Technology news

So you just downloaded Snapchat. Now what? The photo app that everyone wants to copy and yet no one can manage to fully destroy is still a little obscure for those who didn’t get onboard during its initial rush of popularity. I’ve actually been asked by multiple people who know my profession to “explain Snapchat” to them. That’s not something that can be done in a short conversation, so here we are. Here’s a complete guide to Snapchat, including what it does,

The CW’s Riverdale has become a hit by adapting one of the most unlikely pieces of source material: the all-American line of Archie Comics. With a darker, more glamorous take, the show has been able to bring an entirely new audience to the traditionally wholesome high school adventures of Archie and his friends Betty, Veronica, and Jughead. A panel dedicated to the character at New York Comic Con this past Saturday highlighted the schism between the old and the new, revealing an unlikely k

Today at GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, TCL officially unveiled its all-touchscreen phone, BlackBerry Motion. Evan Blass leaked images of the device last week, and according to AndroidCentral, it will be similar to this year’s KEYOne phone in a couple of ways. It comes with a 5.5 inch HD LCD display and a Snapdragon 625 SoC processor. It will also come with 4GB of Ram, 32GB of storage, and a 4000mAh battery. And, it’s water resistant.BlackBerry Motion goes from rumor to real... make

Today at GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, TCL officially unveiled its all-touchscreen phone, BlackBerry Motion.Evan Blass leaked images of the device last week, and according to AndroidCentral, it will be similar to the this year’s KEYOne phone in a couple of ways. It comes with a 5.5 inch HD LCD display and a Snapdragon 625 SoC processor. It will also come with 4GB of Ram, 32GB of storage, and a 4000mAh battery. And, it’s water resistant.BlackBerry Motion goes from rumor to real... m

GUEST: You’re at an electronics store. You check out a few TVs and head home after being scanned by store cameras. This data is then cross-referenced with other databases that already contain your facial data. Your face is now the epicenter of a retargeting campaign. For instance, your camera-equipped smart TV, which already recognizes your face, could now serve you commercials for the new TV you were considering, among other products you were captured perusing using the same service at ot

GUEST: An increasing number of people want to fix the flaws of the internet by decentralizing it, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox browser and other open-source tools, and Richard Hendricks, the protagonist of HBO’s Silicon Valley.
But what’s wrong with the current internet, and isn’t it already decentralized?
The internet is physically decentralized; no single entity owns i

Why make robots edible? Well, it’s not to give humanity an advantage during future robot uprisings. Instead, researchers from Swiss research institute EPFL imagine digestible bots being put to a number of uses — from exploring our bodies (before being disposed of by our guts) to “food transportation where the robot does not require additional payload because the robot is the food.” (Our emphasis.)
These ideas and more were outlined in a recent paper titled “Soft Pne

When Microsoft announced its Windows Mixed Reality platform last week, it talked about how the combination of virtual reality and augmented reality (which Microsoft calls mixed reality) would create a new era in computing.
Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft and the researcher behind Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset, went on stage at an event in San Francisco and answered questions from a group of journalists. He did his entire presentation while wearing a new Samsung HMD Odyssey mix

Nigel Stanford is a New Zealand musician who creates sound experiments using mechanics and technology. His new album, Automatica, was made by two thin orange boys: industrial robots.For each instrument, Stanford manipulated the robots slightly to help them play.When the robots play the bass, the one near the body of the instrument is equipped with a guitar pick. When they play the drums, each robot is gripping a drumstick, except for the one playing the bass drum.In the video above, you can watc

Nigel Stanford is a New Zealand musician who creates sound experiments using mechanics and technology. The music video for the title track on his new album, Automatica, was made by two thin orange boys: industrial robots.Or, well, it looks like it was made by the robots. In fact, the robots aren’t playing the music you can hear — instead, a combination of special effects and sped-up footage was used to make it look like they are. Stanford told The Verge that the video is essentially

