Technology news

French retailer Carrefour has teamed up with Bookeen, an e-reader company, to release and develop a new e-reader. Surprise. The two companies put out their first Nolim e-reader in 2013 and are now refreshing it. The revamped version features a 6-inch E Ink touchscreen display (1024 x 758 resoultion), 8GB of storage, and Wi-Fi connectivity. It’ll cost €129. Given that Amazon put out its square-shaped Paperwhite last year, Carrefour and Bookeen had to find a way to make theirs sound mor

 Deep Algo was one of the more fascinating companies on display in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The French team aims to make coding languages more accessible for the masses with SaaS (software as a service) offering that promises to do for languages like C++, C Sharp and Javascript what WYSIWYG does for HTML. It’s a pretty bold claim, but the company is confident that… Read More

Apple is refusing to compensate a woman whose Beats headphones exploded in her face, claiming the batteries were at fault. Earlier this year, the anonymous woman says she was asleep on a flight from Beijing to Melbourne when she was awakened by an explosion and heat searing her face. The sparking headphones burned her face and neck, and half-melted to the floor where she threw them before flight attendants managed to douse them in water. The Australian news site news.com.au 

Netflix’s original series Orange is the New Black returns June 9th, and the company’s latest teaser is banking on viewers being diehard fans of its other shows. Of course, that can backfire — if you’ve never seen Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” episode, this touching moment between Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and Poussey (Samira Wiley) is likely to cruise right over your head.
The “Orange is the New Black Mirror” gag riffs on an oddly bright epis

The current generation of VR is great, but it's far from perfect. One way VR falls short of the real world is the fixed focus distance. Despite the illusion of depth from the stereo images you're looking at, each image is essentially flat, at a fixed perceived distance from your face, and with a focus selected by the game engine instead of your eyeballs. This can lead to fatigue or worse kinds of discomfort, and also puts limits on developers who need to strive to keep content in a visual sweet

Professional writing isn’t easy. As a blogger, journalist or reporter, you have to meet several challenges to stay at the top of your trade. You have to stay up to date with the latest developments and at the same time write timely, compelling and unique content. The same goes for scientists, researchers and analysts and other professionals whose job involves a lot of writing. With the deluge of information being published on the web every day, things aren’t getting easier. You have

I went to college at a strange time for the music industry. Napster had already come and gone, digital music stores like iTunes and Amazon Music were growing quickly, and the big streaming sites were just getting popular. While there were file sharing options out there for acquiring new music, there was one site that I turned to anytime I was looking for something new and interesting: Hype Machine. Unfortunately, the site recently announced that it’s turning to crowdfunding to survive, and

Scientists on Twitter are introducing themselves to the famous TV host Bill Nye (of Bill Nye the Science Guy fame), using the hashtag #BillMeetScienceTwitter. Their aim is to spark more collaboration between science celebrities with massive Twitter followings, like Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the scientists doing their best to communicate their research to the public.The Twitter campaign was born out of frustration. It started when Melissa Marquez, a marine biologist, tweeted from a collecti

In April, the Senate voted to roll back the FCC’s internet privacy rules, clearing the way for internet service providers to share browsing histories with third-party advertisers — and provoking a significant backlash along the way. Now, one of the leading forces for the April push has introduced a new bill that could restore some of those restrictions, while adding new ones for web services like Facebook and Google.
Titled the BROWSER Act (Balancing the Rights of Web Surfers Equally

The woman whose headphones caught fire during a February flight from Beijing, China to Melbourne, Australia was wearing a pair of AAA-powered Beats, according to the Australian Associated Press. What’s more, the report states that a representative for Apple, which bought Beats in 2014, told the woman’s lawyer that the company’s investigation into the incident blames the use of a “third-party battery" for the cause of the explosion, though it’s unclear what that mean

Shooting professional quality video with a drone is not an easy task, and often requires multiple human operators. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) think they’ve found a way to take humans out of the operation part of the equation altogether. The team teased a system this week that they plan to unveil at a conference later this month in which filmmakers can set certain parameters and then let the drone do all the work.
The group cal

When Microsoft announced Windows 10 S, one of the main distinctions from vanilla Windows 10 was that only Windows Store applications would run on the education-focused OS. But it turns out when Microsoft said that “applications are delivered via the Windows Store,” it didn’t mean that all Windows Store applications would work on 10 S, as noted by Lilliputing.In a blog post on MSDN today, Rich Turner, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, clarified that certain applications won

