Technology news

Balderton Capital announced today it has closed its sixth fund, which the London-based firm said it will use to expand its commitment to backing young European companies.
“It reflects the increasing opportunity we see in Europe,” said Bernard Liautaud, managing partner of Balderton. “There’s been a huge change in the past decade in the landscape. We have entrepreneurs who are much more ambitious.”
The announcement from Balderton comes as European venture funds conti

Walmart has announced its deals for tomorrow’s digital shopping day, Cyber Monday, which will begin at 12:01AM ET on Monday, November 27th. The sale includes some good ones for the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Playstation 4 Slim, which my colleague Nick pointed out haven’t really been on sale since they were released last year. While they were discounted for Black Friday, but they did sell out in some places, so this might be a good chance to pick one up if you missed out. It’s cu

I’m cursed to be someone who obsesses over the quality of gadgets I buy. If I’m buying a phone, there are a number of things to check off before I decide it’s a keeper. Is the screen what I expected? Are any of the buttons mushy? Do any of them make an annoying sound they shouldn’t?The Nintendo Switch costs less than half the price of my latest smartphone, but that doesn’t mean it gets a pass on this vigorous inspection. I bought my Switch at launch and ultimately r

We’ve all been there: fiddling with your smartphone because it’s there, or reaching for it when you hear a text message notification. Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger created the Substitute Phone as a way to help smartphone addicts cope in its absence.Schillinger tells Dezeen that more and more, phones are becoming an addicting object in our lives. Users constantly play with them, even if they’re not looking for a message or expecting a call, and he was inspired to design

Some of the brightest minds leading the Midwest blockchain movement gathered in Lincoln last week to make the case for the Midwest as a leader in the technology and to announce Block-a-thon coming April 2018.
“We’re all about planting seeds and joining forces with people that have a common vision, common ideas, and a common passion around blockchain and cryptocurrency,” said former Union Pacific head of application development Jeff Main.
The event, hosted at Fuse Cowo

Best Buy’s Cyber Monday deals are out, and they include a number of solid discounts on Apple products, gaming gear, and smart speakers.The standout deal here is the $50 discount on Sony’s 4K-capable PlayStation 4 Pro, a deal matched only by GameStop last week and the first real discount on the system since its release in the fall of 2016. To make it even sweeter, Best Buy is throwing in a free copy of Bungie’s Destiny 2, which will be optimized to take advantage of the PS4 Pro&

Since the release of the very first quirky life simulator The Sims in 2000, it’s been my go-to game for a night by myself. Everything about the game on suggests a quiet time for one. There’s no two-player option, and if you aren’t in the driver’s seat it can feel like peering over someone’s shoulder into their virtual life.
Most Sims games have been limited to players with gaming PCs, but the new console releases finally level the playing field. Thanks to the newly

It’s easy to think that Star Wars: Battlefront II is the sole result of Electronic Arts‘ work. That publisher taken the lead on developing and promoting the sci-fi shooter, which is available now on PC and consoles. But Lucasfilm is involved with everything.
“Yeah, that’s very much true,” Luasfilm brand boss Douglas Reilly told GamesBeat last week. “We have a games team here that I run, that meets with all of our partners, and particularly we spend a lot

Black Friday is now behind us, but the internet is gearing up for Cyber Monday, with a ton of online-only deals to take advantage of. Online retailer eBay has announced its deals for the event, and while sales prices will kick in at 5AM on Monday, others are already live. They include everything from computers and TVs to to tablets and drones.You can check out eBay’s Deals Hub for a bunch of other items on sale as well. Some appear to be sold out, but we’ll do our best to keep this p

A new smartphone obsession brought people together this holiday weekend. And no, we're not talking about the price of bitcoin or the trivia game HQ. 
SEE ALSO: Tamagotchis are coming to your smartphoneAnimal Crossing, a video game first released for Nintendo 64 back in 2001, came to smartphones last week. As advertised in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, players build their own campsites and make friends along the way. Players can add IRL people via personal codes and "befriend" virtual a

Now that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is on my smartphone, I can play it virtually anywhere. Pocket Camp, like its predecessors, is colorful, vibrant and full of things to unlock. I’ve always found the series calming and relaxing, it’s a nice mental break away from life where you can just immerse yourself in a world full of cutesy characters.
Pocket Camp generally follows the other Animal Crossing games, with a focus on making friends and collecting things, but this time it’s s