REVIEW: The Nintendo GameBoy library is a sweet chocolate box of retro gaming: little cartridges containing quaint, meticulously machine-coded 8-bit treasures. It would be a shame to see these games become lost and forgotten in time.
Doing its part to make sure that doesn’t happen, Hyperkin has launched the SmartBoy (available now for $50), a smartphone accessory that hooks up to any handheld Android device with a native Type-C USB port and enables you to play the gems of the GameBoy catal

Over the last couple of years, there has been a boom in technology where new and innovative ideas have been developed to help us deal with the many complexities of our lives. Finances have always been a tricky subject for many people. That is why financial institutions such as banks make huge profits and major turnovers. The reality is that the world will always need money; however, smarter, cleaner innovations will push the financial sector into a new age of technology and transparency. In a n

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is barely two months away, but Disney has nevertheless managed to keep a tight grip on details, releasing just a short trailer and a behind-the-scenes reel thus far. But here at New York Comic Con, Lucasfilm has put together an exhibition giving fans the chance to see some of the props and costumes from the film up close and personal.Tucked away in the back of the exhibition hall, the booth is designed to look as though it’s the deck of a First Order Star Destroyer

Get your wallets ready. Disney has announced that tickets for The Last Jedi will go on sale tomorrow, following the release of a new trailer during Monday Night Football.The announcement didn’t say exactly when tickets would go on sale, just that they would come following the trailer’s release at halftime.Get ready. Trailer tomorrow. #TheLastJedi pic.twitter.com/woC9KF4GH8— Star Wars (@starwars) October 8, 2017The trailer will be the first new glimpse of the film since July, wh

A new trailer for DC’s superhero ensemble movie Justice League has arrived, and it paints a bleak picture for the post-Superman world we were left with after the events of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.Superman’s death looms heavy over the trailer. It opens with Lois Lane dreaming about becoming engaged to Clark Kent in Kansas, only to wake up and find him still missing. We then get a glimpse of how the rest of the world is feeling his loss. TV newscasters say that violence, wa

This week, Neill Blomkamp, the Academy Award-nominated director of District 9, unveiled a short film that he made with the Unity Technologies game engine. At Unity’s event in Austin, Texas, Blomkamp’s Oats Studios showed off Adam: The Mirror, a 6-minute film that was a sequel to Adam, a short film that Unity built as an internally produced showcase demo last year.
Evoking the theme of transhumanism, or the notion that we can live beyond our physical bodi

Google announced a whole bunch of products this week, including two new Home speakers. But among the announcements were also a handful of new things the Home speaker is capable of doing — some of which are handy, and some of which could be pretty powerful improvements. In case you missed them, here are the highlights:
Quickly control your homeYou can already say “good morning” to the Google Home to get info on traffic, the weather, and the latest news. But Google is planning to

In 2010, J.Ed Marston — then the vice president of marketing for the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce — was tasked with pitching new media outlets about one of the city’s latest high-tech offerings. The city’s utility provider, Electrical Power Board of Chattanooga, had created its own fiber optic network that was capable of delivering internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second to all residents.
The problem that Marston encountered wasn’t that media outlets weren’

Airbnb is testing out a new feature that should make business travelers pretty happy. According to Bloomberg, the company has partnered with WeWork to launch a pilot test that allows travelers with business accounts to reserve desks at WeWork locations.The pilot program will take place in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Sydney, and London, according to the report. Airbnb corporate users who book a room in one of those cities will be able to reserve a spot at the closest WeWork locati

Google’s homepage has famously been a minimalist affair, devoid of the links that often cluttered the homepages of other search engines. Earlier this week, the search giant added two links to the upper left corner of the site: About and Store.The links seem to have gone up as Google announced its new lineup of hardware on Wednesday. Android Police first spotted the additions (via 9to5Google), which lead to the company’s storefront, as well as an extensive section about the company, w

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Ask any freelancer what the most tedious part of their job is, and they’ll likely say invoicing. Tracking who has paid them and who hasn’t, staying on top of expenses, and the nightmare that’s taxes adds up. All that admin work takes time and energy away from the actual work.
Luckily, And Co gets it. That’s why they’ve created an app that helps you streamline it al

