Technology news

REVIEW: In Rock Band, you pretend to be your favorite music group. In Rock Band VR, you pretend to be a cover band that doesn’t quite get the songs right.
Rock Band VR may be more of a fundamentally different experience than what you’d expect from a Rock Band game. Good virtual reality games don’t just tack VR onto an existing design. They are built specifically for VR, so to a point Harmonix Music Systems and Oculus Studios had no choice but to make Rock Band VR a fundamentall

Uber is updating its Android app today to begin showing departure times for busses and trains that are nearby where a passenger is getting dropped off. The intention seems to be making Uber seem like a more viable option for taking commuters and other travelers the so-called last mile from where they’re dropped off by public transit to where they actually need to go.
The public transit information is being launched in partnership with the app Transit. It’ll only be available on Andro

GUEST: According to a study by Oracle, almost 80 percent of businesses have already implemented or are planning to adopt AI as a customer service solution by 2020, and a recent report by Deloitte and Oxford University suggests telesales could be the next to go.
Other experts are ambivalent about whether AI is really advanced enough to take over the role of a talented sales representative. AI is already being used in the sales field to respond to basic email or chat inquiries, organize sales inte

 Siri is a critical component of Apple’s vision for the future, so integral that it was willing to spend $200 million to acquire Lattice Data over the weekend. The startup was working to transform the way businesses deal with paragraphs of text and other information that lives outside neatly structured databases. These engineers are uniquely prepared to assist Apple with building… Read More

GUEST: Since Regulation Crowdfunding began on May 16 last year, 335 companies have filed offering documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to fundraise on securities-based crowdfunding platforms. Of those companies, 43 percent were funded, 30 percent failed, and the remainder are still open and trying to get funding.
The total capital committed to date on these platforms is in excess of $40 million, with the average successful crowdfunding campaign raising around $282,000 from

OpenAI, the San Francisco-based nonprofit research lab backed by Elon Musk, today announced a research milestone on its robotics work. The achievement is a new algorithm that allows a human being to communicate a task to an AI by performing it first in virtual reality. The method is based on what’s known as one-time imitation learning, a technique OpenAI developed to allow software guiding a robot to mimic a physical action using just a single example.AI can now learn new tasks quickly thr

After spending my life playing games where failure is never an option, it is difficult to adjust to a game where it is a viable way of progressing.
Expeditions: Viking is that game, and it’s available now for $30 on Steam from the Logic Artists studio. It’s a new tactical turn-based role-playing adventure set in a world of thralls (slaves) and thegns (the king’s chosen governors) without any fantasy creatures or magic spells. If you’ve played Fire Emblem or XCOM

Between streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, and the pay-only online archives of legacy media like Warner Bros. and CBS, the TV and movie business is becoming increasingly subscription-driven — to the extent that getting access to the best of popular culture seems prohibitively expensive. But there are some bargain options out there, especially for adventurous viewers. A sizable number of films and shows are available for free, either because the work’s in the public dom

GUEST: Many auto manufacturers, tech companies, and legislators predict that by 2021, self-driving cars will take to the roads, further accelerating the future of transportation.
Before that happens, one topic that needs further attention is the evolution and roll-out of self-driving technology. Today, many cars offer some form of self-driving capabilities — all of which require constant driver attention — and in many cases there is a gap between what drivers think the car

Hank Green, one half of YouTube’s super popular vlogbrothers, launched VidCon in 2010, and grew it into the biggest annual gathering of YouTube personalities, Vine stars, and other online video enthusiasts. Now he wants to do the same thing but with podcasts. It’ll be called PodCon, which makes sense!
The event has been listed on Indiegogo for less than 48 hours, and has raised about $26,000 of its $300,000 goal. PodCon, if it gets enough funding, will be held in Seattle, Washington,

On any given day, @infinite_scream’s Twitter timeline is a chorus of all-caps yelling. “AAAAHHHHHHH,” it screamed shortly after its creation in October 2015; “AAAAAAAAAH,” it expelled today, during the morning commute. Years separate those tweets, but the only changes to the monosyllabic account across 19 months are its variations in spelling. The intention is consistent.
@infinite_scream is an automated account from Nora Reed, a writer and botmaker responsible for

Sharing and playing Hearthstone with your friends is about to get easier and more rewarding. And Blizzard is hoping you appreciate it — so much so that you’ll keep logging in to play every day.
The studio announced two big features coming to Hearthstone, its digital card game behemoth for PC and mobile, in the coming weeks. Friendly Challenge will let players complete their daily quests while competing against people on their friends list. Blizzard is also finally making it easi

