Technology news

The Boston Red Sox used an Apple Watch to steal pitching signs during baseball games, including against the New York Yankees, according to The New York Times. An investigation conducted by Major League Baseball determined that a member of the Red Sox training staff used the smartwatch to receive information that helped the team’s players decipher hand signals used by the opposing team’s catcher, who is in charge of making (and signaling) the pitch selections for the pitcher.The MLB c

Hurricane Irma is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. A Category 5, it is currently heading toward Southern Florida; the Florida Keys announced a mandatory visitor and resident evacuation will begin Wednesday morning. Miami-Dade County’s emergency management Twitter posted a list of evacuation centers today, and Miami’s mayor has said evacuations for the city will begin Wednesday.
Irma is expected to reach F

Facebook is gearing up to battle YouTube to be the top destination for music videos and other content containing copyright-protected songs, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company is reportedly offering music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars to retain the rights to music featured in videos uploaded by users and page owners. It’s a way to, at least initially, stave off the concerns of the copyright holders who must tirelessly work through Facebook to get the content take

Facebook’s original video-viewing hub is now live for everyone in the US on mobile, desktop, and Facebook TV, but will people start using it? Facebook announced at the end of August that it was rolling out Facebook Watch, a separate tab for hundreds of original shows, with content sponsored by the company and other media partnerships.After Facebook opens up content creation to everyone and not just a select group of creators, the Watch tab could become a livelier and better curated place.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible, and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
On its surface, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s debu

The IFA technology conference in Berlin this past week blessed us with gadgets. We witnessed the introduction of questionably large speakers, new phones, mixed reality headsets, and even new gaming mice. Much like we saw at CES, virtual assistants also continued to creep into every product.As of this summer, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana can all be built into third-party manufacturers' devices, and these new IFA products demonstrate an interest in including them. Most companies either bun

For the past two months, Apple has been giving students who buy a new MacBook or MacBook Pro a pair of Beats headphones for free. But here’s something kind of weird about that: Beats headphones can’t be charged by a new MacBook or the MacBook’s power brick without an adapter.
Despite Apple going all in on USB-C with its laptops, no Beats headphones support the increasingly popular connection standard. The headphones Apple has been offering to students include the Solo3 Wireless

Snapchat is now letting users from select European countries create their own geofilters from their phones, instead of having to design them from Snapchat’s web-based tool. The feature has been available in the US since June.European countries getting the new update include the UK, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Pricing for each filter begins at £5.99 in the UK and €6.99 in France and Sweden, and could cost more depending on location, duration, an

The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he’s everywhere. It’s impossible to turn on the news or access the internet without encountering headlines about him, along with the endless raging dissection of those headlines. Conversations unintentionally drift in his direction. He’s also infected pop culture, coloring the criticism of every new release. Any movie about the immigrant experience, sexuality, medical access, women, young people, politics, or the general resistance of

Microsoft will cover legal fees for employees who face deportation after the end of the Dreamers immigration program, the company says. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, made the promise in a statement condemning Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — something Smith called “a big step back for our entire country.”
Smith says Microsoft employs 39 people that are known to be protected by DACA, and that &l

Google announced an update to YouTube Live today that adds a couple of new features to the company’s live-streaming service.The biggest addition is that iOS users will now be able to live stream apps directly from their iPhones and iPads to YouTube Live, allowing you to share your screen with viewers. (That can be something like playing a game or drawing a picture.) Users will also be able to use the front-facing camera and microphone to add commentary or reactions to their streams. The up

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been one of the biggest surprise hits of 2017, and it has passed a pretty significant sales milestone. The game has sold over 10 million copies on Steam since it went into early access in March.That’s a pretty big achievement for a title that hasn’t even shipped the final version of the game yet, and is only available on one platform right now. It’s especially impressive when compared to estimates for best-selling games in 2017, like Hori

In 2014, Lenovo began bundling a third-party adware program called “Superfish” into its consumer PCs. Now, nearly three years later, the company is facing the consequences. Today, Lenovo settled a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission over the Superfish adware, agreeing to get affirmative consent for any future adware programs, as well as audited security checks of their software for the next 20 years.
Installed on Lenovo laptops between September 2014 and January 2015, Superfish w

PRESS RELEASE:Garcia will share insight from Carvana’s explosive growth and unique business model as a successful e-commerce companyATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 5, 2017– What does multi-million-dollar short-term growth, a leading e-commerce platform and a successful footprint in Atlanta all have in common? Find out from Ernie Garcia, chairman and CEO of Carvana, who will deliver the keynote at the 2017 Venture Atlanta conference. In what promises to be of keen intere

WhatsApp today announced plans to launch an app that lets small businesses chat with customers. A software solution will also be made available that gives large companies, like banks and airlines, tools to manage conversations with customers and do things like share flight times, delivery notifications, and other updates. The news comes a week after information about verified business accounts began to appear on the WhatsApp site.
Verified accounts will have a green badge next to them, whil

Bluehole announced today that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has hit the 10 million sold milestone. The Battle Royale multiplayer shooter has been available for PC in Early Access since March.
That is a lot of games to sell before an official release, but PUBG has become a special kind of hit. It even managed to have more simultaneous players online on Steam than Dota 2, which has long been the king of that platform. According to Bluehole, PUBG’s highest concurrent players count

