Technology news

Apple’s board rewarded CEO Tim Cook with a sizable increase in compensation for the company’s fiscal year 2017, which saw the company return to growth after a rough 2016.
Cook’s total pay package was valued at $12,825,066 for the 12 months ending September 30, 2017, according to the company’s annual proxy statement that was filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s up from $8,747,719 in fiscal 2016, which saw Apple’s first

Twice a year, the crème de la crème of Silicon Valley flocks to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to listen to 100 or so startups deliver carefully curated pitches at the widely popular Y Combinator (YC) Demo Days.
To select the batches, the accelerator program reviews countless applications from various sectors and countries. According to YC partner Adora Cheung, these were some of the trends that stood out this year: artificial intelligence and machine learni

FEATURE: When it comes to the number of great games released, this has been one of the best years ever. I had the easiest time of my professional writing career coming up with 10 games worthy of my list (even if it took a bit more time figuring out which ones wouldn’t make the cut).
2017 saw some dormant and decaying franchises like Sonic and Metroid make triumphant returns. We got great original games like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Nier: Automata. And some of gaming’s oldest franchises

Snap is working on a new feature that will let users share stories outside the Snapchat app, according to a report from live streaming news network Cheddar. The feature, to be called “Stories Everywhere,” is designed to boost Snapchat’s presence beyond the core mobile app as competition with Facebook and Instagram heats up.Since going public in February, Snap has had to deal with stagnate user growth and declining revenue, and the company suffered an abysmal third quarter this

The world’s third-largest smartphone brand remains relatively unknown in the United States, but next year, that could start to change. According to The Information, Chinese smartphone giant Huawei hopes to make a big splash in the US in 2018 by debuting a flagship phone on AT&T. It would mark the first time that a US carrier has pushed a high-end, Huawei-branded smartphone.
Though high-end Huawei phones are already available in the US, it’s been through stores like Best Buy and A

GUEST: As we enter a new year, it’s important to take a look at emerging marketing technologies and understand how they might fit into your annual goals for content planning. Voice is certainly one of the technologies content strategists and site owners should keep an eye on for 2018, and Alexa skills offer a relatively natural entry point for brands focused on churning out useful consumer content.
We’ll likely see a flurry of brands hop on the Alexa skill bandwagon in 2018, but as w

Instagram’s new “recommended for you” section is now rolling out to all users, according to a report from TechCrunch, which notes that the company has also added a new section to its help site documenting the recommendation feature.Last week, Instagram confirmed to The Verge that it was testing the new feature, which displays posts that your friends have liked or that the company’s algorithm has selected to show you in your regular feed.An Instagram spokesperson commented

ANALYSIS: The two questions I get asked most frequently when I tell people that I report on tech startups across Middle America are: Which startups outside of Silicon Valley are getting the most traction? And which cities are home to the most interesting tech activity?
I find that it’s typically easier to answer the first question. There are certain metrics I can point to that make it easy for people ingrained in the startup community to understand what makes a company worth watching: They

REVIEW: Until I tried the Google Home Max, I had never met a smart speaker that brought a smile to my face just by turning up its volume. I was awash in the thumping bass from Zedd’s “Clarity,” and it felt like my apartment’s living room was in the middle of a nightclub. The massive speaker array that makes up much of the Max kept up admirably, providing plenty of volume without distorting the music.
Other voice assistant-enabled speakers like the Amazon Echo and the orig

Writing in games is strange. It’s bigger and more complicated than writing for a film, a novel, or a song. Games can convey a plot with characters, but they can also tell stories through their worlds or through the objects left inside of those spaces. For the Best Writing awards as part of our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event, we are lauding the game that does the best across all of those aspects.
The game with the Best Writing in 2017 is …
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Other

Researchers at Trend Micro have found that certain models of Sonos and Bose speakers have vulnerabilities that leave them open to hijacking, as reported by Wired. The accessible speakers are being exploited by hackers that are using them to play spooky sounds, Alexa commands, and... Rick Astley tracks.
Only a small percentage of speakers by the two companies are actually affected, including some of the Sonos Play:1, the Sonos One, and the Bose SoundTouch. All it takes is for the speaker to be co

iPhone owners aren't happy with Apple, and they're letting the company know with lawsuits. Five iPhone users filed a lawsuit in New York yesterday and are seeking class-action status over Apple intentionally slowing down their phones as the devices' batteries aged. USA Today first reported the lawsuit, which follows others filed over the past week.These iPhone owners claim that they all upgraded their devices to newer models once their phones slowed down after updating to new versions of iOS. Th

