Technology news

GUEST: We can all agree that the use of AI in business is at its infancy and may be long until it becomes widespread. Businesses of all sizes may find it easier than thought to run early AI experiments to clear their vision on how to accelerate their competitiveness. However, several myths will be on the way and need to be reflected upon. Let’s dive into the most common ones.
1. My business isn’t sophisticated enough to require AI
AI is humanity’s attempt to simulate our brain&

An early wave of modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals between 470,000 and 220,000 years ago, a new DNA discovery from an ancient Neanderthal thigh bone suggests. That’s much earlier than experts had thought, and it could help explain why human DNA seems to be appearing in Neanderthal genomes much earlier than it should.There are conflicting answers in ancient DNA
It’s not entirely clear when humans and Neanderthals split — and there are conflicting answers in anci

Swedish company Einride has officially unveiled the first full-scale prototype of its futuristic autonomous electric truck.
First announced back in April, the T-pod is touted as being more than a simple self-driving electric truck — it’s pitched as an entirely “new transportation system,” with plans to have an active fleet of 200 T-pods running in Sweden by 2020.
Each pod is 23 feet (7 meters) in length and can hold 15 “standard” pallets, for a total weig

Thousands of listings from online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy are now filled with unsightly error images by Photobucket after the photo hosting site quietly introduced a $399 annual fee to users who want to embed images on third party websites. Users are now accusing Photobucket of extortion, as the service failed to make the update to its terms of service abundantly clear.
Users are accusing Photobucket of extortion
It all began last week when Photobucket announced in a short blog

Game shows have been losing younger audiences for some time. The Future Group wants to change that by making game shows more interactive with mixed reality technology.
The Oslo, Norway-based startup — which raised $20 million in venture funding — teamed up with FremantleMedia (maker of the Idol TV shows) to create Lost in Time, a new game show that uses The Future Group’s Interactive Mixed Reality (IMR) on both TV and mobile devices.
Lost in Time, which ran a pilot te

A new leaked photo of Lenovo’s new Moto device has surfaced, coupled with a report on detailed specs and a more exact release date from VentureBeat.
We now know that the model is called the Moto X4 and its release is slated for late 2017, possibly in time for Black Friday. Moto X4 will reportedly be the first non-Google branded handset capable of operating Google’s pay-as-you-go Fi MVNO service.
reportedly the first non-Google branded phone that can operate on Google Fi
Like the firs

For most people, self-driving cars are just an abstraction, something they read about occasionally in the press but still consider a far-off, futuristic fantasy. They read the headlines and scoff, “Not in my lifetime.” But the events of this past month may help put a lot of that skepticism to rest. There was a flurry of activity in both Congress and the private sector over the past few weeks, signaling a key shift in the trajectory of self-driving cars and proving that these vehicles

(Reuters) — Facebook is challenging a gag order from a U.S. court that is preventing the company from talking about three government search warrants that it said pose a threat to freedom of speech, according to court documents.
Facebook said it wants to notify three users about the search warrants seeking their communications and information and also give those users an opportunity to object to the warrants, according to a filing in a Washington, D.C., appeals court seen by Reuters.
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Ticketmaster is launching a new ticketing system that can passively check attendees into events using audio data from smartphones to reduce entry wait time. Rather than manually scanning a QR code or a barcode from a paper ticket, a “smart tone” technology can receive attendee’s data over their smartphone’s ultrasonic sound transmission to verify their mobile ticket and ID, allowing people to cruise in simply by showing a green approved screen on their phones.
The new e-t

For one CTO, offshoring software development seemed like a good idea. Six years ago, the CTO joined a fintech company that had a history of sending coding projects to India, China, Vietnam, and the Ukraine. Like so many U.S. corporations, this fintech company sent work overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor. However, after one year on the job, the CTO changed course and began outsourcing to Michigan. “We’ve shifted 90 percent of our outsourced work to Michigan over the past fiv

Like so many of us, Snoop Dogg seems a little put off by having to sign up for Tidal for exclusive albums. The rapper admitted online that he doesn’t use Jay-Z’s premier streaming service, and had to get a pirated copy of the Tidal-exclusive new album 4:44 through a friend.“Top of the morning,” Snoop says at the start of the video. “I want to shoot a shout-out to Jay-Z, just dropped another motherfucking hot album, 4:44.” (That wasn’t enough 4’s fo

