Technology news

Today, at the first-ever Game of Thrones fan convention, Joanna Robinson and David Chen of the A Cast of Kings podcast hosted a panel discussion with actors who have already died on the show. All of the questions were about death!
Called “Ghosts of Westeros,” the panel featured Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton), Kate Dickie (Lisa Arryn), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (Mace Tyrell), Amy Richardson (the original Myrcella Baratheon), Sam Coleman (young Hodor), Kerry Ingram (Shireen Baratheon), and Mi

During a talk at Unite Europe 2017 Ubisoft showed off two previously unrevealed HoloLens game prototypes: Toy Soldier and Rabbid Rockets. Whether or not these games will become full projects remains to be seen.
Above: Ubisoft’s Toy Soldier is an AR HoloLens prototype game.Image Credit: UploadVR
At the event David Yue from Ubisoft led a talk titled “AR Prototyping for the HoloLens” in which both projects were shown. Prior to this event Ubisoft has only been associated with

Let’s face it, Snapchat is facing some serious, constant competition from Instagram. While the company is nowhere near down and out, brands and individuals are increasingly shifting over to Instagram Stories for a variety of reasons. Instagram has been relentless about bringing over some of Snapchat’s best features and tools — and often making its own refinements and improvements along the way.In April, Instagram Stories usage surpassed all Snapchat activity, with Instagram Sto

Blockchain startup Block.one announced this morning that it has raised $185 million in just five days of selling its EOS cryptocurrency token. That sum breaks the record Bancor set just a couple of weeks ago with its nearly $150 million raise.
Block.one’s goal is to bring blockchain to businesses. It claims its platform offers a level of scalability unprecedented in the blockchain world: It would be able to process millions of transactions per second with no transaction fees. “Block.

Ever since smartphones became the default computers that we carry our pockets, the apps that run on them and the stores that sell these apps have created a new kind of economy for software. Apple’s App Store has swelled to more than 2.5 million apps, while the Google Play Store surpasses that with 2.8 million apps available. But even as these companies boast about the payouts to app makers — last month Apple said that developer earnings had surpassed $70 billion — the truth is

GUEST: To date, Silicon Valley has been known worldwide as the place to go to get your tech startup funded. Now, though, a new kind of innovation infrastructure is being built using blockchain technology and, in particular, the Ethereum platform.
Unlike Sand Hill Road or San Francisco, it exists in an abstract, non-physical realm that is secure, decentralized, and distributed across the Internet. Ethereum has all the raw ingredients needed to build startups unconstrained by physical location: a

At the end of April, an exclusive music festival promoted by Instagram “influencers” turned into a disaster, the result of poor planning, prompting a flurry of lawsuits and outcry from attendees. Now, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has announced that it has arrested and charged the festival’s organizer with wire fraud.Acting United States Attorney Joon H. Kim alleges that William McFarland allegedly provided “at least one investor an

GUEST: One of the hottest areas for VC investment at the moment is AI/machine learning — that includes artificial intelligence algorithms, related machine learning systems, neural networks, and back-end processing to produce insightful and self-learning applications. As Nvidia’s CEO recently said:
Software may be eating the world, but AI is going to eat software
AI investment at all time high
VC investment in AI has risen from $3.2 billion in 2014 to $9.5 billion for the first five m

GUEST: From a distance, it seems Blizzard has everything figured out with Overwatch. $1 billion in sales and 30 million players is a massive commercial and cultural success. Taking out the magnifying glass to examine Overwatch from a competitive gaming perspective tells a different story, however. Blizzard wants Overwatch to be a major esport, but so far they’ve had a difficult time convincing many people that they’re up to that challenge.
Overwatch esports barely has a pulse right n

It’s July. I’m a little stunned at how fast 2017 has been passing us by. Half the year is gone already! A ton of really fantastic books have come out in those first six months, and if you’ve got vacation planned for this summer, it’ll be a good time to catch up before the back half of the year.
Given that the Fourth of July is in a couple of days, it had me thinking about stories that deal explicitly with patriotism and the founding of the country, and I remembered a grap

House of Cards and Moonlight star Mahershala Ali is in talks to star in a third season of HBO’s beleaguered anthology show, True Detective, according to Deadline. If there were any way to get excited for the show to return, this is it.Don’t get excited just yet: Deadline says that these are pretty early talks, and that they’re far from any sort of done deal. There isn’t even an order for a third season just yet, but HBO executives have indicated that they’re open to

If you’re on a plane this summer, I can’t recommend an inflight movie any more than Lego Batman. That’s not to say that the movie is only worthy of being watched on a tiny airplane screen, just that you’re almost definitely going to end up watching it. And it will be a very good choice.
I was among the last to board an international flight the other week, and by the time I got on, half of the people around me were already watching Lego Batman. It seemed to be slightly les

Opening and running a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront works off knowledge built through literally centuries of business successes and failures. But if you’re trying to make a business grow and prosper online… well, that’s a whole different story. Find out what it takes to nurture a company in the digital age with this Digital Entrepreneur Bundle — it’s available now at the limited-time price of only $39 from TNW Deals. That’s 94 p

No one can match Nintendo’s backlog of classic games. With Mario, Zelda, and more, fans are willing to spend money to re-experience their favorite franchises. And Nintendo found out that a lot of those nostalgic gamers exist thanks to the success of the NES Classic Edition, which even managed to outsell the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in some months despite shortages.
Earlier this week, Nintendo announced a followup, the SNES Classic Edition. The miniature console will come with 21 built-in