Apple is reportedly planning on upgrading all three of its MacBook products at WWDC this year, according to a report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.The company is said to be working on three updated models: a MacBook Pro with Intel’s latest Kaby Lake processor, a more powerful version of the 12-inch MacBook, and an updated 13-inch MacBook Air, which could get a faster processor as well. But sadly, there’s no word on a better screen. Apple really wants you to think of the 13-inch MacBo

Mophie just put its Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus charging cases online, in case you had any doubt that the company would release accessories for Samsung’s flagship devices. The S8 Juice Pack, as it’s called, includes a 2,950mAh battery while the S8 Plus version has a 3,300mAh battery built in. What’s especially nice about these cases is that they’re compatible with Qi wireless charging pads, meaning you can lay your phone wherever you tend to wirelessly charge and the ca

On its second anniversary, Discord is announcing that it has reached more than 45 million users for its popular voice communications app for gamers.
By comparison, the company had 11 million users in July 2016. That means it quadrupled its growth in less than a year.
The Discord community now exchanges 200 million messages a day, and it has reached a peak of 4 million concurrent users. The app generates about 6 billion messages a month, and its largest server has 77,000 members. And it has 8.9 m

EXCLUSIVE: Thanks to a video uploaded to Vimeo that seems to have included more hardware than it should have, we may have gotten our first look at not one, but two unannounced, Nokia-branded smartphones from licensee HMD Global Oy. The video was posted by a longtime Nokia brand photographer who now works with HMD, serving as a very tangible bridge between the storied brand’s past and its present/future.This will surely get pulled at some point, so I'll mirror it here [source: https://t.co/

Verizon’s version of the LTE-equipped LG Watch Sport has been canceled, according to a report from Droid Life.The Android Wear watch was originally announced to come in both AT&T and Verizon compatible versions, but the Verizon model was delayed, and now, completely canceled. As 9to5Google notes, all references to the Verizon variant have been deleted from LG and Verizon’s respective sites, and Verizon is offering refunds to customers.While Verizon customers may be stuck without

PRESS RELEASE:Venture Atlanta Reaches $1.8 Billion Milestone as it Celebrates 10th AnniversaryATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 16, 2017– Commemorating its 10th anniversary this year, Venture Atlanta today announced it has opened its 2017 call for presenters. The announcement is an invitation to innovating tech companies in the Southeast to vie for the chance to take the stage in October, engage with funding and tech ecosystem movers and shakers, and join the ranks of esteemed and hi

Polk Audio’s new MagniFi Max SR soundbar system can create 5.1 surround sound at home and is compatible with Google Home, thereby allowing it to work with any Chromecast audio-enabled device. That means users can control their sound system with voice commands. The soundbar comes bundled with two wireless speakers that connect over Wi-Fi. The system features four full-range drivers, two tweeters, a center channel driver, and a ported woofer.The MagniFi Max SR has an optical HDMI cable that

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is returning to the company to do whatever Biz Stone does, he said today. “My top focus will be to guide the company culture, that energy, that feeling,” he wrote, in the sentence that came closest to describing what might be expected of him in the new role. “I’m not replacing anyone at Twitter. Somebody mentioned I’m just filling the “Biz shaped hole” I left. You might even say the job description includes being Biz Stone.&r

(Reuters) — Electronic signature service DocuSign said on Tuesday hackers had temporarily gained access to a database containing customer emails following a surge in phishing emails sent to its users.
The company, which has about 200 million users, said the emails imitated the DocuSign brand to trick recipients into opening a Microsoft Word document containing malicious software.
The breach comes amid heightened concerns over the security of computer networks around the world, after the Wa

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone is rejoining the company in a role helping to “guide the company culture.” His position is a new one and he’s adamant that he isn’t replacing anyone. The move comes six years after first leaving to join fellow cofounder Evan Williams on Medium.
At one of Twitter’s famous Tea Time traditions where guest speakers address employees, chief executive Jack Dorsey asked Stone whether he would be interested in rejoining the company. Stone initial

In a month, the industry will gather in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow, but Ubisoft isn’t waiting for that event to reveal some of its new games.
The French publisher revealed that it is making Far Cry 5 on its official forum pages. In a post, the company showed off a logo … and not much else. We have no date, setting, or media. But this is right in line with recent rumors that Ubisoft was planning a new game in the Far Cry series, which typically has pl

Ubisoft isn’t done with racing games yet.
The publisher announced on its forums that The Crew 2 is coming. Ubisoft didn’t not give out any details besides the above logo, but promised that info was coming. The first game had more than 5 million players and shipped over 2 million copies.
The Crew came out in 2014 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC. It featured a large open world, but players criticized the game for its always-online requirement and prevalent microtrans