A few days ago, a Twitter user by the name Makenna posted a photo of herself cleaning President Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, which had been defaced numerous times since the election (most notably with a swastika). “Nothing but respect for MY president,” she declared, adding the hashtag “#RaisedRight.”Obviously her tweet went viral, and has since become a meme as a number of other Twitter users posted their own interpretations. Because while we may leg

The $230 Amazon Echo Show went on sale for the first time last week, and with it came visual cards, video, and other elements developers can use to create Alexa skills. Beyond news and entertainment video, the largest category of the fewer than 10 visual skills available at launch was food.
Calorie counter Track by Nutritionix has added visuals telling you how many calories are in a food; OpenTable books restaurants; and you can now place Starbucks orders with the new visual interface.
Improving

Samsung has already missed its deadline to launch a full version of Bixby’s voice features in the US by spring. But according to a new report by The Korea Herald, the delay wasn’t caused by just linguistic issues of Bixby struggling to understand English. Samsung also lacks enough data needed to develop Bixby’s deep learning technology.
“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,&rdq

ANALYSIS: The sexual harassment scandal that has led to the official resignation of founding partner Dave McClure from 500 Startups raises the question of what kind of future the firm can have without him.
It doesn’t appear 500 Startups is off to a very good start in terms of handling the situation, which became public last Friday as part of a larger New York Times story about sexual harassment in Silicon Valley.
A blog post on June 30 from CEO Christine Tsai said management changes had be

The BBC announced today that it plans to spend about $44 million (£34 million) in online children’s content across the next three years, responding to the rise of Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon. The plan goes into effect immediately.
The funding will go into making personalized online programs for kids, including video, live online program clips, vlogs, podcasts, quizzes, games and apps. According to the network, the programs will be made out of “bespoke commissioned content, re-

In pursuit of a better bang, two unlikely industries are working to develop greener, cleaner-burning pyrotechnics. Hollywood wants less smoke — and the military doesn't want to contaminate its training sites.
But the new formulations are pricy, and America’s commercial fireworks industry — which made $1.1 billion in revenue last year — is still a long way from changing their decades-old recipes. When the industry’s ready, or when environmental regulations become mor

On the last 4th of July, VentureBeat took a look at five bots that could reshape or change democracy. One year later, we revisit the bot landscape with the same idea in mind.
Outlier Media
Detroit has a poverty rate of nearly 40 percent, one of the highest in the nation, and median home values have fallen to roughly $42,000. That’s why Outlier Media acquires the phone numbers of tens of thousands of renters in Detroit and sends them text messages with free information from publicly av

Ticketmaster will soon be able to admit you to live events and track your movement using nothing more than a discrete digital audio broadcast from your smartphone.
The ticketing giant has teamed up with Lisnr, a data-over-audio company that uses an ultrasonic sound technology it calls “smart tones” to transmit information between devices.
There are myriad use-cases for Lisnr’s  technology — for example, it recently partnered with Jaguar Land Rover to enable

It’s just a ruin in a field now, but in 15th-century England, Boxley Abbey was a hotspot for the faithful. Pilgrims would travel from across the land to see a statue of Christ on the cross that was housed in the monastery and known as the Rood of Grace. On holy days, the Christ would come alive, with a contemporary account describing how the figure hypnotized crowds with its ability to:“shake and stirre the hands and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to ben

One of the many things that gaming company Valve is famous for is its flat internal hierarchy, which is devoid of managers. This week Valve is expanding that democratic philosophy to the professional aspect of its most lucrative game, Dota 2, by announcing a new tournament structure for the 2017-2018 season, which will commence after the conclusion of The International (TI) 7 in August, Dota's centerpiece event every year.
Not too long ago, in an effort to ensure higher production quality across

Samsung Electronics has announced that it is pumping 20.4 trillion won ($18 billion) of new investment into growing its semiconductor manufacturing facilities in South Korea.
While consumers may first associate the brand with smartphones and televisions, Samsung is the world’s largest producer of memory chips. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, semiconductors generated almost half of the company’s operating revenue in 2016. The latest round of investments means that those reven

