Technology news

(Reuters) — Uber Technologies Inc co-founder Travis Kalanick said he had appointed two new directors, a surprise move that publicly reignited a board battle over the role of the ousted former chief executive.
Kalanick’s move on Friday sought to pre-empt a move by new Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi to restructure the board and gain greater control, a person familiar with the co-founder’s decision said.
Uber said in a statement on Friday the company was surprised by Kalanick&r

Back in 2016, in an interview with Metro, actor Kiefer Sutherland said something that promptly made the rounds in the usual film-news outlets: he claimed Niels Arden Oplev’s 2017 Flatliners remake is actually a sequel to the original 1990 film. “I play a professor at the medical university,” he told writer Ann Lee. “It is never stated but it will probably be very clearly understood that I’m the same character I was in the original Flatliners but that I have changed

So a startup walks into a bar… bet you want to know what happens next, right? All the best stories are the ones that hook you right from the very beginning, and hold your interest till the end. But more often than not, you’ll have a hard time doing that when telling people about your awesome new enterprise. Why is that? Well, the short answer is: your storytelling skills suck. Cheer up! While you’ll probably never win a Pulitzer Prize, there are some simple guidelines you can

The US government will purchase up to 1.13 million doses of a pair of Ebola vaccines and treatments to keep on hand in the event of another outbreak, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority said yesterday.BARDA, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, will spend $170 million to stockpile two vaccines and two treatments. While the authority can purchase the drugs, none have been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Reuters, BARDA will

MZ, formerly known as Machine Zone, formed its Satori open data project to take advantage of the real-time server infrastructure that it build for mobile games like Game of War, Mobile Strike, and Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. And to stoke interest in the platform, Satori held a Live Data Hackathon recently in San Francisco. And from that, we got SmartTrash, a way to use the Internet of Things to improve trash pickups.
The SmartTrash team won $20,000 and took top prize in the contest on how to

Apple released an ad for the iPhone 8 Plus, which shows off the phone’s big new feature, Portrait Lighting. The spot features a singer walking towards the camera, lit with the various lighting setups.Portrait Lighting is a new feature for the iPhone, which uses software to apply several preset lighting effects to a subject’s face. The various presets — Natural Light, Studio Light, Contour Light, Stage Light, and Stage Light Mono — are still in beta, but it’s a neat

During the height of the Cold War, a Soviet submarine mysteriously sank in the Pacific Ocean. K-129 held a crew of nearly 100 sailors, as well as a full payload of nuclear missiles. Following its loss, the US Navy noted the flurry of Soviet activity dispatched to locate the ship and saw an opportunity to gain access to their rival’s military secrets. They decided to locate and then steal the sub. The fact that this was physically, scientifically, and perhaps legally impossible led the team

GUEST: Bitcoin may be the original blockchain, but there haven’t been many ICOs built on the platform — the majority of new projects lauch on the Ethereum blockchain instead. While Bitcoin is generally still considered a better store of value than Ethereum’s currency, the Bitcoin blockchain has been less conducive to new, innovative blockchain applications.
The team behind Zen, however, wants to help Bitcoin maintain its dominance as digital gold while enabling it to benefit fr

Last weekend, I burned through Neo Yokio, which is the new love-it-or-hate-it must-watch series on Netflix. It's a six-episode anime voiced by a ton of big stars, but the most important thing to know is that it comes from Vampire Weekend leader Ezra Koenig. And I suspect that if you like Vampire Weekend's simultaneous embrace and mockery of high society, you'll also find something to like in the show.
There's a lot to unpack, but the thing that I want to focus on really briefly is Neo Yokio's wo

Once upon a time, you had to submit a program to the computer department. They would run it, and send the results back to you in the form of a printout. That worked well in the days when there was one big computing resource that everybody had to share.
In a way, Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy (maker of the Octane graphics renderer), believes those days could come back, except the computer we are sharing is all of the computers on the Internet. He applies that computer history to the idea of cloud ren

Earlier this week, Amazon surprised everyone with a press event that revealed a bunch of new Echo hardware. If you missed any of it, we have the biggest announcements right here. The retail giant is selling a few bundles, allowing you to save on the new hardware including the Fire TV and smaller version of the Echo.There are also several deals ending tonight, so act fast if anything catches your attention!
Last callSamsung Gear S3: Save $50 on various models of the new smartwatch (was $350&ndash

If you listen to your local NPR station, this weekend marks a significant milestone. Saturday is the last day that most will broadcast an episode of the network’s long-running automotive call-in show Car Talk. It’s an end of an era, and one that will be sorely missed.
For thirty years, Car Talk featured Boston mechanics Tom and Ray Magliozzi (affectionately known to listeners as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers) as they took calls from thousands of callers across the world (and e

