Technology news

GUEST: In the U.S., the Southeast’s tech ecosystem is traditionally strong in a few defined sectors: Fintech, SaaS, and health IT are among the industries thriving in terms of successful exits, high-growth companies, and venture dollars.
But just as the broader tech scene is constantly changing, new industries will emerge and pick up steam in the region. Over the next year, driven by support from public and private entities, as well as innovation from new startups, these disruptive technol

GUEST: Sixty years after the first Ford Model T rolled off the production line, Congress passed a law requiring the installation of seat belts to address public safety concerns. Many auto manufacturer lobbyists claimed this would be the end of the U.S. car industry. But of course, it has saved millions of lives.
It looks like 2018 will be the software industry’s seat belt moment. The introduction of GDPR in Europe, rulings on the rights of contract workers on the gig-economy platform in bo

Last month, Facebook announced that it would create a tool for users to see if they follow pages and accounts that were linked to Russian-backed groups. That tool is now live, and you can see for yourself if any of the pages you liked were created by the Internet Research Agency.You can find the tool in Facebook’s Help Center, and it will show you a list of the various pages that you follow that are linked to the Kremlin-backed group, as well as when you liked and followed it. You can also

Hello! It’s your local friendly science editor, coming up on the end of the year. Typically, I like to think back on the stories that impressed me — and consider how I can learn from what set them apart to create excellent journalism in the following year.I asked my writers to name some of their favorite stories, and came up with a few of my own. Using this list of our favorites, I’ve created an arbitrary round-up of the stories that impressed us this year — our favorites

We’re approaching the end of 2017, which means I get to write my favorite article of the year: web design trends you can expect to see in the coming year.  Below are the top 11 web design trends that I anticipate we will be seeing much more of in 2018. 1. The end of pop-ups and interstitials Google tends to be the main driver behind web trends, and there’s no doubt that it will be the driving force behind sites wanting to drop their pop-ups and interstitials. Google recently an

GUEST: The other night, my nine-year-old daughter (who is, of course, the most tech-savvy person in the house), introduced me to a new Amazon Alexa skill.
“Alexa, start a conversation,” she said.
We were immediately drawn into an experience with new bot, or, as the technologists would say, “conversational user interface” (CUI).  It was, we were told, the recent winner in an Amazon AI competition from the University of Washington.
At first, the experience was fun, but

 Theranos has secured $100 million in debt financing. Yes, someone gave the blood testing company known for handing out questionable test results money.
First reported by Business Insider, the company reportedly told investors it had secured the money from Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based private equity firm that was acquired by Softbank earlier this year.
Of course, this is debt… Read More

In February, Netflix will begin streaming an ambitious adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s debut science fiction novel Altered Carbon. The novel is a cyberpunk mystery that delves into issues about wealth and power, and it’s the perfect source material for a prestige television series.Set in a future where people can trade bodies on a whim, Altered Carbon is the first of Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy (it’s followed by 2003’s Broken Angels and 2005’s Woken Furi

Virtual reality can never be too immersive, at least until we get to something like the Star Trek Holodeck. While VR’s visuals and sound make you feel like you’re wandering in a 3D space, the feeling disappears the second you touch something. That’s why Haptx is the latest company to try to tackle this problem — with haptic gloves that enable you to feel things that you touch in VR.
VR has been slow in taking off with consumers, and it just might take another generation o

One of the frustrating things about streaming movies is that you can never really be sure that you're getting the proper aspect ratio, not unless you go and look it up later. HBO is particularly bad about this, but I recently watched Gangs of New York on Amazon and discovered that it was streaming in 16:9 instead of the much wider 2.35:1 theatrical format it’s supposed to be in.
I was pretty frustrated by this, but it turns out, Gangs of New York is a very odd exception to the rule. Rather

Looking back over our coverage of Uber in 2017, the controversial subsidized taxi service based in San Francisco, it remains a wonder that this company survived what is arguably one of the worst years ever for a Silicon Valley startup. Stealing, lying, harassing, and bullying are just a few of the verbs that were associated with Uber’s year.
Along the way, we saw founder Travis Kalanick forced out and replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO. In between, we saw the most painful of CEO sea

It’s almost Christmas and if you’re behind on your shopping, you can still find some great holiday sales on headphones, smart speakers, and more. As we mentioned last week, Sennheiser’s holiday deals are running through December 31st, through which you can save $100 on various best-selling headphones. There’s also still time to save on a few Amazon devices, including the new Echo. Note that the Echo Show and Fire HD deals end tomorrow (Sunday, December 24th), so act fast

