Technology news

GUEST: This is a short warning to entrepreneurs. Founders often start a company based on their passion for something. That’s fine as long as they are also solving a problem or otherwise addressing the needs of a clearly defined target market.
The advice that is dispensed too often these days is to pursue your passion, do something you love. That’s all well and good as long as your passion intersects with a problem that customers will pay you to solve. But don’t start a business

GUEST: Traditionally, Latin America has turned to the United States for trade and financing opportunities from institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). However, under the Trump Administration, economic relationships between Latin America and the United States are more uncertain than ever. As a result, Latin American countries are strengthening ties with a new major trading partner: China.
Unlike many U.S. investors, Chinese investors are generally less a

A coloring book starring prehistoric tooth extractions, plague rats, and ancient colon contents could be just the right stress reliever for this holiday season. Coloring books are supposed to be soothing — but this one is also scientifically accurate.Called “Adventures in ArchaeologicalScience,” the 12-page book delves into what microbial archaeologist Christina Warinner calls the “archaeology of the invisible”. Warinner, the book’s editor, investigates how ti

About two months ago, Ajit Pai, a 42-year-old DJ in Goa, India, noticed a puzzling comment on his Instagram. It was abusive, but without any clear reason. The next day, more strange comments began to appear on his account. Some included the hashtag #netneutrality. Finally, it clicked. They were looking for Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai.
Pai first learned that he shared a name with the chairman six months ago, but it had never been a problem until that comment. Last week, as

Ubisoft created such a massive world for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the latest open-world game set in the world of ancient Egypt. And one of the people responsible for that massiveness was Raphael Lacoste, art director on the project.
He spoke at the 2017 Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS 17) about how Ubisoft undertook the massive task of making the art for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which took an extra year to make compared to earlier Assassin’s Creed games.

Dongles are, as a general rule, terrible. Using them is bad, losing them is bad, from a design perspective they look bad — even the word “dongle” just sounds bad.But for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying out Elecjet’s AnyWatt dongle — and it might just be good.What is it?
The AnyWatt was a Kickstarter from earlier this year, but it’s actually shipping now for anyone who missed the campaign. It’s a dongle, designed (like many dongles are) for use

Shoot-em-ups are a popular genre in video games. But Ubisoft wanted to make a “chop-em-up” melee game, and it had to think hard about how to create a new brand and a new kind of game with its launch of For Honor.
The responsibility for this task fell to the only marketing guy on the initial For Honor team. Luc Duchaine was the brand director of For Honor, the sword fighting game that debuted earlier this year. He gave a post-mortem talk at the 2017 Montreal Internation

GUEST: I’m a big believer in keeping things simple. Don’t make more work for yourself, especially if you’re a launching a startup. Growing a business, staffing it, and keeping ahead of the competition is more than enough for anyone to tackle.
So when I see a startup has organized as an LLC, a limited liability company, I know that the founders were probably thinking something like this: “The paperwork for an LLC is a single page, man. Let’s fill it out, file it in D

If you use your Tesla for your job, you won’t be able to use the company’s Supercharger stations anymore. The company recently released a new policy called Supercharger Fair Use, which prohibits commercial drivers from using the red-and-white charging ports.Tesla has been working to expand its network of charging stations, announcing in April that it hoped to have more than 10,000 Supercharger stations by the end of 2017. The expansion is needed to alleviate heavy traffic at the stat

Porgs. When fans spotted the diminutive creatures of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in the first behind-the-scenes reel, they were immediately divided. Some fell utterly in love with them, creating fan art, buttons, and shirts right off the bat, while others dismissed them as a cheap marketing gimmick for the inevitable batch of toys that would hit stores.The creatures’ next appearance in the film’s second trailer showed off one squawking alongside Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon, which

Night School Studio’s Oxenfree is an eerie ghost story wrapped in a coming-of-age tale about friendship, family, and loss. But its newest game, Afterparty, is more lighthearted. Its protagonists are Lola and Milo, two best buddies who find themselves in Hell. It’s slated for a PC release in 2019, with other platforms to be announced.
“After finishing Oxenfree, we wanted to build a world that accommodated characters from all walks of life,” said Night School cofounder

A couple of years ago, I read Cumulus, a self-published book by Eliot Peper. The novel follows three characters in a near-future San Francisco, which is divided into a super-wealthy tech elite and the downtrodden customers who use their services. It’s an engaging satire of Silicon Valley, and it put Peper on my radar.In May, Peper will publish his second book, called Bandwidth. It’s about a near-future Mexico City lawyer named Dag Calhoun, who begins to question the world he’s

Manami Matsumae is most closely associated with a tiny blue robot. The Tokyo-based composer is best known for her work on the Mega Man series, having crafted the sound of the Blue Bomber’s original outing, and later contributing tracks to games like Mega Man 10 and the ill-fated spiritual successor Mighty No. 9. Now, after a career that has spanned three decades and dozens of games, she’s finally releasing her first solo album called Three Movements. And while it may not be associate

Free VR improvisation software Mindshow is adding a major feature — sharing. So performances in Mindshow can be added to or remixed by others.
For those unfamiliar, Mindshow is an innovative app which unlocks your acting skills to animate a wide range of characters. Sharing was a feature on Mindshow’s roadmap for a long time and it was released to some testers early. The addition of sharing widely, however, turns the app into a social experience. You can essentially download the perf

GUEST: Much like consumers, marketers aren’t immune to chasing after must-have fads and trends. Chatbots — a shiny object du jour within the industry — make a strong case for this. Thus far, however, interest in chatbots has been driven more by vague notions of transforming customer service than by concrete opportunities for bots to drive business value.
However, those opportunities do exist. Setting aside use cases that focus on customer support, for a moment, there are s

Seattle-based Against Gravity released an enormous update to Rec Room that adds clubhouses you can customize and have friends visit even when you’re not online.
The update represents a huge step for the cross-platform app available for Rift, Vive, PlayStation VR and Windows-based VR headsets (through Steam). Now, visitors to Rec Room can express themselves more and drive additional creativity. Creators can also connect their rooms together using doors, so each room can become part of an in

GUEST: On Wednesday of this week, 50 companies led by clean transportation nonprofit CALSTART, including my company, Volta, signed a letter urging Congress to keep a tax credit that boosts U.S. job creation and EV leadership.
Yesterday, several sources revealed that the final version of the GOP tax bill will preserve a $7,500 electric vehicle (EV) tax credit that was once at risk of being removed, according to Reuters.
Keeping the incentive protects not only thousands of American jobs and sales