Technology news

Flipp is a Kickstarter project with a single goal: enable you to easily control your music. As the enthusiastic pitch video points out, there are plenty of smart home remotes that are packed with tons of features for controlling all sorts of things in your home — but sometimes, you just want a simple way to listen to music.And things don’t get much simpler than Flipp. It’s a roughly palm-sized disc that does exactly four things: play / pause music, control volume, skip songs, a

Minnesota is grappling with 73 cases of measles right now — more cases than the entire country had last year. The outbreak is thanks to people who don’t vaccinate their children, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. These people wrongly believe a debunked theory that vaccination causes autism.
The Minnesota outbreak has exposed more than 8,000 people to the virus, mostly in schools and hospitals. “Many of the cases could have been prevented if people had gotten vacc

Tilt Brush is sort of like fancy MS Paint for virtual reality. It fosters creativity, allowing you to paint, smear, and dab beautiful (or in my case, sort of okay) works in a 3D space. Traditionally, artists use their hands to craft their VR art. But drones aren’t a bad option either.On Twitter, Jaymis Loveday posted a video of himself navigating a drone to paint in the HTC Vive’s version of Tilt Brush. The video creates a mixed reality effect, wherein the physical drone appears to b

The seventh season of Game of Thrones (coming July 16th) was pushed back several months due to a production schedule that needed to revolve around winter, but the eighth season may be pushed back even further, for vaguer reasons.In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, HBO programming chief Casey Bloys hinted that the eighth season (only six episodes long) might not air until 2019. Discussing why showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss aren’t going to be involved in any spinoff series in

Nutella’s manufacturer Ferrero partnered with its advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Italia to devise a plan to get people to buy more Nutella. Their idea? Have an algorithm design the packaging. The company provided the software with a database of patterns and colors that Ferrero felt fit with the hazelnut spread brand. It then created 7 million unique jars that were sold throughout Italy.You can see some of the designs below. They look nice. I wouldn’t mind having them at home,

Professional sports leagues like the NFL and the NBA are about to face a major challenge called “the march of time.”
Young Americans, or “millennials,” (the generation that was born from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s) are split in terms of their loyalty to traditional sports and competitive video gaming, according to an LEK Consulting survey. While 18 percent are undecided, 40 percent of millennials prefer esports compared to 42 percent who still favor old-fashion

OPINION: Google yesterday confirmed that Chrome is getting a built-in ad blocker that will block all the ads on a site (including Google’s own ads) if just one ad doesn’t meet certain standards. That’s right: Google, the company that makes the majority of its money from advertising, is building an ad blocker.
This alone is crazy. Google already has the world’s most popular browser and it’s plowing ahead building arguably the only feature that would really differenti

The new Wonder Woman film has most of what Wonder Woman fans would expect from a cinematic adaptation of her comics. There's Paradise Island, the distant utopia where women warriors live and fight together, sans men. There's the magic golden lasso which compels people to tell the truth. There are the magical bracelets that deflect bullets (and the occasional World War I shell, since the film is set in that era). Steve Trevor, brave airman in need of rescue? Yep. Etta Candy, jovial sidekick? She'

Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we got our hands on Arms, Nintendo’s upcoming fighting game for the Switch. Also, 2K has a new president, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is getting involved with an online game.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: Don’t panic. E3 will be full of fun, not FUD
AR/VR Weekly: Buying stuff in VR without facing … reality
What should you expect from Nintendo at E3 2017?

By now, most smartphone users have experienced some form of augmented reality on their phones, whether they play Pokémon Go, use Snapchat, or actually remember the days of Yelp Monocle (from way back in 2009). But for the people who make the apps, AR isn’t quite as simple, particularly when the apps they’re building involve 3D or “volumetric” objects — stuff you can walk around and interact with through the screen of the phone.Which is why Apple should start

AT&T has a new deal for customers on the company’s cheaper, $60-a-month Unlimited Choice plan: DirecTV Now for an extra $10 a month.It’s a deal that the company has previously offered to customers on the $90 Unlimited Plus plan, which offers HD streaming, 10GB of tethering, free HBO, and no speed cap — unlike the cheaper Unlimited Choice plan.The new $10 deal for Unlimited Choice customers comes in the form of a $25-per-month video credit that starts after three billing cyc

The theme of this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is, “It all starts here.” Roughly 50,000 industry professionals will converge on the Los Angeles Convention Center during the week of June 10. Tens of millions will watch the event on livestreams. Last year, 50,300 professionals attended and another 20,000 fans visited nearby events. This year, 15,000 fans will get inside the expo for the first time.
And it all starts with one guy. Making sure that it all goe

