Technology news

Bloomberg has been keeping an eye on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth and notes that today, for the first time, it has exceeded $100 billion. That’s 100,000,000,000 dollars. He was already definitively the richest person in the world after spending part of 2016 trading places with Bill Gates. Gates, by the way, was the last person to reach that stratospheric level of wealth, back in 1999.
Bezos’ fortune is swelling mainly because Amazon’s stock has been doing so well this

GUEST: The way we create and consume visual content has changed significantly with the advent of both digital and mobile cameras. Today, algorithms bring on the next wave of innovation and evolution in the space.
AI technologies are increasingly good at classifying, organizing and understanding images, changing the way both brands and creators think about visuals.
Sourcing visuals at scale
Cheaper and faster hardware, along with an abundance of rich data sets, has led to the visual computing rev

Niantic, Inc. announced today that it has raised a fresh round of capital — $200 million to be exact, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The Series B round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Meritech, Javelin Venture Partners, and NeatEase. Spark Capital partner Megan Quinn will join Niantic’s board.
‘”We are excited to be working with NetEase, Spark, and our other new investors.  This round enables new strategic opportun

GUEST: Three critical trends are driving forward the rapid development of a new generation of financial robo-advice models. In fact, gains in these three areas create the potential for a Moore’s Law pattern of acceleration in the field of artificial intelligence-powered financial advice models.
1. Availability of data
We generate more than 2.5 billion GB of data every day. Innovators and developers access the vast lakes of this data from a seemingly endless range of sources. For

I think we’re missing the bigger picture when it comes to AI. Once again humanity tricked itself into thinking that this time, it’s the end. That the looming technological revolution will take over our jobs and wipe us off the face of the earth. It’s not surprising, though. Technophobia is not a new phenomenon. It was a distinctive feature of about every technological shift that we went through in the modern era. People have always feared to be replaced by machines. Yet,

Since its initial release in late September, it hasn’t been easy to get a hold of the Super NES Classic, a miniature version of the beloved 1990s Nintendo console that comes loaded with 21 games. The initial preorders were available only to customers who happened to be awake in the wee hours of the morning, and despite Nintendo’s promises to manufacture “significantly more” stock than they did of the NES Classic, the $79.99 retro console sold out quickly in stores.But thi

Tabletop games have become more popular and sophisticated over the years, and one of the people responsible for that is Larry Harris, the creator of Axis & Allies. The casual simulation of World War II has sold millions of copies over the years, and it is just one of 200 tabletop games that Harris has designed.
But he’s not done yet. For the past five years, Harris has been working on War Room, a more ambitious but not necessarily more complicated tabletop board game about World War II

Adam Helps is an app that lets anyone living in the Toronto area hire others in their local communities to help them with odd jobs, much like TaskRabbit does (and to a lesser extent, classifieds services like Craigslist, Gumtree, and Kijiji). If you’ve burdened with some fiendishly tricky IKEA flat-packed furniture that needs assembling, or a lawn that needs mowing, you can put out the feelers into your local community and find someone available. You can even use it to find a babysitter,

You may not have heard of Yiying Lu, but chances are you’ve seen her work for some of tech’s most popular companies. She’s the artist behind one of the most iconic images from the beginning of Web 2.0, the Fail Whale, which Twitter adopted to replace the stale 404 page when the service went down frequently in the late 2000s.
For more than a decade, Lu has spent time creating artwork for companies and helping startups add more personality to their brand. VentureBeat had a chance

Virtual water-cooler Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that illustrates how many people are discussing individual, popular tweets through the service. The feature — which, again, is just an experiment — appears on embeds of popular, viral tweets found across the Internet. It replaces the like and retweet icons with a count of how many people are discussing the tweet. Twitter removed the Retweet / Like buttons for tweets embedded in articles?! Old Twitter Embed vs. New Twit

When I split the wishbone yesterday, I wished for a very special live Vergecast with my two good friends, Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn. And now my wish has come true! We’re broadcasting live on YouTube right now. If for any reason we aren’t live right now, you already missed it, or Google Hangouts is broken in some terrible way.
Guess what we’re talking about!
At some point in the near future we’ll take the audio from the stream and put it into the regular podcast feed, so

Everyone has that Apple fanatic on their holiday gift list — but what to buy for the Apple fan who already has everything? I wish I could say the answer was this one-foot tall Steve Jobs figurine from Dam Toys, which comes with 10 different accessories and three pairs of interchangeable hands. Yes, three pairs of hands: one pair of “open hands” and two pairs of the “relaxed hands” that Jobs was so famous for.
Using this figurine, you could recreate great moments in

I’ve got all the self-control of an untrained, ADHD-addled labradoodle puppy. Suffice to say, this time of year is always mildly financially ruinous for me, as I inevitably fill my apartment with all the discounted crap my credit card will permit. If you’re like me, you’ll want to check out Icebox, from comparison site Finder.com, which promises to stop impulse purchases by making you — wait for it — think about them. This Chrome plugin replaces the ‘Buy

I know, I know — you’ve got games like Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and Call of Duty: World War II on your to-play list. Or maybe you’re deep into Blizzard Entertainment’s team shooter Overwatch and you’re working on getting to platinum with the new healer Moira. But this year gave us a raft of outstanding indie games. Here are just a few that you should consider gifting a friend or giving a try yourself.
Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall)Pl

Chrome aside, Slack has easily become the app I most frequently use; and while I generally have no squabbles with it, the team collaboration messenger continues to suffer from a rage-inducing bug that sporadically causes it to crash when using the drag-and-drop image upload feature. The worst part is how little it takes to trigger this annoying flaw: sometimes I would be casually dragging an image to drop in Gmail and a mere hover over Slack would be enough to abruptly reboot it. For those who&