Last night, SpaceX pulled off its final mission of 2017, launching a Falcon 9 rocket out of California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base — and that flight created a spectacular sight in the night sky. The setting sun illuminated the rocket’s expelled gas just right, creating a beautiful white plume above the Earth. But as pretty as the show was, it also led to quite a bit of concern in nearby Los Angeles.
Vandenberg is around 150 miles away from LA, giving the city a front row view o

GUEST: I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 11 years before moving to London for three, but my wife and I grew up in the Midwest, which meant annual trips home for the holidays. Our nights were usually packed with family events or reconnecting with old friends, but our days were relatively free. In fact, getting out of my parents’ house would have done me some good (everyone has their breaking point). Grabbing coffee with a startup founder or local tech investor or just going downtown

Christmas is almost here, and for many people that means a time of festivity, food and family. And while we may love our families — both biological and chosen — some of us still have to face an unfortunate truth about going home for the holidays: they’re going to make us watch terrible TV. Whether they insist on flipping to The Real Housewives of Whatever City They’re in Now or have a DVR full of Blue Bloods they want to turn on, coming face to face with the questionable

We've done it, fam. We've finished season one of the podcast. Because it's also the season of giving, and because we love you all, today's episode is dedicated to you. In today's Holiday Spectacular — I told you it was coming — Kaitlyn and I listen to the audio clips you've sent us over the past few months. We also sit by the fireplace here in our podcast studio to look back at the season. We've learned so much, mainly how tech companies manipulate our minds :)Anyway, I know we're go

Earlier this year, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden met with Jacqueline Moudeina, the first female lawyer in Chad and a legendary human rights advocate who has worked tirelessly to bring former dictator Hissène Habré to justice. Habré was convicted of human rights abuses — ordering the killing of 40,000 people, sexual slavery, and rape —by a Senegalese jury in 2016.Snowden told Moudeina that he was working on an app that could turn a mobile device into a kind of

Hey, everybody!
When I talk with people about being an AI reporter, one of the topics that tends to come up is the issue of evaluating companies that claim to be working with AI in some capacity. It can be hard to evaluate how different companies compare, especially with new startups cropping up on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
To help with my own workload, I’ve developed a three-point test, which I apply to every company that lands in my inbox. To pass, companies need to have these three

Players will soon be able to admire World of Tanks’s historical detail in high definition. Developer Wargaming announced today that it’s rolling out an update for its hit multiplayer action game that will overhaul it visually with its new CORE graphics engine. The update is for the PC version, not the PS4 or Xbox One games, and will be available in March 2018.
Update 1.0 will improve World of Tanks’s graphics, adding more realism to the battlefields and additional environmental

In a surprising move today, Ubisoft has announced that Star Trek: Bridge Crew is no longer a VR-exclusive title. According to a Steam Community post the update is being delivered by way of a “broad compatibility patch” that “enables non-VR play as well as adding enhanced support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets.”
For a game that is so intimately tied to its hand-presence and motion control support, I can certainly say I’m surprised. When I revi

Our relationship with technology, and social media, in particular, is ripe with irony, impulse, and irrational behavior. We have a love/hate with Facebook and our smartphones, which seem to offer us a mixture of both freedom and servitude. The average American spends over 50 minutes a day on the world’s largest social network while touching their phone well north of a hundred times. As social animals, we long for the warmth of friendship and prospect of love that is a swipe or click away.

(Reuters) — Stocks that surged in recent weeks because of the cryptocurrency mania have managed to hold onto most of their gains despite the recent retreat in the price of bitcoin and scepticism from market participants.
A Reuters analysis of 17 stocks of companies that have made blockchain or cryptocurrency announcements showed an average gain of 224 percent through Thursday’s close from they released those statements.
For example, shares of Long Island Iced Tea Corp jumped nearly 3

As we near the dawn of the robot apocalypse, this is proof that you’re probably safe for at least a few more weeks. Colorado-based research scientists Janelle Shane recently trained her own neural network to write its own Christmas carols. Using a collection of about 240 carols ranging from “What Child is This?” to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” Shane turned the neural net loose with zero instruction. First, it attempted to find patterns in the songs, thus m

GUEST: While you were looking the other way, Toronto humbly produced some of the globe’s top artificial intelligence and deep learning experts, companies, and innovations. Now is the time for the city to stand up tall and loudly proclaim what local folks already know: Toronto is at the center of AI innovation and its real-world applications.
The city is home to world-class academic institutions like the University of Toronto and nearby to the University of Waterloo, both of which cons

GUEST: Many brands are evaluating augmented reality (AR) and the potential it holds for interacting with consumers in an immersive and impactful way. It’s easy to see why — AR experiences allow brands to integrate content into real environments to complement the world of the consumer in a myriad of ways. In fact, a recent report predicted that the global AR market would increase from $3.33 billion in 2015 to more than $133 billion in 2021.
The industry has made great strides in creat