FEATURE: When I think about 2017, thoughts of playing my Nintendo Switch anywhere I want — in my bed, on my couch, in the car, on a train, on a plane — first come to mind. But my top 10 games of the year isn’t about a piece of hardware; it’s about the experiences that stuck with me overnight, over days. It’s about the games I wanted to keep playing, those that I stayed up late to play, and those I wanted to share with my children.
Thus, my list of games features not

Your PlayStation Plus subscription is giving you access to some big games in January. Here are the free titles coming Sony’s premium gaming service in January for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 (yup, it still gets some), and Vita (yup, it also still gets some).
PlayStation 4
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Above: Elias Chikane is Adam Jensens pilot, and Chikane hates augs.Image Credit: Square Enix
This first-person shooter/role-playing game came out last year, so it’s a relatively recent trip

At the beginning of 2017, I wrote about what I thought might be the year’s most important virtual reality technology: tracking cameras that would work from inside, not outside, a VR headset. And the results weren’t great. Almost every inside-out tracking system I tried was uncomfortable, most of them were barely functional, and none of them seemed anywhere near as good as more traditional high-end headsets. It seemed like VR would have to take a step back before it could move forward

This year’s video games have gifted us with an array of stunning moments, like punching Nazis or scaling Hyrule’s highest mountains or spinning frantically in battle, unsure whether to trust the voices in our heads. The GamesBeat team talked over a few of our favorite gaming memories, and though it was a difficult decision, we’ve picked just one as our Standout Gaming Moment of the year for our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event.
The Standout Gaming Moment of 2017 is…

Virtual reality developers have to be creative to survive the VR desert, where sales haven’t kept up with expectations. So Vander Caballero, founder of Minority Media and creator of the VR game Time Machine VR, has adopted a new strategy to get through the tough times.
Montreal-based Minority Media, which also created the groundbreaking PSN title Papo Y Yo in 2012, has created the four-player VR game Chaos Jump for virtual reality arcades. VR arcades are starting to thrive i

Microsoft started selling the LTE-equipped version of its Surface Pro at the beginning of the month, but the company only sold the LTE models to business customers, promising that consumers would be able to purchase them sometime in 2018.But if you really can’t wait, Microsoft has just opened up sales of the “Commercial Microsoft Surface Pro with LTE Advanced” to everyone over at the Microsoft Store, meaning that you’ll be able to pick one up now even if you’re not

Apple had a very good 2017 holiday season, once again holding the top place in smartphone and tablet activations, though it remained at 44 percent of total activations in both 2016 and 2017, according to Flurry Analytics. By comparison, rival Samsung gained 5 percentage points over the same time period, jumping from 21 percent to 26 percent, which Flurry attributes primarily to weakness in Samsung’s 2016 sales attributable to the Galaxy Note 7 recall.
Having once been name-dropped by

So many things happened in 2017 that it's hard to know where to get started when sizing up a wide-reaching tech behemoth's past year. So for Amazon, maybe it's best to start with a simple statement: it lowered prices on avocados.
Yes. In June, Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and reduced avocado pricesat its stores by $0.50 to $1.00, in a move that, generally speaking, pleased consumers. It also added more Alexa features and more and cheaper Echo devices in a series of moves that, gen

Garmin is still making lightweight activity trackers, ones that appeal more to the step-counting crowd than the mountain-climbing kind. The company just announced its new Vivofit 4 yesterday, which sounds pretty similar to the Vivofit 3.The Vivofit 4 has a coin cell battery, like prior models, which means it should last at least a year before you have to replace the battery. It syncs with smartphones over Bluetooth and pairs with a companion iOS / Android app, called Garmin Connect. It also auto

As we head into the final weeks of 2017, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago is engulfing the pop culture universe. But amid all the best-of lists and greatest-moments roundups, we tend to forget the other side of the coin — the “how did this get made, and why did we suffer through it?” memes, moments, and movies that made our jobs harder and our lives sadder. Here, we asked our staff: what in the cultural world made you question humanity in 2017?
Fake news
Is the