Irma is now an “extremely dangerous” Category 5 hurricane with wind speeds up to 175 miles per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. That makes it the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s still unclear where exactly the hurricane will make landfall in the US and which parts of the East Coast it will affect, but there’s an “increasing chance” that Florida will be impacted l

After California got rid of the personal belief exemption for vaccinations, medical exemptions for vaccinations went up, say researchers studying the public health effects of a California Senate bill. Though total exemptions still went down, the findings suggest that the bill isn’t as strong as was hoped, since anti-vaxxers were still able to find doctors willing to provide a medical exemption instead.The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is typically required to attend schools. In 2015,

Microsoft made headlines last week when both its president and CEO issued a strongly worded statement in defense of DACA, an Obama-era program that allows immigrants who came to the US as children to stay if they meet certain requirements. The Trump administration is reportedly considering ending the program, and the president tweeted this morning that he expects Congress to move on the issue.
The highly visible defense of an immigration policy adds to the very vocal condemnation of Trump’

Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone has finally shipped to customers after half a summer’s worth of delays, and that means the teardown experts of iFixit have now had a chance to rip apart the slick slab of titanium and ceramic. The verdict? iFixit gives the Essential Phone a one out of 10 on its “repairability” scale, placing it in the company of some of the website’s worst offenders. That score pales in comparison to the iPhone 7 (7), Google Pixel XL (7), or even the Sam

The days of the large, globe-like cameras on top of Google Street View cars may be slowly disappearing. Google has refreshed the design for the cameras used to capture Street View images, which is its first significant upgrade in eight years, reports Wired. The new camera rig will help capture photos that are clearer, higher in resolution, and more vivid in color. Like the old design, the rig will attach to a vehicle’s roof, but it now features just two cameras that take still HD photos. T

SPONSORED: Presented by Wells Fargo
It goes without saying that technology is increasingly woven into our daily lives, and the over-abundance of touch points is causing consumers’ digital lives to become progressively more complex.
But as the world continues to evolve — and the need to deliver ever faster grows — there is a great focus and opportunity for the financial industry to adapt right along with it.
Understanding how a customer wants to connect will most definitely dete

PRESS RELEASE:Startup Provides the First Fully Digital End-to-End Way to Get a Car With the Flexibility to Return it AnytimeSANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 5, 2017– Fair-a first-of-its-kind app that allows customers to shop, get approved and pay for a car all on a phone-launched today. Fair’s innovative offering allows customers to shop for a car they want and can afford based on a pre-qualified monthly payment range tailored to their budget, and includes t

Nasdaq has announced plans to acquire eVestment, a data and analytics platform for the investment industry, in a $705 million deal.
The transaction will be funded through a mixture of cash and debt.
Founded out of Georgia in 2000, eVestment offers a range of subscription cloud-based services geared toward helping institutional investors spot trends, track the best investment managers, and succeed in the world of investment. The company claims more than 2,000 clients, including “92 per

PRESS RELEASE:Click here for the video animation of the ProtEmbo® SystemAACHEN, Germany–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 5, 2017– Protembis GmbH, a privately held medical device company, announced today the first clinical applications of its ProtEmbo® Cerebral Protection System to complement a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure. The ProtEmbo® System is an intra-aortic filter device that deflects embolic material arising during TAVR away from the brain.

Here’s the updated preliminary agenda for our GamesBeat 2017 event coming on October 5-6 at Fort Mason in San Francisco, California.
The event is GamesBeat 2017: The Time Machine. It’s full of speakers who can tell you the future of games before it happens — and they’ll use the same time machine to take you to the past for critical lessons that still apply. You can secure your seat here, still priced at a 40 percent discount. We think we’ve built a unique slate of s

PRESS RELEASE:100% Billings Growth Highlights Outstanding Second Quarter Announces $56M Equity Raise from Existing Investors Demonstrating Technology Leadership and Global DemandSAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 5, 2017– MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the Converged Data Platform that fully integrates analytics with operational processes in real time, today announced it completed another outstanding quarter, as the company continues to challenge both traditional a

A new European investment fund is turning to social media to find the next batch of undiscovered entrepreneurs.
Based in Paris, OneRagtime is run by a combination of millennial partners and experienced investors. The firm has created a platform to connect startups, investors, partners, and advisors and assists startups through a combination of direct investment via a fund and help with crowdsourced fundraising.
After launching in 2016, the firm conducted a Startup Hunt competition via Snapc

LG’s new V30 smartphone is justifiably one of the most exciting Android devices on the near horizon, checking off practically every desirable feature and spec from a modern flagship-tier phone. Among its many attributes is a new breakthrough in camera aperture (a measure of the amount of light that the lens array lets in) for smartphones with a value of f/1.6. For the vast majority of people, the difference between f/1.6 and f/1.7 is not something to be especially fussed about, but for com

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has launched its first Android One device in partnership with Google.
The Mi A1 is the latest in a line of Android One devices to hit developing markets over the past few years.
Android One is a software and hardware standard through which Google controls the development and design of the devices while leaving the building to partner manufacturers in each country. The program is essentially designed to bring affordable but good quality mobile phones to more p