Technology news

Another San Francisco financial tech company is expanding operations into Utah, looking to add 500 jobs with a capital investment of $5.6 million.
Earnest Inc., a startup that offers low-interest, no-fee loans using its software to analyze applicants’ creditworthiness, will expand its operations into Salt Lake County, the company and the Governor’s Office of Economic Development announced Thursday.
Earnest is the third fintech company from San Francisco to recently announce plans to

California already has some of the most generous incentives to get an electric car, but people living in San Diego are being further enticed to go the plug-in route.Through September 30th, San Diego Gas & Electric will offer its utility customers $10,000 toward a BMW i3 or Nissan Leaf. That’s in addition to the state of California’s offer of up to $2,500 in rebates on plug-ins, as well as the $7,500 federal tax credit. Depending on models, SDG&E customers could get up to $20,

A Samsung Galaxy S5 allegedly fell from a plane and miraculously survived after landing in someone’s yard. It also happened to record the whole thing and was returned to its owner, Blake Henderson, with the hilarious footage inside.
The 11-minute video posted on YouTube by the phone owner’s nephew, Robert Ryan, shows a clear landscape for the first few seconds, as Henderson is recording nearby aircraft from inside the plane. Then, there’s a blur of blue and green as the phone a

On Friday, GamesBeat held its first PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Family Chicken Dinner night. For hours, game developers and designers, composers, writers, and other media personalities came together to fight over a few measly drumsticks and a breast piece. It was a blast, and we’re planning to do this again soon. In the meantime, we’ve collected some of the highlights from the evening for your viewing pleasure.
Battlegrounds is a massive success. It is among the most played g

We heard earlier this month that the next Apple Watch would be available in an LTE version. Now, it seems, Apple will make two models of the watch: one with LTE and one without. The company also likely won't iterate on design much with its form factor remaining largely similar to previous versions. The rumored news comes from Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, who has reliably predicted Apple trends in the past. Kuo also says the new Apple Watch will ship in its usual two sizes — 38mm and 42m

Nintendo just launched new options for online Switch customers, allowing them to customize the color of their Joy-Con and accompanying straps — up to a point. The page is on Nintendo’s Japanese store, and hence is in Japanese. I apologize for any translation errors — I’m relying on Google for the information. Each of the Joy-Con and straps come in the color of your specification, as long as it’s a color the company has already produced. Want to mix and match Splato

DJI is far and away the world’s most popular brand of drone across the consumer and commercial sectors. Increasingly, its aircraft are also being used by militaries. The US Army, for example, has issued over 300 exemptions allowing its troops to fly DJI drones on various missions. But two weeks ago, the Army put a temporary halt on the use of any DJI equipment, citing concerns over potential cyber vulnerabilities.
That news sparked a broader conversation about the use of Chinese-made hardw

GUEST: I recently introduced my kids to the original Star Wars trilogy. As we watched together, there was one thing that bothered me over and over. That “thing” was a gangly, gold-plated klutz of a droid called C-3PO.
Threepio is kind of a terrible robot. The problem is his heavy, accident-prone body really only exists to carry his software around. He easily could have been a handheld device that you take out of your pocket when you need to negotiate with some Jawas and put away when

Goodbye pencil/ruler/paintbrush, hello popsicle sticks. While the app store icon has seen subtle tweaks over the years, it’s featured the same basic logo until now. Apple today released it’s sixth developer beta for iOS 11 about a week ahead of expectations. The update includes new icons for Maps and the App Store, new AirPod animations, as well as other cosmetic changes. It also features bug-fixes and performance upgrades as well. De zesde beta van iOS 11 brengt nieuwe icoontjes vo

In a blog post today, online web hosting provider DreamHost disclosed that it has been involved in a months-long legal battle with the Justice Department over records on visitors to an anti-Trump website.The dispute focuses on the website disruptj20.org
The dispute focuses on a Justice Department demand for information on data related to disruptj20.org, which describes itself as a group of activists “building the framework needed for mass protests to shut down the inauguration of Donald Tr

VB LIVE: Last year, AR and VR raked in $1.8B, with 6.3M headsets shipped. And those numbers are expected to just keep climbing. Join this VB Live for insights into VR and AR usage, consumer attitudes, and to learn whether the massive potential audience that exists is ready to go virtual.
Access this VB Live event on demand right here.
With virtual reality and augmented reality starting to make meaningful penetration, it’s time to start thinking of them as potential new marketing channels &

Facebook’s Marketplace has become one of the biggest competitors to Craigslist in the US since it launched last year. Unfortunately, it’s only been available in a handful of countries so far. That’s now changing. The company today announced it’s rolling out Marketplace to 17 more countries across Europe: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerla

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones’ “Eastwatch” episode came bearing the gift of reunions. It was the latest round of important meet-ups in a season already packed with homecomings, but the power of those encounters is wearing thin.
Anticipation for some of these scenes has been building literally for years. Gendry hasn’t been seen since 2013, when Davos sent him off in a rowboat to escape death by blood sacrifice. And yet, his return to the show is sandw

