Technology news

GUEST: Treating AI like it’s a person has its benefits. When IBM named its AI “Watson,” the company hoped people would see it as warm and approachable, a “humble genius” even. According to Ann Rubin, vice president of branded content and global creative at IBM, in a conversation with Adweek, it worked.
It’s no surprise then that emerging AI platforms like Salesforce’s Einstein, Amazon’s Alexa, and my company’s Albert followed suit. Some compa

 Facebook says that one of its success stories in recent years involves a relatively small group of engineers. Originally it was just one engineer, Vastal Mehta, who serves as Facebook’s director of solutions engineering and now leads a team of more than 100 people that works with advertisers to build the technology and infrastructure needed to run more effective campaigns on Facebook. Read More

OPINION: For Apple-focused writers, no subject is as thankless as a “what should Apple do” article. Why should any mere journalist presume to offer guidance to a company that has weathered decades of second-guessing, only to emerge at the very top of the heap? Some of Apple’s more… devoted fans treat even light criticism of the company as heresy.
I believe that even wildly successful companies can get better, and that for all of its financial acumen, Apple could cle

GUEST: During the late ’90s, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and New York City investment bankers used phrases such as “monetizing eyeballs,” “stickiness,” and “B2C” to justify the ridiculous valuations of Internet companies. They claimed conventional methods were inapplicable in valuing the dot-com companies — which had no revenue — because we were entering an entirely new economy.
Believing these people, and afraid to miss out on the gol

A feud between two Call of Duty players, who argued after an online wagered match reportedly worth just $1.50, led to the death of a 28-year-old Kansas man, who was shot and killed by police after a fraudulent SWAT team call sent a small army of police officers to the man’s private home. The news was first reported by local newspaper The Wichita Eagle, which cites numerous now-deleted tweets in which Call of Duty players take responsibility for participating in or observing the intended p

If you want to get a sense of the extent of Apple’s cultural might, glance about 6,200 miles east of the company’s Cupertino headquarters to the capital city of Ukraine. Sometime in 2018, the Eastern European city of Kyiv will somewhat improbably become home to a new museum devoted to Apple products.
While the city that Americans refer to as “Kiev” is hardly a backwater — either culturally or economically — its connection to the world’s most valuable com

This is an excerpt from a long interview between an anonymous data scientist and Logic Magazine about AI, deep learning, FinTech, and the future, conducted in November 2016. LOGIC: One hears a lot about algorithmic finance and things like robo-advisers. And I’m wondering, is it over-hyped? DATA SCIENTIST: I would say that robo-advisers are not doing anything special. It’s AI only in the loosest sense of the word. They’re not really doing anything advanced — the

GUEST: Building a startup in Silicon Valley has its advantages: close proximity to investors, availability of talent, and an appetite for — and history of — innovation.
However, not every successful startup begins in Silicon Valley. It can be expensive to sustain company growth there, or the startup might solve a pain point that exists outside the Valley. Even more simply, you just might have been somewhere else when you started the business. For these and other reasons, there are an

OPINION: Countless tech startups break out in a given year. The majority fail. Of the ones that don’t, some are boring, some are copycats, and some are worth mentioning, but not necessarily highlighting. Just one startup stood out to me in 2017: Eve-Tech.
To be clear, Eve-Tech was founded back in December 2013 (see this timeline). But the Finnish startup only launched and started shipping its groundbreaking device, the Eve V, this year.
Eve V is described as the world’s first crowd-d

FEATURE: 2017 was a strange, though good, year for strategy games. After the sensational 2016, with five major releases and some fascinating indie games, this was always likely to be a consolidation year. So while we didn’t see too much new and exciting to blow strategy players away, we did get a bunch of improvements and enhancements to existing games in the form of sequels, expansions, and mods. Good? Sure, but perhaps not the explosion of amazement that gaming at large had in 2017.
So h