A landlord in Israel has successfully sued a couple who mislead him with emoji, with the judge ruling that the tiny pictures constituted a statement of intent. The landlord, Yaniv Dahan, posted an ad on a classified site for his home, and received a response from a couple. After giving him the impression they wanted to rent the house, he took down the ad — and then the couple stopped responding to his texts. Incensed at being ghosted, Dahan took the couple to

 Twitter is alerting Vine users of a bug that exposed their email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers to third parties. It’s also advising affected users to be cautious about any emails from unknown senders as a result. The company says the bug was only active for 24 hours before being patched, and doesn’t believe that the data was misused in any way, at this time.… Read More

London-based technology firm Improbable has had a very improbable week. The company raised a whopping $502 million from Japan’s SoftBank for its SpatialOS platform for enabling massive online gaming worlds.
Then Improbable announced that Jagex, maker of the enormously popular RuneScape, will use the SpatialOS platform for future game worlds.
We caught up with Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, for an interview about these events. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

 There’s hardly anything that we haven’t tried putting machine learning to work at, and usually they take to it like a duck to water. That’s not the case here, with a neural network attempting to learn how to give paint colors those fancy names like “spring rain” and “harbor mist.” How would you like to paint your house in a nice “dorkwood”… Read More

OPINION: This year’s I/O developer conference felt a little repetitive. Almost everything announced was an iteration on what Google showed off last year. But there was one theme that was particularly clear, especially on day one: Google is becoming more and more confident with its bet on AI.
The consumer version of this is Google Assistant. Last year, Google Assistant was merely introduced, not even launched. This year, there were so many features, integrations, and partnerships announced

Blogging platform Medium has introduced audio to its premium membership, meaning that paying Medium users will be able to listen to stories as read by either the author or a voice actor. According to VentureBeat, every member-exclusive story will have audio, as well as a few selected by Medium staff. Medium says on its membership page: Our audio content is designed to give you a direct, emotional version of each story with professionally recorded narrations – no automated voices allowed.

Few apps have made a more valiant effort to rescue us from indolence than Things, the to-do list app for Mac and iOS from German software developer Cultured Code. When it debuted as one of the original iPhone apps in 2008, Things was notable for its strong compatibility with Getting Things Done, the popular productivity system. Its original incarnation won an Apple Design Award, and by 2014 Things had sold 3 million copies of its iPhone app alone.
But in the intervening years, Things has come to

Design showcase Sight Unseen Offsite kicks off today in New York City, and among the featured exhibitors was Austin-based startup Twyla, an online marketplace selling specializing in licensed art prints. For first-time buyers who are intimidated by art auctions, or put off by dropping an insane amount of cash for an original painting, Twyla offers limited-edition prints individually numbered and signed by artists.
Inside the Twyla booth were artworks featured on the site, and in front of each pr

Hello, and welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, Nintendo wins April, with the Switch hitting the top console spot while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the best-selling game. But Persona 5 was right behind it. In fact, it sold more than five times better in the U.S. than Persona 4 did. Also, Ubisoft confirmed that Far Cry 5 is coming, and Sega wants to bring back some of its older franchises.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Destiny 2 is Bungi

Some of the biggest news to come out of Google I/O this week was that Google Assistant is coming to iOS, looking to take a shot at Siri, Apple’s own entrenched AI assistant. While Assistant has been available on Android for a while now, how does the AI assistant stack up against Siri when its forced to go head-to-head on Apple’s far more limited playing field? We put the two head-to-head.
Access
One of the most important parts of any AI assistant is how easy it is to access. One of t

Let’s get one thing out of the way: no matter what movies like Limitless claim, humans use more than 10 percent of our brains. This isn’t a surprise to a lot of people, but there’s more to the science of our cognitive potential than knowing that it can’t be true that 90 percent of our gray matter is inactive.The claim has been around for a long time, but where did it come from, anyway? And why are we so eager to believe it? How much of our brain do we really use — a

Back in 1991, when David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking TV melodrama Twin Peaks was cancelled, it left viewers with a lot of unanswered questions. Some of them were central to the series’ dreamy, surreal mysteries. Others were more immediate, and were deliberately left dramatically hanging in the series finale, which left so many characters apparently dead, and protagonist Dale Cooper possessed or outright replaced by an evil spirit. Fans hoped to see Cooper’s story reso

 This week the TechCrunch team threw another successful Disrupt conference, this time in New York City. 20 companies took the stage at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where they presented their products and took questions from our expert judges. The judges narrowed the competition down to five finalists. But RecordGram, a mobile recording studio where aspiring artists can find… Read More

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video? Maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for how long.