FEATURE: One of the great debates of 2017 is the “death of the single-player game,” a conversation that flared up when EA cancelled Visceral’s untitled Star Wars action-adventure and shut down the studio, seemingly because its executives didn’t see how it could make as much money as FIFA’s Ultimate Team. But the discussion that ensued quickly turned muddy, as single-player games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Mario Odyssey got rave reviews, and this in a y

Like many Apple users, I’ve carried a Siri device everywhere since 2011, so when Amazon introduced the original Echo speaker in November 2014, I couldn’t accept an AI assistant that was “anchored” to the $200 speaker’s single room. Why would I want to use Amazon’s Alexa only in my kitchen, for instance, when I could get similar assistance anywhere from the iPhone in my pocket?
As 2017 comes to a close, I still wouldn’t want a one-room-only AI assistant.

Christmas is over — so now what do you do with that massive Fraser fir that’s been decorating your living room? Well, you could mulch it, or just toss it in a lake. Seriously.
Around the US, many park districts and wildlife areas collect used or unsold Christmas trees to recycle as fish habitats. It works this way: at the end of the holidays, real Christmas trees, stripped of all their ornaments, are bundled up together and thrown in lakes to create reefs. These reefs give young fish

Over the course of the year, Snap went public, and 2017 became all about its ability to prove its worth after a pricey IPO. Unfortunately for Snap, things didn’t turn out as well as last year. Its stock tanked. Instagram stole all its best and most recognizable features. The company’s head of HR was outed as deeply problematic, and, by the end of the year, the company unveiled its redesign as a last ditch effort to scrounge up ad revenue.Let’s break down the year a bit more, pa

EXCLUSIVE: AI has been the buzzword of 2017, with the technology increasingly used to bring predictive analysis to marketing applications. And while it’s certainly valuable to know when to make that important business decision, AI’s predictive capabilities can also be used to help save lives.
Enter Clew Medical, which is launching its AI predictive analytics platform to help prevent life-threatening complications for patients.
In short, Clew uses real-time data and machine learn

While Apple almost completely dominates the smartwatch market, its looks increasingly likely that the emerging electronics category of smart speakers — where the company already lags far behind — is on a far faster path toward mainstream acceptance.
And that makes Apple’s failure to deliver its own HomePod smart speaker in time for the holidays, as promised, look like a huge missed opportunity. It’s hard to say that Apple bet on the wrong device category by deciding to fo

The iPhone X’s face-tracking capabilities range from supremely cute to oh, that might be useful. Now comes something truly terrifying. A Japanese app developer named Kazuya Noshiro has tweeted a preview of an app he’s working on that camouflages a user’s face with the background (first spotted by Design Taxi). The brief, ten-second video shows Noshiro moving his transparent face around to reveal the contents of his home through his head.The effect is like a creepy, see-through

While everyone else is giving awards to Zelda and PlayerUnknown’s Battegrounds, our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event has the guts to hand out silly accolades to the real winners of the year as part of our Non-Awards. For example, virtual reality can’t win game of the year, but here’s something it truly deserves.
The non-award for Best Tech That’s Too Much Dang Work goes to… Virtual Reality
Listen to us discuss this category in the audio version of the podc

During the darkest days of the Wii U, some armchair analysts wondered whether Nintendo should even continue to compete in the ultra-competitive hardware space — but nobody thinks that any more.
After less than a year on the market, the Switch has been an unqualified success, selling 10 million units, a pace that puts it on par with the Wii, Nintendo’s best-selling console to date. Along the way, Nintendo seems creatively revitalized. 2017 saw the release of two of the company’s

Switzerland-based Sirin Labs announced today that its initial coin offering has raised $157.8 million, the fourth-largest such offering in a year that has been defined by an explosion in blockchain-driven crowdfunding.
Sirin’s Finney lineup of devices includes a smartphone and personal computer that have blockchain technology baked in to provide what the company promises is greater security and protection against cybercrime and hacks. Indeed, Sirin’s mobile phone will come prelo

2017 has been a tough year for most people, and tech companies were not spared. Most companies found themselves grappling with moral, cultural, and political responsibilities, such as fighting the spread of fake news and advertisements and correcting toxic corporate cultures. Others found runaway success with a viral release of a much needed, innovative product. So, how did giants like Facebook, Google, Nintendo, Uber, Tesla, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, and more do compared to last year? Find out