Technology news

Unikitty was one of the biggest breakout stars from 2014’s The Lego Movie — Lego has made the temperamental, perky unicorn-cat character a marketing focus, with a series of individual playsets, and eight different mini-figure variants to date. But she was also an audience favorite, prompting a wave of cosplay and fan art. So like Lego Batman, she’s getting her own spin-off property — in this case, an animated Cartoon Network TV show called Unikitty!
In the new show, Uniki

Toyota has tapped Nvidia to help it bring self-driving tech to people — and roads — in just a few years.
The automaker will use Nvidia’s Drive PX supercomputer, a platform with a robust new processor called Xavier, to power the autonomous driving systems inside its future cars, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced Wednesday at the GTC Conference in San Jose, California.
These production vehicles are slated to hit the marketplace in a few years, which means that by 2020 there sho

Snap reported its earnings for the first time since becoming a public company in March of this year. Its daily active user count clicked up to 166 million, a 5 percent increase over last quarter, up 36 percent from this time a year ago. That puts it behind Instagram Stories, a competitor launched by Facebook that copied heavily from Snapchat and has already passed 200 million users. It also means Snap hasn’t found a way back to the rapid growth it saw in years past.Snapchat has a user grow

Google announced today that it’s acquiring Owlchemy Labs, the VR-focused studio that created Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Owlchemy will keep releasing VR games for multiple platforms, but with backing from Google — similar to Tilt Brush studio Skillman & Hackett, which Google acquired in 2015. “We have a slate of original games that we have in [the] production and prototyping phase, and we're going to continue to do that,” says Owlchemy co-fou

Tesla has started taking preorders for its “solar roof,” the tile-sized solar panels that the company announced back in October 2016. According to the company, the “typical” customer in the US can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot of solar panels.A Tesla solar roof for a two-story, 2,000-square-foot home in New York state would cost around $50,000 to install after federal tax cuts, and would generate $64,000 in energy savings over 30 years, according to the company&rsq

UK police in the city of Durham, England, are prepared to go live with a predictive artificial intelligence system that will determine whether a suspect should be kept in custody, according to the BBC. Called Hart, which stands for Harm Assessment Risk Tool, the system is designed to classify individuals based on a low, medium, or high risk of committing a future offense. Police plan to put it live in the next few months to test its effectiveness against cases in which custody specialists do not

Uber will now let you save places other than your home or work for quick access in the app. You can assign names to your favorite Saved Places, as Uber calls them, so you could label your best friend’s apartment or the airport, for example. Riders can save a place once they’re en route. From then on, they can access that saved address by tapping the “Where to?” bar and choosing Saved Places.The feature is available on Android and iOS in the US, and it’s rolling out

Add New York to the list of states where autonomous cars will soon be navigating the streets. Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced that NY is now accepting applications from companies that want to test their self-driving vehicles on public roads.New York’s experiment with autonomous cars will be rather short in duration; the law that permits these tests, approved as part of the state’s budget last month, will expire on April 1st, 2018. These initial tests could be a bridge to expanded

Ticketmaster has added a new feature to its website and mobile apps, offering users a preview of the exact view from their seats. The sneak peek was made possible through a partnership with IOMedia and its 3D Virtual Venue technology. Users can get a sense of how they’ll see the game at over 110 venues across North America and Australia, including Madison Square Garden, AT&T Stadium, and the LA Coliseum.
Virtual Venue will show you different layouts depending on the event at the arena.

Starting today, CBS is offering a combined digital subscription that includes both CBS All Access and Showtime. The package costs either $14.99 with limited commercials for CBS content or $18.99 for no CBS ads at all. The Showtime side of things is commercial-free in both cases.
All Access includes a live CBS feed in select cities and on-demand access to the network’s current hits and vault of older programming. Showtime is much the same; you get both a live stream — in all markets t

To participate in the Bow Wow Challenge, you need only to understand the unspoken rules of Instagram. Take a photo that, whether by a clever trick of framing, perspective, or just a nice filter, gives your followers the impression that the life you live is far more glamorous than it is. Post the final image vs. the full view, and you’re done.
The joke, which is rapidly spreading around Twitter, is named for rapper Shad Moss, aka Bow Wow, formerly Lil’ Bow Wow. On May 8th, Bow Wow pos