Tencent announced this week that it will limit the amount of time children can play the role-playing mobile game Honor of Kings, amid concerns that some kids were becoming addicted.As Reuters reports, the Chinese internet giant will begin limiting play time for users below the age of 18 on Tuesday. Players under the age of 12 will be limited to one hour of playing per day and will be blocked from accessing the game after 9PM, Tencent said. Users between 12 and 18 years old will have a two-hour d

Samsung is working on a smart speaker powered by its new Bixby voice assistant, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The project is said to be codenamed Vega, but little more is known about the device; its features and specifications are apparently yet to be decided, much less a release date.
The Vega project’s development is reportedly being slowed by the progress of Bixby itself. Samsung had to launch the Galaxy S8 without support for English voice commands, despite marketin

 Cross-border payment startup InstaRem has raised $13 million in new financing as it looks to expand its business, which is rooted in Asia, into Europe and North America ahead of an eventual public listing as soon as 2020. The Singapore-based startup said the raise was led by China’s GSR Ventures, an early investor in Didi among others, with participation from Japan/Netherlands… Read More

(Reuters) — The prices of several big-name Nasdaq-listed stocks appeared on some websites to either spike or plummet well after the closing bell on Monday, seemingly due to a glitch related to the market data that runs the largely automated markets.
At around 6:30 p.m., the prices of Amazon and Microsoft stocks appeared to have lost more than half their value, while Apple shares appeared to more than double. Google parent Alphabet and eBay shares were among others that all appeared to be p

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds represents a paradigm shift in the shooter genre. Its thrilling last-man-standing multiplayer action has led to more than 4 million in sales, but it’s the breadth of its appeal that makes it so important to the future of gaming.
Everyone is playing Battlegrounds. That’s hyperbole, but it doesn’t feel too far from the truth. The online shooter from developer Bluehole has attracted a huge player base, and it’s not slowing down.
“Unl

A stock market data error this evening set an undetermined number of companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange to a share price of $123.47, sending some tech companies’ stock prices crashing and others’ soaring. In a statement obtained by the Financial Times, Nasdaq said the culprit was “improper use of test data” that was picked up third party financial data providers. The exchange said it was “working with third party vendors to resolve this matter.”The issue

Even though Bitcoin has been called a bubble, investors who have hungrily watched Bitcoin’s price soar 290% over the past year from the sidelines still have a chance to win big. Or at least that’s according to Goldman Sachs analyst Sheba Jafari.
On Sunday, the banking giant sent a note seen by CNBC that said Bitcoin, now priced at $2,568 a piece, could fall as low as $1,857 before bouncing to a much higher valuation between $3,212 to $3,915. That means if an

GUEST: Here’s what we know: Chatbots have enormous potential. With bots, brands can have millions of simultaneous one-on-one conversations with fans without sacrificing the quality of the user’s experience. But not all chatbots are created equal, and not all chatbots were made for the same purpose.
Today, there are two major categories of chatbots: utility bots that help users complete simple tasks and conversational bots that aim to learn about the user. The latter, while more compl

Data-sharing business Dropbox is seeking to hire underwriters for an initial public offering that could come later this year, which would make it the biggest U.S. technology company to go public since Snap, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
The IPO will be a key test of Dropbox’s worth after it was valued at almost $10 billion in a private fundraising round in 2014.
Dropbox will begin interviewing investment banks in the coming weeks, the sources said, asking not to

 An email circulated to 500 Startups staffers by its Mountain View accelerator lead and partner Elizabeth Yin makes several claims that contradict the narrative presented by leadership so far. In the email, Yin resigns effective Friday, citing the lack of transparency and ‘several untruths’ presented by 500 Leadership. This email makes claims that there were allegations yet to be… Read More

 Earlier today, TechCrunch broke the news that 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure, who had already stepped down as CEO, has resigned from his general partner role. Now, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, who are limited partners in 500 Startups, have spoken out about his resignation in light of allegations of sexual misconduct. “The events of 2017 in the tech ecosystem depict a sector… Read More