Technology news

Bust out the cake and candles … er, candle, I guess. Just one candle.
Overwatch is celebrating its first anniversary, having come out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on May 24, 2016. The team-based shooter already has over 30 million players, an impressive number for a paid game in only one year. And Blizzard is celebrating with another seasonal event, giving players new play modes and limited-time cosmetics.
But this anniversary event is unusual for Overwatch. Past celebrations have

Stephen Colbert found himself in the middle of a bipartisan controversy earlier this month when he made an insensitive joke about the president that angered both Trump supporters and the LGBTQ community. Though Colbert coyly shrugged off the heat he and The Late Show were taking for the remark, which illustrated a sexual act between the Trump and Vladimir Putin, it turns out the FCC is not going to levy a fine against the comedian for using the word “cock” on late-night network telev

GUEST: Nuclear technology can power an entire city or flatten it. Artificial intelligence is similar, in that it can be used as a tool for great good or a weapon for greater evil. For example, we’ve all read those gloomy reports about AI causing mass unemployment — but they assume that AI will entirely replace people in the affected jobs and that AI will rapidly advance to allow a totally autonomous enterprise. False, all of it.
The truth is that AI can’t do the all o

Emojipedia has a new tool to track which of your favorite icons are having their moment in the sun, and which symbols are slowly going the way of the fax machine emoji. With the new “trends” feature, Emojipedia pulls data from Google Trends and builds graphs, going back five years, to show the climbing and falling of each icon.
“Each graph is relative to the emoji being viewed,” Emojipedia says. “100 represents when that emoji saw its highest number of searches.&rdq

Google’s AlphaGo program bested the world’s top Go player by the slimmest margin possible in the first of three matches Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean humanity is safe.
The AI won a match against Ke Jie as part of an exhibition during the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, China. While Ke made moves reminiscent of his computerized opponent, he was eventually defeated by half a point.
AlphaGo is supposed to maximize its chances of winning, rather than maximize the margin of its vict

Nintendo is known for keeping things weird, and yet not even the Japanese game company’s big, splashy Switch launch earlier this year can keep pace with this mock ad for the console from Russian YouTube channel Юзя, via Kotaku.The video, shot through a series of first-person action cam angles, shows two globetrotting daredevils traverse a number of different environments all while playing the Switch. From roofs to trains to jumping out of a honest-to-god airplane, the duo

President Donald Trump plans to gut American science. Released today, his full budget proposal for the 2018 fiscal year requests that billions of dollars be slashed from the agencies tasked with funding and conducting research that drives innovation and keeps Americans healthy and safe.
The budget proposal confirms fears that Trump intends to cut nearly $5.8 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health — about 18 percent of the agency’s total budget. It also cuts hundred

Honor updated its Honor Band wearable today, and this year’s iteration — the A2 — is a pretty significant upgrade with basically no price increase. The A2 will include a 0.96-inch OLED touch display, as well as a heart rate tracker. The strap is water resistant and will come in various patterns and colors. It’s Bluetooth-compatible and includes a pedometer, sleep tracker, exercise tracker, and sedentary reminder.I’m excited about the prospect of an affordable and ma

 Flightcaster, Prismatic and now Merlon Intelligence. Bradford Cross, founder of the venture capital firm Data Collective is a known figure in the ranks of VCs who have caught the entrepreneurship bug, abandoning what could have been a cushy lifestyle for one with considerably more volatility. His third startup, Merlon Intelligence, services banks, helping them cut down on risk and put a… Read More

Intel's Euclid development kit was announced last year, and now it's finally ready. First spotted by Liliputing, it's full of last year’s specs, like a RealSense ZR300 depth camera, an Atom x7-8700 quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of built-in storage. In addition to the camera, the system includes the whole suite of motion and location sensors you'd expect on a modern smartphone, plus ambient light detection, a barometer, a thermal sensor, a noise-canceling microphone, and a mono

1Password received a handy new feature last week that allows the app to temporarily remove all passwords, credit cards, and other stored data from a user’s devices. The feature is called Travel Mode, and it was created to protect users worried about running into trouble with security agents while traveling.
Increasingly, people are being asked to turn over and unlock their phones at the border, and doing that can expose a huge amount of data. Add in an app like 1Password — a central

The annual E3 video game conference is reliably punctuated with surprise video game announcements. However, this year, one announcement won’t come as a shock for fans: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The game, which combines Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. with the screaming pseudo-Minions of Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids brand, has been long rumored across a variety of publications. The trend continues today with leaked key art, providing the first look at the game’s visual dire

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed today that the company is planning to use the post-merger AOL-Yahoo subsidiary as a platform to “test out an over-the-top service,” according to a report from Variety. The news was rumored by a Bloomberg report that claimed that Verizon was preparing to launch a nationwide TV service as early as this summer.
The statement marks the first official word that Verizon is, in fact, pursuing its own streaming TV service, similar to DirecTV Now (owned by