Pandora has announced that Sling TV founding CEO Roger Lynch will join the company as CEO and president, effective September 18th, 2017. Naveen Chopra, who served as Pandora’s interim CEO following co-founder Tim Westergren’s announcement that he was vacating all official positions with the company, will continue as chief financial officer.
As the founding CEO of Dish Network-owned Sling TV, Lynch led the company to become the leading on-demand over-the-top (OTT) service in the US Be

The Google Brain team has a new high-profile hire. Chris Lattner, a former Apple executive credited with the creation of the Swift programming language who previously headed engineering efforts for Tesla’s Autopilot system, said in a tweet today that he would be joining one of the tech giant’s machine learning teams.
Lattner left Apple last year to join Tesla, where he worked on leading engineering for the carmaker’s Autopilot assistive driving feature. The new position didn&rs

Upping the stakes in an already epic round of backbiting on Uber’s board, Benchmark today sent an open letter to Uber employees explaining why it decided to sue founder Travis Kalanick. The influential VC firm then posted the open letter on Google Docs and posted a link on Twitter.An open letter to Uber employees from Benchmark: https://t.co/YQN8hQ9MjH
— Benchmark (@benchmark) August 14, 2017The move is an unorthodox one. Board communications to employees are usually handled by a top

GUEST: We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato farm across the street. Drive down the road and you can see the tall stalks of corn waving on other farms. Most people aren’t in tech or law or teaching in universities; they fall solidly into what is called working-class. They work as electricians, carpenters, plumbers, in hospitals, restaurants, as clerks, office managers, farmers, etc. They have solid middle-class values of work,

Discord, a fast-growing free chat service popular among gamers, said today that it had shut down “a number of accounts” following violence instigated by white supremacists over the weekend. The service, which lets users chat with voice and text, was being used by proponents of Nazi ideology both before and after the attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We will continue to take action against Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate,” the company said in a tweet.
Discord dec

GUEST: In the first Terminator movie, Arnie’s T-800 is sent back in time to kill a human. In Terminator 2, the T-800 is programmed to protect a human. This idea of having our machines grapple with the concept of “kill/do not kill” is still science fiction for now, but some profound questions about the relationship between humanity and AI automation are starting to need real-world answers.
We’re talking about AI, this immensely powerful, often ambiguous term thrown around

Google Assistant has a smattering of recently released voice apps that do things like help Airbnb guests, play a rap lyrics karaoke challenge, or give guided whiskey tastings by Johnnie Walker.
The Actions on Google platform, which launched last December, now counts more than 450 voice apps, or actions, in its directory.
The recently added Facts About Sloths shares fun and scientific facts about sloths in visual cards (along with a fair amount of adorable sloth photos).From Flyaway Sprout, the F

Just hours after being dropped by GoDaddy, prominent white nationalist publication The Daily Stormer attempted to find a home at Google. As of press time, the site’s registration info pointed to domains.google.com, indicating the web giant had taken over services as registrar.Shortly after the switch was noticed, Google announced plans to drop the site. “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the company sai

Facebook Messenger’s intelligent assistant M now delivers Spotify suggestions when music is brought up in conversation. The prompts are triggered by a variety of phrases and specific words. For example, type “play some music” or “listen to music” in Messenger, and M will offer to “Find Music” in Spotify. If a specific artist is named, then M asks those in the conversation if they want to listen to that artist in Spotify. These artist-specific Spotify pro

ZTE is releasing a new smartphone through MetroPCS, called the Blade Z Max. It's a fairly standard budget phone, apart from the fact that it features a rear dual camera system, which is a novelty at its price point of $129.These are the phone's specs:
Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8940 processor
2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage with up to 128GB of expandable storage4,080mAh battery
16-megapixel and 2-megapixel rear dual camera system; 8-megapixel front-facing camera
Rear fingerprint sensor
6-inch Full HD

Facebook’s redesigned Trending Topics section, now dubbed Trending News, is widely available on mobile for iPhone and Android users in the US, giving users a central location for all of the company’s aggregation efforts after a tumultuous year of changes to how Facebook handles journalism. The announcement of a redesign came back in May, when Facebook revealed a new look for its news section that focused more on offering a wider range of publications and giving users something that a

What seemed like a simple case of retaliation against a right-wing hate site has turned into a debate over who really dunnit.
A post appeared on The Daily Stormer claiming that the hacking collective known as Anonymous managed to break into and seize control.
“THIS SITE IS NOW UNDER THE CONTROL OF ANONYMOUS,” the alleged hackers wrote. “WE HAVE TAKEN THIS SITE IN THE NAME OF HEATHER HEYER A VICTIM OF WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISM. FOR TOO LONG THE DAILY STORMER AND ANDREW ANGLIN