Dungeons & Dragons is doing a marathon of gaming live on Twitch this weekend to announce its next storyline for the world’s biggest role-playing game, new products for its board games and miniature lines, and expand Twitch programming … and with a name like “Stream of Annihilation,” I’m pretty sure someone’s going to die.
Cruelly.
Here’s the two-day schedule, with a list of the streams participating (and the group’s bios).
Wizards of the Coast

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Vivo, a China-focused smartphone company that is similar to Xiaomi or Oppo. But unlike those other two companies, chances are that, unless you live in China (or more recently, India), you’ve probably never encountered a Vivo device, or even seen the company’s name before.While Vivo may not have that much of a presence in European or American markets, the company has been still been building up a serious following when it comes t

Until recently, back issues of Omni Magazine were stored on the Internet Archive, for readers to page through at no cost. The collection of issues was taken down a couple of years ago, but it’s now back online on Amazon.com.Earlier this week, Jerrick Media, owner of the Omni brand, announced that it was partnering with the Museum of Science Fiction to put the original issues of the magazine back online — this time in high-resolution. Instead of Archive.org, readers can find all 200 i

EXCLUSIVE: Rooster Teeth made its name as the producer of the funny Red vs Blue machinima videos, which featured the characters of Microsoft’s Halo game series in animated shows. Now it’s moving into game publishing with Rooster Teeth Games, and it has hired former Gearbox executive David Eddings as head of game publishing.
Austin, Texas-based Rooster Teeth announced its plans to move into games in January, with the creation of the publishing division Rooster Teeth Games. The aim is

Airbnb hosts have already been found to discriminate against guests with "black-sounding" names, and now it sounds like host discrimination extends to guests with disabilities as well.
A study by researchers at Rutgers, highlighted in The New York Times today, found that guests who disclose a disability are less likely to be approved for a room and more likely to be outright rejected.
Guests who didn’t disclose a disability received “pre-approval” from an Airbnb host 74.5 perce

This week’s Vergecast is recorded out of the studio. Nilay heads to the West Coast to reunite with Dieter, Lauren, and Casey at this year’s Code Conference. The gang discusses the speakers (in more than one way) at the event including Andy Rubin, Hillary Clinton, and Reed Hastings. They also chat a little about the news outside of the conference.Back in New York, Paul reports on gadget week with his weekly segment “Let me hug your robot heart.”There’s a whole lot mo

For some reason, Samsung is releasing a Pirates of The Caribbean-themed Galaxy S8. Spec-wise, the phone isn’t any different than the standard Galaxy S8, save for a fancy box, some wallpaper, and a case. But when Disney is trying to make a film with a $230 million budget a success... well, this is what you get.Photo: SamsungThe phone, which is currently on sale at JD.com, only comes in the 4GB of RAM + 64GB of storage version, and retails for $880. It also comes with a special phone ring ho

Valve is changing how its Steam store works and opening up its platform to any developer who wants to sell a game and is willing to pay a small fee.
Today, the company revealed the price of that Steam Direct fee is $100 per game. Developers can recoup that money, so this isn’t a direct deposit into Valve’s bank account. In February, Valve invited GamesBeat out to its Bellevue, Washington offices to explain the reasoning behind Steam Direct and for ending its Greenlight program that p

Some wags will tell you that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles in mid-June, is on its way down. They will make you worry about big companies pulling out of the show, mobile companies failing to show up, and fans making it too crowded for the 50,000 or so professionals who will descend on the Los Angeles Convention Center in a couple of weeks. They’ll say that E3 is dead.
Don’t believe them. I’ve been going to E3 shows for a couple of

VentureBeat is pleased to introduce Heartland Tech, an editorial channel devoted to news and analysis around one of the most important issues of our time: the role of tech in creating — and destroying — jobs in America’s heartland.
The 2016 presidential election laid bare a chasm between technology companies and the rest of the country, namely the so-called flyover states and the region often derided as the Rust Belt. Yet new ecosystems of ven

Sega’s The Creative Assembly has about three decades of Warhammer lore to tap for its Total War: Warhammer II game that is coming out on the PC later this year. We were able to play a battle in the real-time strategy game coming from Sega’s strategy studio. And it’s going to be a pretty massive experience for Warhammer and Total War fans.
Total War: Warhammer debuted a year ago, and it was played by 1.5 million players, according to SteamSpy market intelligence. I met with