Dangerously cold temperatures are hitting the eastern US this week, prompting President Donald Trump to tweet: “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.” But scientists say that the record-low temperatures and record-high snowfalls aren’t proof that global warming is a hoax: they’re precisely the weather you’d expect in a warming world.There’s a lot of wrongness to

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for h

I’ve been pretty religious about playing Call of Duty multiplayer every year. But with Call of Duty: WWII, I managed to hit the highest level of 55 in the game yesterday. That is the earliest I’ve hit Prestige, as the top level is known, that I can remember.
That means I went through 55 levels in the 54 days. For a lot of Call of Duty gamers, that’s no big deal, as many were hitting Prestige just hours after the launch on November 3. I recognize there are far more talented

SpaceX started 2017 at one of its lowest points ever. The company hadn’t launched a single rocket since September 1st, 2016, when a Falcon 9 exploded on a Florida launch pad as it was being fueled. The mishap destroyed both the rocket and the satellite the vehicle was supposed to carry to space — prompting many to question the reliability of the company’s hardware. But in January, just four and a half months after the accident, SpaceX was ready to convince the world that it ha

2016 brought us amazing titles and new hardware like the PlayStation 4 Pro, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation VR, but 2017, somehow, was even better. Indie titles like Cuphead proved creativity is alive and well, while titles we expected to be good, like Destiny 2, somehow still managed to exceed expectations. Sprinkle in the most powerful console to date, the Xbox One X, and you’ll see why 2017 defied all expectations. It was difficult, but we somehow narrowed the list down to these games,

Drawfee is normally a zany art channel on YouTube, but earlier this month, it hosted a two-day game jam sponsored by the anime hosting site Crunchyroll. Developers such as Teddy Dief (Hyper Light Drifter), Jo Fu (Ghosts of Miami), and Ethan Redd (Blazing Legion: Ignition) participated in the event, and you can download all five PC games for free on its page today.
Drawfee spun off from the comedy websites CollegeHumor and Dorkly. It started initially as a fun way for staff illustrators to w

Amazon’s Alexa is leading the AI assistant pack. Echo devices are dominating smart speaker sales, and that was before Amazon brought the devices to more than 80 nations around the world. To defend its crown, Amazon moved fast this year to outpace competitors like Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Apple’s delayed HomePod is due out next year, while Samsung and Facebook are also reportedly planning to debut smart speakers.
It can be challenging to keep up with all the fea

FEATURE: I play far too much Hearthstone, Blizzard Entertainment‘s market-leading card game. I play it on the train. I play it in the rain. I play it on the bus. I play it when I’m feeling like a gloomy gus. I will play it anywhere!
But then I think about … those cards. The minions and spells that make me grumble under my breath on the train. That make me hit the “concede” button before we even get to Turn 2. And as I thought about these cards, those that turn my h

iFixit, the internet’s most popular repository of guides for repairing Apple devices, has announced that it’s cutting prices for all of its iPhone battery replacement kits down to $29 or less. They usually sell for between $39 to $49, depending on how recent your phone is.The news comes after Apple announced yesterday that it would be cutting the price of its own battery replacements to $29 for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later, starting in late January and running through December 2

The ritual has arrived again. It’s time for me to make wildly inaccurate predictions about the future of games. This is always embarrassing for me, but I’m hoping that one of these years it will sharpen my thinking.
I’ve written more than 15,000 stories for VentureBeat over nearly 10 years, mostly based on what other people think about the future of tech and games. But once a year, I try to absorb some of that thinking and go out on the limb with my own predictions. This year,

Employees at big tech companies tend to frequently switch jobs, a recent Business Insider article noted. People working for Uber stick around just over a year. Employees at Airbnb, Twitter, Snap, and Apple stay almost two years on average. To me, these results reconfirm that job hopping in tech is a thing. In some ways, it’s a bit of a relief to know that I’m not the only CEO struggling with the hyper-liquidity of the Silicon Valley job market — and the enormous cost