With Memorial Day behind us, July Fourth is the next holiday to get big sales, and we’ve rounded up a number of tech deals worth checking out during the long weekend. Highlights include early Prime Day deals, $50 off the Nest Learning Thermostat, Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Sale, big discounts on Lenovo laptops, and so much more.
Without further ado, here are our favorite Independence Day sales:
Amazon
Amazon is already busy promoting Prime Day which we mentioned earlier this week. The

Life Is Strange was a sleeper hit when it debuted in 2015 as an episodic series. It sold more than 3 million copies — so well that publisher Square Enix commissioned developer Dontnod Entertainment to work on Life Is Strange 2 and Deck Nine to work on a prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm.
Square Enix showed off a couple of scenes from the first episode of Before the Storm at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles. Deck Nine has ch

Thousands of years after acupuncture was invented, controversy remains over whether the Chinese traditional medicine technique works. While previous trials have shown mixed results, a new study shows that, at the very least, those needles really do cause something to happen in our bodies.
Scientists have long been skeptical about the value of acupuncture, though practitioners have questioned whether the acupuncture in many studies was done “correctly.” Other trials suggest that acupu

Randi Zuckerberg envisions a future of integrated technology–and that starts with parents embracing interactive tech for their kids in a healthy way.
That’s the inspiration for the Zuckerberg Media founder and CEO’s latest venture, Sue’s Tech Kitchen, an interactive “tech-driven pop-up dining experience” opening in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on July 28. It’s a space where families, and especially kids, can immerse themselves in adventure and in what Zuckerb

500 Startups announced today that cofounder Dave McClure has been acting in a reduced capacity over the past few months following an internal investigation. The news came shortly after the New York Times revealed McClure had behaved inappropriately toward some women.
According to the blog post, 500 Startups cofounder Christine Tsai took on the role of CEO a few months back. This is the first time the organization has publicly addressed the matter with McClure. Tsai wrote:
In recent months, we fo

Rumor has it, Apple has plans to dramatically change the iPhone 8. We’ve reported several of these, but to date, they were still just that: rumors. Today, we’re getting even more rumors, although these are from two highly-trusted sources in the mobile industry, and each seems to confirm the other. First up is Steve Hemmerstoffer — @OnLeaks on Twitter — who reportedly obtained detailed schematics for Apple’s 10th anniversary iPhone. According to Hemmerstoffer, the i

WannaCry paralyzed hospitals. NotPeya crashed banks. But how to know if you're vulnerable to the stolen National Security Agency exploit that fueled two major cyber attacks and helped bring down computers across the globe?
Thankfully, a new tool has your back. 
SEE ALSO: Ransomware has been around for almost 30 years, so why does it feel like it's getting worse?
After the Shadow Brokers hacking group dumped a cache of stolen NSA exploits in April, the cybersecurity community issued dire war

Verizon today announced a new subscription service designed to cut down on robocalls and other spammy automated messages that plague mobile users each and every day. The service, called Verizon Caller Name ID, comes in the form of an app and it will notify users when an incoming call is likely to be a robocall, spam, or fraudulent. The big catch: unlike competing carriers’ similar features, Verizon wants to charge customers $2.99 per month for Caller Name ID.$2.99 per month is not cheap, e

 Today’s StoriesFacebook is rolling out its ‘Find Wi-Fi’ feature worldwide
Delivery Hero’s valuation surpasses $5B following successful IPO
Chat app Kakao raises $437M for its Korean ride-hailing service
Cabin secures $3.3M for its ‘moving hotel’Credits
Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha
Filmed by: Matthew Mauro
Edited by: Chris Gates
Notes:
Tito… Read More

EXCLUSIVE: Buying clothes and apparel over the internet is still a tricky business, but it is hugely lucrative. And increasingly, smartphones are driving retail growth.
In 2016 — as noted in VB Insight’s latest research — mobile devices influenced $500 billion in sales; $140 billion of that was driven directly by mcommerce.
The problem with online apparel: Accurate sizing, and the returns process that comes along with that. Consumers regularly purchase three of everything to se

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent hours clicking from link to link, sucked into Wikipedia’s endless void of information. Indie dev Kevan Davis apparently has as well — except he came out on the other side with a game. Wikipedia: The Text Adventure is a free-to-play piece of interactive fiction that uses real entries to create a virtual world to explore.
There are already a few informal Wikipedia challenges floating around out there, such as Wikirace. It also goes by The Wik

There are a dozen very good reasons why you might have stopped watching Doctor Who. Maybe you're a holdout from the classic series, which ran from 1963 to 1989. Maybe you loved Christopher Eccleston in the role and couldn't stand David Tennant; maybe you're a die-hard Ten fan who loathed Matt Smith. 
More likely, you've been turned off at some point in the Peter Capaldi era. No doubt you love the grumpy old Scot himself, but showrunner Steven Moffat's increasingly twisty scripts, reset-butt

Netflix has never been on the big Hall H stage at Comic-Con, but then again, they've never had anything quite like Stranger Things.
The streaming phenom first came to Netflix on July 15 last year, just a week before the annual nerd pilgrimage got underway. The buzz that's made the show such a hit was just building steam then — and certainly not in time to make it Hall H-worthy.
SEE ALSO: TV peaked exactly 4 years ago today, with this one 'Game of Thrones' episode
Well Hall H, prepare to go