audiovisual art organization" BrainMonk a year ago. Now BrainMonk is looking into the feasibility of actually building it, and has put out a PDF that details the necessary components, according to Music Crowns.
The concept itself is simple: what if a cassette player didn't have any of that nasty boxy stuff that protects the cassette? Elbow, were it to exist, uses a single pulley to drive the tape, and it tra

Unihertz’s Jelly phone sounds like an all-things-miniature dream come true. It has a 2.45-inch display and is designed to fit in your pocket without losing any functionality. It also runs Android Nougat and comes in three colors: white, a sky blue, and black. As a proponent of all odd phone designs, as well as tiny objects, I’m rooting for the Jelly on Kickstarter. I’m also really hoping it isn’t a scam.Here are the full specs:
4G LTE
950mAh battery
2.45-inch display with

Lots of ideas for receiving the benefits of exercise without actually, you know, exercising have come and gone in the last 50 years. So it’s worth being a little skeptical about this one: mice, when given a certain molecule, could run 100 minutes longer without any training.The usual caveats apply: this is a mouse study, and we haven’t tested the drug in humans. But scientists hope that this compound — called GW1516, or GW for short — can be turned into a medicine that pr

L’Oréal has launched a bot named Beauty Gifter that asks both the gift giver and the recipient questions in order to sell personalized makeup and skin care gifts via Facebook Messenger.
The bot was first made available in a soft launch last week.
Beauty Gifter is one in a series of conversational experiences L’Oréal plans to create together with Automat Technologies, a Montreal-based startup that has operated primarily in stealth since its launch last year.
Upcomin

PRESS RELEASE: LAKEWOOD, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 2, 2017– AdAction is excited to launch its one-of-a-kind app discovery platform, Action Discover, during this year’s Mobile Apps Unlocked summit in Las Vegas. Available exclusively for AdAction clients, the Action Discover platform provides high volume and extensive targeting capabilities to optimize campaigns and drive scale for maximum return on ad spend. “Action Discover gives an in-depth analysis to determine wh

GUEST: I spent the past five months developing an AI-powered VoiceOps interface for the enterprise. Since Amazon Lex wasn’t available at the time, my team open-sourced the project. We successfully launched it into production in February; it is now live with several customers, helping them prioritize problem resolution for enterprise apps. More recently, we started beta testing with Lex. Now that Lex is widely available to developers, I wanted to share with others some advice and best

Today Radiohead tweeted a cryptic announcement for an OK Computer remaster in honor of the album’s 10-year anniversary. “OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017,” the tweet reads. There’s also a link to the band’s website, which appears to have been reverted to its 1997 version.“This is the Radiohead website [from about 1997],” reads an announcement at the top of the website. If you click on it, you’ll be directed to a series of stark white pages featuring p

The gaming industry has successfully fought off critics and their moral panics for decades, and now it’s time to look ahead to the next battle.
Two of the people who helped games find First Amendment protection revisited that battle today while also discussing how those lessons could stave off similar legal challenges to the emerging augmented and virtual reality industries. Ted Price, chief executive of Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank studio Insomniac Games, and Mike Gal

Microsoft finally made a real laptop, and it’s beautiful. I got a chance to get a closer look at the new Surface Laptop during Microsoft’s event in New York City, and I’m impressed. This could be the laptop I've been waiting for Microsoft to create. The Surface Book was always a little too top-heavy and chunky, but this new Surface Laptop is under three pounds and feels high end, thanks to its aluminum finish and design. Microsoft has made some interesting hardware choices here

Lately, the Apple rumor mill has been speculating that the company is working on two new iPhone models: an overhauled iPhone 8, said to have a new bezel-less design, OLED display, wireless charging, some sort of augmented reality features, and a more pedestrian iPhone 7S model. But while there have been reports that the iPhone 8 would be delayed until later in the fall than usual, a new research note from Deutsche Bank suggests that the new iPhone might not be out until as early as 2018, accordi

PRESS RELEASE:Financing to Support Development of Precision Oncology Treatments Driven by Advanced Genomics, Big Data and Artificial IntelligenceDALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 2, 2017– Today Lantern Pharma Inc. announced the closure of its Series A equity financing of $3.7 million for the biotech company and its clinical-stage cancer treatments. This Series A closing was led by Bios Partners, GPG Ventures and other private investors. Lantern Pharma Inc. is a clinical-stage biotech

Microsoft is planning to let Surface Laptop owners upgrade to Windows 10 Pro free of charge until the end of the year. While the laptop ships with Windows 10 S, a new version designed just for Windows Store apps, Microsoft isn't charging Surface Laptop owners the $49 fee to switch to Pro. If you purchase another Windows 10 S device then you'll still need to pay the $49 upgrade free, but Surface Laptop customers will have until the end of the year to switch.
Microsoft is also throwing in an Offic

Hi, everybody! Welcome to The Circle Question Club, where secrets are lies and knowing is good but knowing everything is better! The Circle — a thriller about a Google-like tech company with a sinister agenda, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson — has gotten largely bad reviews from critics, including our own Tasha Robinson. Still, there’s a lot to say about the film’s portrayal of the tech industry and how it handles its source material, Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel of t