GUEST: While artificial intelligence for self-driving cars and virtual assistants gets a lot of attention, the past few months have seen a wave of AI advancements focused on the tasks of analysts. “Analyst” is a ubiquitous role, found in every industry that touches data. Analysts use the measurements we take of our world and try to answer relevant business questions — a role that is critical to gaining value from data. Yet AI appears to be increasingly encroaching on the r

Google is yet again streamlining the ways that family members can share with each other using its services. You can already share digital content (Android apps, TV shows, movies, and ebooks) from the Play Store with up to 5 people in your family — and there’s also a family plan for the company’s subscription music service. But today Google is expanding family sharing to also include Google Calendar, Keep, and Photos.We heard about Google’s big plans for Photos at I/O last

Today Twitter launched a new way for advertisers to boost their chat experience with Promoted Tweets. Direct Message Cards allow brands to reach users and start an experience with a bot in their Twitter feed.
“Using a Direct Message Card, businesses can capture people’s attention with engaging image or video creatives, and include up to four fully customizable call-to-action buttons,” Twitter product manager Travis Lull wrote in a blog post today unveiling the new car

The FCC published its proposal to undo the 2015 net neutrality rules today, meaning the public is once again able to go and comment on it.
An early draft of the proposal was published last month. Comments were accepted during the following weeks — as many discovered thanks to John Oliver — but the commission put commenting on pause shortly before its vote. The vote happened last week, the proposal passed, and now we’re getting an updated draft and the ability to comment again.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he spoke to President Donald Trump about the Paris climate accords three weeks ago and is now “cautiously optimistic” about the impending decision over whether to pull out. One of Trump’s campaign promises was to leave the climate accords, a landmark agreement that commits almost every country in the world to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.@BigDAK54 I spoke directly with The President three weeks ago about Paris. Many others have too. Cautio

Twitch is trying to make its game and live streaming service a better destination for pre-recorded video, to better compete with YouTube as a place to watch highlights. So the company announced today that it has added new video playback controls to let viewers slow videos down or speed them up. Similar to YouTube’s playback options, Twitch now lets you double the speed of a stream or slow it down to as little as 0.25 its regular speed. These options are all located in the updated settings

Take-Two Interactive Software reported today a net revenue growth of more than 50 percent to $571.6 million in the fiscal year 2017, in large part due to the success of the strategy game Civilization VI.
Civ VI made history as the fastest-selling release in the franchise, which launched in 1991 with Sid Meier’s Civilization. Since Civ V’s launch in October 2016, it’s sold nearly 2 million copies. Take-Two puts it on pace to surpass the sales of the previous installment, Ci

In July 2016, Artem Vaulin left Ukraine for a vacation to Iceland with his family, but he never made it to his destination. During a layover in Poland, Vaulin — the 31-year-old accused by the United States of operating KickassTorrents (KAT), the web's most popular place to illegally obtain movies, songs, and video games — was arrested by authorities.
Until last week, Vaulin had been held at Warsaw-Bialoleka Investigative Detention Center with little contact to the outside world while

Curved monitors are great for gaming. Acer’s been making them for a while, going back to the 35-inch Predator Z35 from 2015. Now the company has announced the Predator Z35P, an updated version of the Z35 that offers even better resolution than the original, as first spotted by AnandTech.The new Predator Z35P still has a 35-inch curved display, but it measures in at an incredible 3440 x 1440 resolution, up from the 2560 × 1080 of its predecessor. The new Z35P also tones down the desig

Uber admitted on Tuesday that it underpaid its New York City-based drivers by millions of dollars over the past two and a half years, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The ride-hailing company said it had “mistakenly” over-calculated its cut of commission, taking roughly 25 percent from fares before taxes, when it was supposed to do so after local taxes and fees as stated in a driver’s agreement in November 2014.“We made a mistake and we are committed to m

Chinese conglomerate LeEco is laying off a majority of its US workforce, the company announced today. Around 70 percent, or 325 employees, will be cut from its Stateside operations, with LeEco citing a lack of funding as the reason for the reduction. The company will keep operating in the US, but with a “focus on the narrower segment of Chinese-speaking households,” according to CNET. The news comes just a few days after CEO Jia Yueting announced he was stepping down from running Les

Take-Two Interactive teased a new game during its earnings call today, saying that it would launch an unnamed game under the 2K label in the fiscal year that ends March 31, 2019.
The game publisher said that results for that fiscal year would get a boost from Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 and “a highly anticipated new title from one of 2K’s biggest franchises.”
That set off a lot of speculation on the Internet, with fans hoping for follow-up titles in th

Ikea today announced that its recently released smart home lighting kit will soon be able to connect with Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri and the Apple HomeKit.
Compatibility with virtual assistants will begin this summer and fall. The Swedish homeware company first began to roll out its Trådfri LED bulb and smart home lighting kits in April.
From enterprise business to restaurants, intelligent assistants have sought to engage and provide services to se