 Back in October of last year, Tesla unveiled a new project it had been secretly cracking away at behind the scenes: solar roof tiles. Unlike traditional solar panels that sit on top of the roof, these solar tiles would replace your roof outright — and, if all went to plan, they’d look as good as any other roof. Just… maybe a little shinier. But how much will it cost? Read More

At today’s GPU Technology Conference keynote, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a project known as Holodeck — a shared virtual space where people can examine photorealistic objects. In this case, carmaker Christian Koenigsegg and three other people entered the Holodeck to see a model of Koenigsegg’s new $1.9 million luxury car.
Inside the simulation, users could grab the car’s steering wheel, or watch it explode into its component parts. According to VentureBeat, which

Google’s adding a small but useful update to search to help address your fear of missing out. Starting today – on the Google app and mobile web – you can now find nearby events right from Google Search. Type something like “art events this weekend” and Google will pull in results from sites like Eventrbite and Meetup to show you some options in your area, as well as their date and time. If you want something with more specific timing, you can also tap on one of the

 Nothing actually appears to happen when the Essentium rep flips the switch to fire up the company’s demo. The change is undetectable standing a foot away from the Stacker industrial 3D printer, but if you lean forward and peek into the small gap between the print head and bed, you’ll spot two small semi-circles that glow purple like a range oven on its highest setting. It’s… Read More

Today in Seattle, Microsoft kicked off its annual developer conference, Build. Build is a conference by developers, and for developers, so we don’t get the consumer-facing technology at the same scale as other dev events, like those from Google, Facebook, and Apple, but we still have plenty of cool stuff to talk about. Here’s what you missed. Windows 10 hits a major milestone Microsoft originally set the goal of reaching 1 billion devices by mid-2018, a goal it appears unlikely

I love Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. It’s taken something incredibly complicated – artificial intelligence and machine learning – and turned it into something that’s not just easy, but also commoditized. The latest addition to Microsoft’s Cognitive Service is Custom Vision, which lets you create sophisticated computer vision applications, but with a minimum of effort and time. Cornelia Carapcea, Senior Project Manager at Microsoft, demonstrated the technolo

Microsoft is experimenting with a new PowerPoint add-in that will allow users to present slides in a foreign language. Microsoft executive Harry Shum demonstrated the new add-in on stage at the company's Build developers conference today. Presenters can download Microsoft's Translator app and sync it to a PowerPoint presentation. This link will then provide closed captioning on top of PowerPoint slides automatically.
Microsoft's demonstration wasn't perfect, however. The translator failed to pic

Google is adding a new feature to search results on the Google app and mobile site: local events, which will now show up in a special “events” box when searching queries for events.As seen in the example, searching for things like “art events this weekend” will now show a simple, organized list of nearby matches. Google also allows for more specific searches, so you’ll be able to search for things like “jazz concerts in Austin next week” and get similarl

It sucks when you click on some interesting link on Facebook, only to find it takes you to some sucky, ad-filled spam website. Now Facebook says it’s leveraging AI to bury those types of links on the News Feed. Facebook has been punishing spammy websites that advertise on the platform since last year, but the company says it’s now doubling down on the punishment, as well as downranking spammy link posts on the News Feed itself. Facebook says it’s used AI to analyze &ldquo

Judge Dredd could be making a comeback. EW revealed today that entertainment company IM Global and UK game publisher Rebellion have partnered to create Judge Dredd: Mega City, a television show featuring the masked hero.
Judge Dredd: Mega City will reportedly be an “ensemble drama about a team of Judges,” with IM Global Television CEO Stuart Ford, president Mark Stern (who helped develop Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica, Helix, and Defiance), and Rebellion owners Jason and Chris Kin

Facebook today announced its latest move to rid the social network of sensationalist, misleading, and spammy junk. The company says it has tweaked its News Feed algorithms to downrank “low-quality webpage experiences,” as part of its heightened effort to cut down on fake news, viral clickbait, and other types of content pushed out on Facebook purely for the financial benefit of third-party website owners. The company says the changes are rolling out to users over the next few months.