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Are you still paying for cable in 2017? Let’s fix that. It's time to break up with your cable company — and this is how.
Real talk: cable’s an expensive pain in the butt. You pay for channels you don’t want in order to get channels you do want, and after a year of paying the promo price, your bills shoot up. Inevitably, you forgot that you planned to cancel and then you'

With the release of its latest collaboration, TheWaveVR continues to push the boundaries of VR and make a name for itself building mind-bending virtual worlds centered on music.
Based in Austin and Los Angeles, TheWaveVR raised a $4 million seed round earlier this year. The company employs around eight people full-time, plus a number of contractors, and the VR concerts they make are experienced with a group of people similar to a rave in the real world. These concerts remain some of th

Independence Day director Roland Emmerich just launched his own VR company. No, really.
Emmerich is the chairman and co-founder of a new VR media outfit named VRenetic that aims to make 360 degree broadcasting accessible and affordable to everyone. The company has its own free app, VResh, that allows for real-time streaming of panoramic video with the use of a proprietary smartphone-connected camera. It’s powered by the company’s own Media Engine, which it plans to utilize in other a

GUEST: The future of entertainment is here. The BBC, in collaboration with Rosina Sound, is working on an interactive radio play for artificial intelligence-enabled home chatbots, like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home.
The production will be the first of its kind, and the futuristic, high-tech play is slated to be released by the end of the year.
Do you have an AI strategy — or hoping to get one? Check out VB Summit on October 23-24 in Berkeley, a high-level, invite-only AI ev

Saturday Night Live has always taken great care to strike the right tone after tragedy, and this week's episode managed to delicately address a terrible week on multiple levels, but with a single, thoughtful stroke.
Instead of a cold open mocking the Donald Trump administration — breaking what must have been some kind of record streak — the first face we saw was that of country singer Jason Aldean, about to make his first public performance since leaving the stage last Sunday as the

A few weeks back, UploadVR caught wind that Microsoft’s iconic Halo franchise would be coming to its new line of Windows 10 virtual reality headsets, which are made by partners such as Asus and Dell, though we didn’t know in what form. Today, Microsoft revealed all.
Halo Recruit is coming to all Windows VR headsets at launch on October 17. It will be a free, albeit brief experience designed to introduce players to the possibilities of Halo in VR. It’s developed by 343

Ever since The Walking Dead got its spinoff (aka prequel) series, Fear the Walking Dead, fans and reporters alike have been badgering the producers behind the two shows about the possibility of a crossover — and apparently said badgering has finally paid off.
"There are two Walking Dead shows, I'm not gonna name them... There is one character that is going to go from one show, that I will not name... and appear in the other show, which I will not name," series creator Robert Kirkman reveal

GUEST: We are living in a world of data overload. From behavioral analytics to customer preferences, businesses now have so much data at their fingertips that they’re unable to process and consume all of it in a meaningful way. This is where the magic of machine learning comes in. When applied to massive internal company datasets, machine learning technology can derive important insights and provide actionable recommendations and predictions at superhuman scale.
But as automation, machine

"The first note we got from Syfy said, 'Don't hold back, don't edit yourselves, go for it,'" recalled Brian Taylor, executive producer of Happy!, during the show's New York Comic-Con panel. "'We don't want you to do something safe. We want dangerous TV. We want something on the edge."
From here – two full months before the series' cable debut – it's too soon to determine whether Happy! will turn out to be truly "dangerous" and "edgy," or just puckishly obnoxious. But having seen the

James Bond. Jason Bourne. Jack Bauer. Don't lump Jack Ryan in with all these other dudes with J-names, even if they share a history of espionage and action. If Amazon and producers Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland have their way. 
“Jack is a classic American hero," Cuse said at New York Comic Con. "The thing that was really exciting for Graham and me was that we could do it for Amazon and do an eight-hour version." 
This is the era of reinvention: Beloved properties and characters

 The FCC has given approval for Google parent company, Alphabet, to help Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands regain wireless service. The company will attempt to enable LTE connectivity using its high-flying Project Loon balloons.
BREAKING: FCC issues experimental license to Google to provide emergency cellular service in Puerto Rico through Project Loon balloons.
— Matthew Berry… Read More