PRESS RELEASE: LEXINGTON, Ky.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 16, 2017– Additional findings at the six-month juncture from its early safety and feasibility study, Intralink-Spine, Inc. (ILS) indicates that the Réjuve™ System effectively eliminates or reduces low back pain. “We’ve demonstrated the safety of this device, and it has performed as expected. The dramatic pain reduction in these patients correlated with some objective measures: there was an average increa

We learned back in March that Mark Cuban was still making a hoverboard, but there wasn’t much information about what it would be capable of or how much it would cost. But now, Radical Transport — the company making the hoverboard for Cuban — has offered some of the first details in a YouTube video, which you can see above. After originally aiming for April, the Moov hoverboard will now supposedly hit Kickstarter around the end of May. It will be available there in limited quant

Amazon is bringing one of the best and worst smartphone features to Alexa: notifications.
Sometime in the next few months, Amazon’s Echo devices and third-party Alexa devices will be able to receive notifications from any developer that decides to build them into their Alexa skill. All notifications will be opt in, and they won’t be read aloud until prompted by a user asking, “Alexa, what are my notifications?”
Notifications will show up in two ways: the device will emit

Edgar Wright’s SXSW hit Baby Driver is still over a month away from its mid-summer release date, yet the fan art cottage industry is already cranking out comics, poster mock-ups, and illustrated portraits of the stars.
You can find this stuff on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. But you can’t find much in the way of an explanation as to why all of these artists are so invested in a movie most haven’t even seen, and which doesn’t involve any familiar characters or properties

Sure, The Emoji Movie never sounded like a good idea, but if there’s anything Hollywood has has proven in the past decade, it’s this: flagrant cash-grabs can be salvaged when the right talent is given enough creative control — 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, 22 Jump Street. Okay, I’m just talking about movies made by Chris Miller and Phil Lord.
The Emoji Movie isn’t made by Miller and Lord, and that is immediately obvious from the trailer, which appears to superfici

Apple has been granted two new patents that are particularly interesting to anyone who’s been following the iPhone 8 rumor mill: a patent for “Reducing the border area of a device” and one for a fingerprint sensor embedded directly in a screen, as spotted by Patently Apple.
In other words, Apple has patents to two of the biggest features that are rumored to appear on the next iPhone. Now, obviously, these are just patents, plenty of which get filed and granted but never actuall

If you wonder where your plastic toothbrushes and cigarette lighters go after you trash them, here’s your answer: many end up in the ocean, which means that they either sink to the bottom or wash up on beaches — like this remote, uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Henderson Island, which is located between New Zealand and Chile, was found to be covered in an estimated 38 million pieces of trash, most of it plastic, according to a new study. The density of debris w

If you like strange, beautiful television shows about fictional papacies, I have good news for you: HBO is working on a Young Pope follow-up. The show, called The New Pope, will be a limited series created and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, according to The Hollywood Reporter.None of the cast has been announced yet, and it’s not clear if the series will be a sequel to The Young Pope, set in the same universe, or just a riff on the first season’s ideas — like True Detective&rsquo

 In the early days of Android, skins were the norm. Manufacturers looked to set themselves apart from countless competitors with custom design languages at proprietary apps, to the point where many actually slowed down and hurt the experience in the process.
The tide has, thankfully, turned on that front. While a full-vanilla Android experience isn’t always the norm, many learned the… Read More

 We first developed the idea for TC Sessions: Robotics because we wanted to bridge the gap between startups and investment in the robotics world — namely research, academia, government and industry.  On July 17 at MIT’s Kresge auditorium in Cambridge, MA, those worlds will come together like never before for an event that we’re pleased to host alongside MIT’s… Read More

 Bill Maris, the former chief executive of Alphabet’s venture arm, GV, has closed on $150 million in commitments for his own, San Diego-based venture firm. The outfit, Section 32, was expected to raise closer to $100 million, according to an earlier Bloomberg report; because there was “strong interest,” it will instead close on $150 million, Maris tells us. Maris, who has lived… Read More

Apple’s brand-new campus is starting to open up to employees, and Wired got to step inside for an early look at the incredibly elaborate building. The article highlights a bunch of thoughtful and often excessive architectural touches — from making sure rain doesn’t streak on the glass to using water cooling so that the air conditioning rarely kicks on because Steve Jobs hated fans — but perhaps the true standout detail from the piece is that Apple invented its own pizza b