Bitcoin is getting closer and closer to $10,000. 
The cryptocurrency hit a record high of $9,033 per bitcoin early Sunday morning. The price rose steadily over the weekend and surpassed $9,000 at around 6:40 a.m. UTC (1:40 a.m. ET), according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index. It now has a market cap of more than $150 billion. 
SEE ALSO: Bitcoin's little brother Ethereum is at an all-time high
Another digital currency ethereum also hit an all-time high of $485.18 on Saturday but has si

For a brief, shining period last summer, Pokémon Go reigned supreme. It brought obsession, joy, and, according to a new paper, injuries and death.This working paper, appropriately and evocatively titled “Death by Pokemon Go,” shows the darker side of the massively popular augmented reality game. Purdue University economists Mara Faccio and John McConnell combed through accident reports from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, in the first 148 days after the game was released in July 2

"I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee."
Ah, Skyrim. In the pantheon of Gaming's Greatest Memes, "The cake is a lie" from Portal may have the edge. But anyone who was plugged into games back in 2011, when Bethesda Softworks released The Elder Scrolls V, surely remembers "arrow in the knee."
SEE ALSO: There's a new 'Skyrim' survival mode because fantasy warriors need food, too
Those two, short sentences seemed to forever be on the lips of every nameless guard acros

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It can be hard to pick out holiday gifts for picky friends and family members. You're pretty safe betting on some kind of tech, but there's so much to choose from: cameras, phones, speakers... you need to get a gift that no one else is going to think to get, and you need to do it without breaking the bank. So consider the TRNDlabs Spectre Drone.
SEE ALSO: The PowerUp FPV is a paper airplan

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You rely on colors to help you make decisions, whether you're designing a website or just painting your kitchen. The problem is that the average set of eyes isn't built to tell minute differences between colors. Thanks to technology, however, it doesn't matter. The Nix Mini Color Sensor can help take the guesswork out color-matching with its robot superpowers.
SEE ALSO: Under the bed motio

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The people we work with aren’t just in the next cubicle over anymore. Sometimes they’re not even in the same state or country. Which means collaboration is essential.
So what tools do the pros rely on? If you’re asking Dollar Shave Club, Squarespace, AirBnB, Nike, TED, Pixar, and others, the answer is Droplr. It’s a favorite in workplaces that rely on remote staff, and f

The final stretch is still ahead; after Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend comes Cyber Monday, a time of massive online-only deals. Tech giant Amazon may have gotten into brick-and-mortar stores with its acquisition of Whole Foods in August, but it’s still keeping its online presence strong. Amazon is also running its Smile program for these deals, so you can use smile.amazon.com to donate 0.5 percent of your purchases to a chosen charity, a small but still helpful amount that might mak

When Bait! from Resolution Games first launched on Gear VR it introduced several visually pleasing vistas at which players could cast their line for some recreational fishing. With a mixture of free-to-play design and some light microtransactions, it quickly soared on the platform and became one of the most-downloaded mobile VR experiences available.
Now today Bait! is coming to Facebook Spaces through a new iteration dubbed Bait! Arctic Open. This time around it’s exclusive to t

GUEST: It’s tempting to think that adoption of AI is limited by the technology itself. Headlines declaring the rise of robot doctors and approaching technological singularity, contrasted with humorous memes of robots falling over, make us alternately fear and doubt AI’s capabilities. In practice, however, decades-old AI technologies could unlock significant value, although many companies still have yet to adopt them. This is because adoption of AI is determined by both trust and risk

The VOID just announced a third location for its top-of-the-line Star Wars VR installation. London now joins Orlando and Anaheim offering Star Wars: Secrets Of The Empire.
The London location in the Shepherd’s Bush neighborhood at the Westfield shopping center opens starting December 16, the same day the attraction opens in Disney Springs outside Walt Disney World in Florida. The California location in Anaheim, right outside Disneyland, opens January 5.
Tickets to the London Star Wars attr

A religion based around artificial intelligence is in the news again, this time helmed by Anthony Levandowski, a former member of Google’s self-driving car team. His argument is that humans will eventually create AI that is more intelligent than we are, making it functionally god-like, so we might as well start planning for that eventuality.
His thinking about the rise of super intelligent machines runs parallel to that of Elon Musk, who has been trumpeting the risks of artificial superint

Australia's offshore detention centres have long been a secretive, carefully guarded operation.
For those who remain inside them, smartphones and social media have been the main way to tell stories of their plight, as governments remain reticent on who is responsible for them and journalists struggle to gain access to the sites.
SEE ALSO: How one tech initiative helps Syrian refugee kids learn new skills
The situation has come to a head lately with the closure of the Australian-run Manus Island