Black Friday is one of the best times of the year to stock up on audio gear, and whether you’re looking to overhaul your living room setup or just improve some sound on your commute, we’ve rounded up every great headphone and speaker deal around.And if you’re a DJ or electronic musician, we’ve put together a separate list with more tailored suggestions for you, too.
The best headphones to buy on Black Friday
The Massdrop-made Sennheiser HD 6XX for $199.99 still is one of

Although we’re over twelve hours into this year’s main Black Friday event with plenty of stores selling out of major deals, eBay is refreshing its deals by the hour, which makes it easier to catch discounted goods.We’ve found the best tech deals that eBay is offering so far, updated with a new round of deals released just today, including price cuts on PS4 bundles and gift cards attached to discounts for the GoPro Hero6 and the Google Home Mini. If you’re a frequent shopp

If you get stuck using a Linux tool, the first port of call shouldn’t be to Stack Overflow, but rather its “man pages.” Man — which is short for manual — retrieves documentation for a given program. Unfortunately, this can often be dense, hard to understand, and lacking in practical examples to help you solve your problem. TLDR is another way of looking at documentation. Rather than being a comprehensive guide to a given tool, it instead focuses on offering practic

Some people are freaking out about net neutrality right now. Me, I’m deciding where to put my holiday play time. Will it be Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Star Wars: Battlefront II, or Call of Duty: WWII?
The best answer, of course, is to play all three of the recently launched first-person shooter games. I’ve completed the single-player campaigns of each title, and they’re all reasonably good. But not everybody is going to pour all that time into each campaign and then play

Pet obsession is currently at an all-time high, with us humans spending over $100 billion on pet products and services in 2016. Fortunately, our CEO Boris discovered one of the most practical pet products on the market: fully customizable and extremely regal portraits of your precious furry friends, available to order. Founded by Dutch designer, Tein Traniello, L’animophe is the company responsible for the happiness of numerous pet owners around the globe, even harmoni

If you’ve seen media coverage of Bitcoin and the rise of cryptocurrencies, you’re probably thinking of getting into the action, if you haven’t already. One startup wants to provide an index fund type of product that lets investors combine their holdings, manage risk and get returns from a bull market. Aggregated Coin (AGRE) and UpStart1K (UP1K) are ICOs that will launch on December 1st. The AGRE token is an investment vehicle for people who want to diversify their crypto holdi

ANALYSIS: In the month since 238 cities submitted a bid for Amazon’s HQ2, few details have emerged as to what various cities and states have tried to entice Amazon with (except for a 21-foot saguro cactus, of course).
MuckRock, a journalism nonprofit, is trying to track down all 238 bids through Freedom of Information Act Requests. According to MuckRock, more than 20 cities or states have made their Amazon bids publicly available. It’s worth noting, however, that this map only counts

Thanks to online shopping, Black Friday has become a much more peaceful time of year, as people no longer need to physically go to a store and charge into a swarm of angry shoppers who are ready to attack at the slightest provocation. But for anyone who misses that anxiety post-Thanksgiving, this video of a man wading into a massive wasps’ nest in Patterson, Louisiana should bring those feelings of panic right back to the front of your mind.
The video was shot by Louisiana beekeeper and pr

iPads don’t have cooling fans, which seems to make sense, given that iPads don’t really generate a lot of heat and fans are kind of bulky and loud. But there are others, like a company called X-naut, who view this as a serious design flaw.However, X-naut has also taken it upon itself to fix Apple’s failures with its Active Cooling Mount, an iPad case that attaches to the back of your tablet and adds not just one, but four cooling fans to help prevent your iPad from overheating.

It’s Black Friday, meaning that some brick-and-mortar stores have already been open since Thanksgiving evening, dealing with hordes of crowds and offering discounted merch. Apple, in the midst of all of this, is doing a one-day Black Friday sale, and a bunch of other places are offering slight discounts on Apple products.Rather than slashing prices on any of its goods, Apple is offering gift cards up to $150 with the purchase of select products. You can get a gift card of up to $100 when y

EXCLUSIVE: Artificial intelligence has been transformative in 2017. On VentureBeat podcast VB Engage, we’ve been talking every week about AI’s role in changing the face of marketing.
Missbeez, the sharing economy app for beauty therapists, today announced that it is now using AI and machine learning across its entire platform — powering a chatbot, smart routing, consumer pattern analysis, and behavioral graphs.
Missbeez was founded in 2015 and currently operates in Israel

For some satellite subscribers, a standoff between Dish and CBS over a carriage agreement meant no traditional NFL on Thanksgiving, an unforgivable slight to some. But both companies have now reached a multi-year deal after a blackout on CBS programming to two million subscribers for almost three days. The new deal covers networks including CBS, CBS Sports Network, Pop, and the Smithsonian channel. Dish says the channels are currently being restored to its customers.
“We are grateful to ou

If you are buying something for someone who grew up in the ’90s on your shopping list, then I’m sorry that you know a millennial. Please forgive us for killing every business. Maybe we’re just acting out because you didn’t get us what we wanted for the gift-giving holidays last year. Well, you don’t have to make that mistake again if you use our guide to win over your friends and family.
Nintendo Game Boy Color-Changing Pint Glass
Above: Makes me want to drink beer

Black Friday is usually more often thought of as a time to buy gadgets and TVs, but there are also great deals on books, the oldest gadget of them all.
Book sales tend to work a little differently than other deals — instead of specific stuff going on sale, you’re looking at category-wide discounts. Fortunately, if you need some ideas as to what books to get, we’ve got plenty of suggestions over in The Verge’s 2017 holiday gift guide.Amazon
Amazon has one of the best deals