On Friday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk laid out his vision for SpaceX’s future: the company is going all-in on a next-generation vehicle called the BFR, or Big Fucking Rocket. This rocket, which will be capable of going to the Moon and Mars, will eventually become SpaceX’s primary vehicle for launching satellites and traveling to the International Space Station, too.It’s a radical move for the company, which has a fairly reliable rocket already. But can SpaceX afford this change? In h

Re:Legend checks every box for a certain kind of gamer: It’s got monster-raising, farming, crafting, and fishing. It smashed through a bevy of goals on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, pulling in $630,700 in Singapore dollars (that’s $463,967.25 U.S.). The original goal? $70,000. The enthusiasm was more than enough to eclipse the platform goals: It’s coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and the Xbox One.
Not a bad start for Magnus Games, a two-person studio in Malays

What’s becoming clear in VR development is that with the market split across Rift, Vive and PlayStation VR, the developers of some of the most successful apps like Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption and Raw Data work hard to make their software work well across all three headsets.
Even if it is hard to stand out from dozens of apps launching each week, making a virtual world available across Steam, the PlayStation Store and Oculus increases the chances of a devel

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” This quote is often attributed to Pablo Picasso but did you know that he actually ‘stole‘ it from a host of writers and authors before him? Steve Jobs then credited the quote to Picasso and the cycle of plagiarism continued. Why do I care about copying in the startup world? Well I’m writing this post as a disgruntled victim of a daylight robbery. It’s an article I’ve wanted to write for a long time. As a fou

VB LIVE: The amount of customer data marketers can get their hands on has exploded; we understand what they do, and when and where they do it, but now we can figure out what they want. And when you give it to them, you’ve got their loyalty for life. Find out how to use your marketing analytics powers for good when you join this VB Live event featuring Boxed’s director of marketing and others.
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“Marketing is so important to drive growth, which is key for an

Esports events tend to emulate the setup of something like the FIFA World Cup. You might some group stages at the beginning before getting into an elimination tournament. But what if professional gaming looked more like mixed martial arts or boxing? Well, you’d end up with Body Count Fighting.
On Tuesday, The CW Network will air the five-party documentary series Chasing The Cup: Injustice 2. The episodes are available online, and they tell the story of multiple pro fighters trying to domin

Google plans on upgrading its two-factor authentication tool with an improved, physical security measure aimed at protecting high-profile users from politically motivated cyberattacks, according to a report from Bloomberg. The new service, to be called Advanced Protection Program and potentially slated to launch next month, will trade out the standard authentication process for services like Gmail and Google Drive with physical USB security keys. The service would also restrict the types of thir

Project Loon, the initiative of Alphabet’s X lab to deliver internet using air balloons, is looking into deploying Wi-Fi balloons to help alleviate the crisis in Puerto Rico, the company confirmed. “The Project Loon team at X is exploring if it’s possible to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico,” the X lab’s official Twitter account wrote this afternoon. X, formerly Google X, is the “moonshot” division of Google-owner Alphabet, responsible for the

Project Loon, the initiative of Alphabet’s X lab to deliver internet using hot air balloons, is looking into deploying Wi-Fi balloons to help alleviate the crisis in Puerto Rico, the company confirmed. “The Project Loon team at X is exploring if it’s possible to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico,” the X lab’s official Twitter account wrote this afternoon. X, formerly Google X, is the “moonshot” division of Google-owner Alphabet, responsible for

Esports is headed to Gig City. Chattanooga, Tennessee, has the fastest internet in the U.S., and the upcoming TenGig Festival intends to make the most of that. From October 6 to 8, TenGig will be hosting tournaments for the massively multiplayer online shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and the multiplayer online battle arena League of Legends. It will also feature panels on technology and innovation and a pub crawl for the 5-v-5 arcade machine Killer Queen.
The festival name comes from

Do you find the new 280-character limit on Twitter annoying and excessive? Good news: first, you’re not alone, and second, there’s already a Chrome extension for you. Block280 does just what it says: collapses any tweet longer than 140 characters so you don’t have to read them. You can tap to reopen them if you change your mind. Conor Browne, the creator of the app, said on the extension’s Product Hunt page that he was inspired by complaints he saw online about the chara

Edge first received support for extensions as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update released in August 2016. More than a year has passed since then, and Microsoft is now offering an update on the state of Edge extensions.
When it first got the ability to support them, Edge had 13 extensions: AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Amazon Assistant, Evernote Web Clipper, LastPass, Mouse Gestures, Office Online, OneNote Web Clipper, Page Analyzer, Pinterest Save Button, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Save to Pocket

It’s no secret that DC’s cinematic universe efforts have experienced some difficulties winning the hearts of both fans and critics. The exception has been the most recent entry in the franchise: the largely standalone Wonder Woman, released earlier this year.Now it seems that DC is learning from its past mistakes and successes. According to an extensive report by Abraham Riesman over at Vulture, Warner Bros. and DC will be deemphasizing the interconnected DC Extended Universe for fut