I might sound stereotypical as hell here, but I’m Italian and I care a lot about food. I also think Italian food is the best food in the world, and I get mad if you bastardize Italian dishes with ingredients that have nothing to do with it. Like, why would you create a burger pizza? (I ate it, with pickles and all, and no, it had no reason to be.)
That’s why I was delighted when a friend (also Italian) pointed me to the Twitter account Italians Mad at Food. It’s a fantastic col

For your safety, keep your arms and legs inside the licensing agreement at all times.
Atari has extended its agreement with Chris Sawyer, the creator of the RollerCoaster Tycoon series. Atari can now use the RollerCoaster Tycoon brand until 2022. The last installment in the series, RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch, launched earlier this year for iOS and Android and has over 6.5 million downloads.
RollerCoaster Tycoon has been finding success on mobile. Along with Touch, Atari released RollerCoast

PRESS RELEASE: SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 19, 2017– Nerdify, a leading educational platform that connects students and personal assistants, is excited to announce the launch of Nerdy Bot – a new educational project on Facebook Messenger. Nerdy Bot will help students speed up their studying routine by instantly delivering answers to simple homework-related questions. Nerdy Bot is a smart Facebook Messenger bot that is powered by a combination of AI and Human Persona

We’re thrilled to announce Blair Hanley Frank will join VentureBeat as a staff writer effective May 22, 2017. His areas of coverage will include artificial intelligence, big data, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise technologies.
Above: Blair Hanley Frank joins VentureBeat as a staff writer covering AI, big data, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise.
Blair comes to VentureBeat from IDG News Service where he served as a U.S. correspondent and provided breaking news and analysis of the publ

All-electric racing series Formula E heads back to the city streets of Paris this Saturday. The 20-car showdown will take place at 3:45PM local time on a 14-turn, 1.93 kilometer (1.19-mile) layout — one of the shortest on the schedule.
This is the second time the series has raced in Paris (you can see highlights from last year’s race here) and the sixth competition of the third season. There’s a tight points battle between the top two in the drivers’ championship —

This weekend, a lot of gamers are going to sit around and watch cyberathletes play video games in the FIFA 17 world championships, just a week after the Madden NFL 17 finals.
In the physical world, pro football and soccer events are among the biggest spectator sports in the world. But Electronic Arts is making progress in getting fans to watch digital versions of those sports in the form of video game esports tournaments.
It may sound like the strangest thing in the world that fans would spectat

A new study lends credence to what you’ve probably always suspected: social media is having a pretty negative effect on teenagers — Instagram and Snapchat being the worst culprits. The study, published today and called “Status of Mind,” was conducted by researchers for the Royal Society for Public Health in the UK. The researchers surveyed 1,479 British youths ages 14-24, asking them how they felt the different social media networks effected their mental health. They too

Google released its standalone Google Assistant iPhone app on Wednesday and made it possible for both Android and iOS smartphone users to access voice apps made by third-party developers.
These changes were two of about a dozen major Google Assistant announcements made this week at I/O, Google’s annual developer conference.
Since the launch of the Actions on Google platform six months ago, roughly 250 conversations actions or voice apps have been made by developers.
Try

Tumblr is an Internet property known for its pronounced activist streak. That’s as true for its community as it is for the company as a whole. Where other businesses have remained silent, the youth-oriented blogging service has been at the center of several fraught battles, including net neutrality, reproductive rights, and the fight against SOPA — the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. David Karp, speaking on-stage at TNW Conference with with Martin Bryant, former TNW Editor-at-

Everybody wants to know what you’re doing online. Whether it’s businesses trying to extract marketing data or hackers and thieves mining information for more nefarious purposes, trackers and malware worm their way into devices all the time, collecting personal details and even slowing down your phone or tablet. Shake yourself free from all those data sponges — and get your device running faster again — with a lifetime premium subscription to Disconnect. It’s on sal