A new take on The Sims is coming to your phone. Called simply The Sims Mobile, the game is available in Brazil today, and will start rolling out to the rest of the world soon after. It’s available on both iOS and Android.
EA hasn’t revealed a lot about how the game will play, but the mobile release will be based on The Sims 4 “legacy challenge,” a set of self-imposed rules that task players with building and maintaining a family across generations. The Sims Mobile will be

Today at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, the company launched Azure Cosmos DB – a brand new schemaless database system designed for large, globally-distributed, data-intensive applications. Azure Cosmos DB is a superset of the existing DocumentDB service, and Microsoft is transitioning all existing DocumentDB customers to Azure Cosmos DB, free of charge. The system is designed to scale horizontally, whilst maintaining impressive performance and reliability. This i

Today, on stage at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman, announced a couple of major updates for Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. The biggest is a brand new management application for Android and iOS, which promises to allow sysadmins to manage their systems from their mobile devices. I can’t imagine doing much legwork from the cramped real-estate of an iPhone, but it’s pretty cool to have the option to view real-time an

At its Build developer conference in Seattle today, Microsoft showed off how developers can extend the company’s Graph API to turn just about any device into a productivity assistant. To illustrate what that means, Senior Product Marketing Manager Laura Jones took to the stage to demonstrate a scenario in which she has a meeting to get to in the morning. She first asked Cortana to give her a run-down of her schedule for the day, by issuing a voice command to an Invoke smart speaker.

Microsoft made the huge move of bringing a preview of Visual Studio to the Mac back in November. Today, during its Build event in Seattle, Microsoft announced the software is now ready for general availability. Of course, developers has been trying Visual Studio on Mac in preview form for some time, but general availability marks a milestone as Microsoft continues its campaign to become a company that supports developers no matter what platform they’re using. It’s probably

Following up its promise from December, Microsoft has opened up the Cortana Skills Kit preview for developers. That will open up Microsoft’s AI to numerous new custom abilities. To make it easier for to get started, Microsoft says developers can simply reuse the a lot of the code they’ve created for Alexa or the Microsoft Bot Framework. These skills will work on any device Cortana is available on, including Android, iOS, and new Cortana devices in addition to Windows 10. T

Artificial intelligence is going to radically change the workplace. But not just in terms of eliminating jobs, but also by making them measurably safer. Today at Microsoft’s Build conference in Seattle, Andrea Carl, Director of Commercial Communications at Microsoft, demonstrated how the Azure stack, Azire IoT Edge, Microsoft Cognitive Services, and commodity camera equipment can make the workplace safer. It does this by identifying tools, people, and even potential accidents, like spilla

At its Build 2017 developer conference today, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 is now on over 500 million devices. It took the company’s latest and greatest operating system about 21 months to hit that milestone.
Windows 10 was installed on over 75 million PCs in its first four weeks, passed 110 million devices after 10 weeks, 200 million in under six months, 270 million after eight months, 300 million after nine months, 350 million after 11 months, and 400 million after 14 months. Micr

The Bing search engine can now surface bots in its search results when you search for a business.
The news was announced today at Build, Microsoft’s annual developer taking place May 10-12 in Seattle. The Microsoft Bot Framework, a toolkit for creating bots for more than half a dozen chat apps and Bing.com, was first launched at Build in San Francisco last year.
To test the feature, search “Monsoon Restaurant Seattle” now and you can try out the bots on Bing experience.
Th

At Microsoft’s Build 2017 developer conference, its biggest Visual Studio news wasn’t even for its own platform: Visual Studio 2017 for Mac has hit general availability (download here, requires OS X El Capitan 10.11 or higher). Developers can now use Microsoft’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) across Windows and Mac to build for the cloud, mobile, and the web.
“Developers get a great IDE and a single environment to not only work on end-to-end solutions &

Microsoft today announced a public preview of its Cortana Skills Kit that allows developers to create voice apps for the intelligent assistant.
The announcement was made at Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference taking place May 10-12 in Seattle.
Third-party developers have already made hundreds of Google Assistant actions and more than 10,000 Alexa skills using Actions on Google and the Alexa Skills Kit.
The Harman Kardon Invoke speaker with Cortana inside is d

Arguably the biggest Azure news to come out of Microsoft’s Build 2017 developer conference is the debut of Azure Cosmos DB. The schema-free database service offers developers flexibility with five consistency choices, instead of forcing them to choose between strong and eventual consistency. Other highlights include high performance, fault tolerance, being able to elastically scale across any number of geographical regions, and automatically indexing data.
Cosmos DB is the evolution of Doc

A year after the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework, today Microsoft announced that its toolkit for creating bots is now used by over 130,000 developers.
The developer number was announced together with a series of new features for the framework, including a way to make payments inside bots and the ability to publish bots to Skype for Business, the Bing search engine, and the Cortana intelligent assistant.
The news was announced today at Build, Microsoft’s annua