EXCLUSIVE: While the star of Samsung’s Unpacked event on August 23 will undoubtedly be the Galaxy Note8, the mammoth smartphone is not the only device poised for an unveiling in a little over a week. Samsung also plans to introduce a new, backwards-compatible GearVR headset and its latest fitness smartband, the Gear Fit2 Pro.
Somewhat confusingly, the Fit2 Pro is actually the third fitness tracker from the South Korean manufacturer and builds on the Tizen-powered Gear Fit2 in a number of w

You might not have noticed, but over the weekend a little coup took place. On Friday night, in front of a crowd of thousands, an AI bot beat a professional human player at Dota 2 — one of the world’s most popular video games. The human champ, the affable Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, threw in the towel after being killed three times, saying he couldn’t beat the unstoppable bot. “It feels a little bit like human,” said Dendi. “But at the same time, it’s somethin

The tech industry CEOs who remain on President Donald Trump’s jobs advisory board are planning to stay there. Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier resigned from the American Manufacturing Council today after Trump blamed violence incited by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend on “many sides.” But the remark was largely met with a shrug by Intel, Dell, and GE, among others.Here’s Dell’s founder and CEO, Michael Dell, who sits on the council: “Whi

The United States may not be in the midst of a robot revolution quite yet, but new data indicates that Heartland cities should be prepared to see more and more robots at their factories.
Today, the Brookings Institution published a report showing which cities and states in the U.S. are employing the most robots. Using sales data from the International Federation of Robotics, Brookings calculated the metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of industrial robots per 1,000 workers. Brookin

MalwareTech, the security researcher catapulted to global fame after stopping the WannaCry ransomware, has plead not guilty to creating software used to harvest banking credentials. The UK-based malware expert, whose real name is Marcus Hutchins, was arrested at the Virgin Atlantic business class lounge at Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport on August 3 as he waited for his flight home, after attending the DEF CON hacking conference. Here's a picture of @MalwareTechBlog and @marciahofmann before

What are you good at? Seriously, think about your talents, your areas of expertise, the things you do better than anybody else that you know. Have something in mind? If not, you’re not alone. The fact is, it’s hard for us to admit that we think we’re better at something than others. When it comes down to it, though, you almost certainly have a strength that sets you apart from the rest. It could be in programming, writing, music, art, sports, or whatever area you’re draw

Just when you thought Snapchat was down for the count due to its miserable second quarter report — well, I don’t want to exaggerate and say it’s making a comeback, but at least its new Pikachu filter has caught the eye of a few Pokémon fans. Take a selfie with Pikachu! 📸⚡️Our Pikachu Lens is available now on Snapchat for a limited time: https://t.co/hOCWNkQWmB pic.twitter.com/GX8mY7hPYI — Pokémon (@Pokemon) August 14, 2017 The Pikachu f

Peter Molyneux is a legendary game designer, creator of the first “god game” and maker of hits such as Populous, Black & White, and Fable. He took a lot criticism from Internet haters a few years ago for over-hyping games that hadn’t shipped yet. So he dropped out of sight.
But he didn’t stop making games. Now his 22cans studio in the United Kingdom is about to ship The Trail: Frontier Challenge for the PC. Kongregate will publish it August 16 on Steam

Researchers have created AI that can render fictional street scenes based on human requests. The scientists load in a “paint by numbers” kind of template, and the computer outputs a dreamy display which rivals the graphics of the current generation of video games. Qifeng Chen, co-author of the research paper, believes his team has taken the next step in providing increased realism for games like Grand Theft Auto. The scientists created the algorithm and trained it using images from

SpaceX has landed yet another one of its Falcon 9 rockets after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:31PM ET, bound for the International Space Station. Around eight minutes after takeoff, the majority of the vehicle landed back on solid ground off the Florida coast. It marks the 14th successful rocket landing for SpaceX, and the sixth time a Falcon 9 has successfully touched on solid ground post-launch.
In fact, SpaceX has yet

A rising number of sea lions are being poisoned by toxic algae blooms in California, according to The Associated Press. So far, 68 sea lions have been treated by the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, compared to 70 in all of 2016. The number "is more pronounced than we've seen in the past few years,” Michael Milstein, a spokesman for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the AP.
The sea lions are getting sick because they eat small fish like sardines and anchovies that fee

On August 21st, a total solar eclipse will cross the United States from coast to coast for the first time in nearly a century. The event has been a boon to the tourism and hotel industries of towns like Nashville, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina that are in the path of the Moon’s shadow. Whether you’re flying or driving to one of these towns, or just camping out in your backyard, here are the gadgets you will need to get a good look at the Moon and the Sun — while kee

Amazon is shutting down its DVD rental service in the UK and Germany this fall. The service, Lovefilm, was acquired by Amazon in 2011, and does not operate anywhere else in the world, according to Variety.
For a monthly subscription fee, Lovefilm users receive a DVD or Blu-ray disc of their choice in the mail, and mail it back when they’re finished. The service, similar to Netflix’s DVD plan, struggled to compete in a market dominated by streaming services.Lovefilm, but not DVDs
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