Clash of Clans maker Supercell has acquired 62 percent of London-based Space Ape Games for $55.8 million.
The deal is another sign of consolidation in mobile games, as well as a rare coming together of two companies that have very similar operating styles. Space Ape Games, maker of mobile titles such as Samurai Siege and the upcoming Fastlane: Road to Revenge, will continue to operate as an independent company and make its own decisions about which games to create.
Space Ape Games founders John

Hasbro and Dan Mintz’s Hollywood film studio DMG Entertainment are launching interactive Transformers virtual reality and augmented reality centers in China — a nation where the robots in disguise films have thrived in recent years.
The centers will treat guests to “digital simulation experiences” based on the Transformers universe in both VR and AR. The first center will open in Shanghai this summer, and the companies will add more in other Chinese centers over the

We keep hearing about online data storage on private, public, or hybrid clouds. But what about the physical things in our lives that we need to store? Trove is tackling this by providing a full storage service that handles everything from locating an affordable space to connecting customers with moving companies. The San Francisco-based startup launched out of beta today and announced an $8 million round led by Greylock Partners.
“Three-quarters of customers start online with a search

Google today started selling its Jamboard in the U.S. and shared that the 4K digital whiteboard will be available for purchase in the U.K. and Canada “this summer.” Jamboard is designed for businesses with a G Suite plan that want to collaborate on Google Drive files with teams both local and remote.
First unveiled in October 2016, Jamboard was pitched as a cloud-based collaborative 55-inch screen with Google Docs-style collaboration plus Android and iOS apps that let others join in

Embrace.io has raised $2.5 million so it can tell developers how their apps are performing, how fast they load, and whether they work properly.
Eniac Ventures led the round, with additional investments from The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures, and BoxGroup. Embrace.io is releasing its platform to developers in a limited release today. The idea is to help developers diagnose the issues that disrupt mobile users’ experiences before they permanently leave the app, said Embrace.io CEO Eric F

In this week’s episode, Stewart and Travis discuss how Google’s announcements at its I/O event will affect marketers and marketing this year, and we also discuss how AI is helping B2B markets. We then get to interview the awesome Super Evil Megacorp’s Kristian Segerstrale, who gives us the lowdown on how to create amazing communities and how to sound like an evil genius.
And don’t forget: You can win a Huawei MediaPad M3 tablet in our fantastic giveaway, details of w

Grand Theft Auto V came out more than three years ago, and people aren’t done spending money on it.
Publisher Take-Two reported in its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year of 2017 that Grand Theft Auto V has now sold over 80 million copies. The open-world game first came out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, but PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions followed. It is one of the best-selling games of all time.
Grand Theft Auto V has had considerable longevity, lar

Happy birthday, Overwatch.
Blizzard’s special event for the team-based shooter’s first anniversary is now live. It will go on until June 12. Since launching on May 24, 2016, Overwatch has attracted over 30 million players. It’s also a paid game, not free-to-play. The base version for PC costs $40, while Overwatch costs $60 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. So all 30 million of those players had to pay money up front to get into the game.
This is the sixth event Blizzard has run fo

Pinterest is today launching a handful of new ways to find recipes using its Lens and Search tools.
First unveiled last summer, Lens lets users take a photo with their smartphone or use an existing image on their camera roll to search for related themes and pins — If you see a chair you really like in a cafe, for example, you can snap a photo and find similar items on Pinterest.
Following a beta period, Lens opened to everyone in the U.S. back in March. Now Pintere

The Jedi must end ... but first, the Jedi must pose for Vanity Fair.
Luke Skywalker and Rey Whatshername grace one of four Star Wars: The Last Jedi-related covers for the latest issue. (Leia, the First Order, and the Resistance get the other three covers.)
SEE ALSO: 'Star Wars' director confirms the last Jedi's identity
And while we've still no idea if they're related, they definitely share the same taste in tasteful neutrals. Rey & Luke Vanity Fair cover description #TheLastJedi pic.tw

Maybe this is harmless wishful thinking, and more likely it's utter hogwash, but I am still holding out hope that David Bowie might just show up for that second Twin Peaks cameo after all.
Bowie played FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in a brief, mostly nonsensical appearance in the 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me. Though that two- to three-minute sequence seemed inconsequential at the time, his character has already been referenced multiple times — and presumed alive! — in Twin Peaks:

Cheer up Kylo Ren, it's almost like you have friends! In one of four new Vanity Fair covers featuring the cast of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Kylo (Adam Driver) and the First Order gang — Captain Phasma (Gwendolyn Christie) and General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) — scowl up at us, ready to wreak havoc on the galaxy.
SEE ALSO: 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' pays tribute to Carrie Fisher in a 'Vanity Fair' cover and now we're cryingFirst look at Gwendoline Christie in character without her Phasm