In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining traction and being applied in a variety of ways, is it really possible for AI to do intuitive things better than humans can, such as marketing messaging? Marketing messaging seems like something that takes human brain power to fully develop, understand, and formulate to optimize return, so could an AI-powered service offer better results? Several startups are aiming to do just that. They are utilizing AI to help optimize marketing message

2017 was a hard year for a lot of people. With climate change, haywire politics, and tech companies running amok, there are lots of reasons to put the year in the rearview mirror. But through it all, a run of great books shined a light in the darkness. They built off and commented on the issues that dominated the year, going beyond mere escapism to provide thoughtful, damning, and entertaining reads to keep us sane.Here are the best books of 2017. Image: Little, Brown & Co.The Power by Naom

Following Apple’s apology for its lack of communication over how it manages iPhones with older batteries, Samsung and LG have come out to say that none of their phones employ similar practices. Both companies emailed Phone Arena to say that they don’t slow down their phones’ processors as their batteries age. LG said, “Never have, never will! We care what our customers think.” Samsung said, “We do not reduce CPU performance through software updates over the l

I couldn’t quite get enough votes for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice as Game of the Year at GamesBeat. But my colleagues took pity on me and voted to give Hellblade’s Senua the award of best new game character of 2017.
This was obvious to me, but for those who haven’t played it yet, Ninja Theory’s self-published Hellblade is a hard game to play because it does such a good job of depicting a Celtic warrior’s descent into madness. Senua journeys (at least in her m

Apple is now offering the iMac Pro for in-store pickup at many of its locations in the US and other countries, as spotted by MacRumors. The high-end all-in-one went on sale earlier this month and initial orders began shipping last week. Now that those are out, Apple appears to have stocked many of its retail stores with the computer’s default configuration. I can’t imagine how many people want to walk into a store, drop $5,000 on an iMac, and walk out carrying it, but you now have t

SPONSORED: Presented by IntelYou might not recognize the name, but chances are good that a lot of the folks at Phaser Lock Interactive worked on a game you love — especially if you were a diehard Nintendo 64 fan.
The small group of coders and animators that founded the Austin-based company first met 20 years ago when they were colleagues at Iguana Entertainment, which was best known for games like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Turok 2, and South Park. That experience led to lifelong friendships

It was supposed to be Tesla's year for delivering big on Elon Musk’s ambitious vision: the mainstream electric car known as the Model 3. And at the beginning of 2017, things looked great from the outside. But instead of delivering, 2017 was a year where Tesla stalled on that promise, and in the end was forced to buy itself more time with the strength of its brand and the promises of its CEO.
Tesla entered the year with around half a million preorders for the Model 3, each worth $1,000. Mu

We saw a lot of wild stuff this year, from the future of electric cars, holograms, and our planet, to the future of... banana phones. As we take a (short) break before January’s Consumer Electronics Show, here’s a look back on Verge Video’s favorite projects of 2017. - Tom Connors
April 9th: The sound of movie monsters
This video all started with a heated convo at lunch between me, audio engineer Andru Marino, and science editor Ale Potenza: two Jurassic Park fanatics versus m

Back in 2010, Patrick and John Collison cofounded Stripe, which quickly gained a following thanks to how easily it let developers integrate a payment system with a few lines of code, something that financial tech giants like PayPal lacked at the time. More than seven years later, the Y Combinator alumnus has matured; its mission of helping developers process online payments has moved beyond transactions to tackle an even more important problem for entrepreneurs: setting up an online busines

It is a truth universally acknowledged that dogs are not just pets. They're a core part of the family. 
That's why this excellent father treated his daughter's dog like a grandchild when she was away over the holidays. 
SEE ALSO: You can now have matching PJs with your dog
Meghan Specksgoor tweeted screenshots of her dad's text updates about Chance the dog's wellbeing. And he was quite the model dogsitter. 
Dear everyone: this is how to absolutely crush it at dogsitting. 
In

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After a period of tremendous growth, the banking-oriented cryptocurrency Ripple has overtaken Ethereum and is currently the second largest coin in terms of market cap behind Bitcoin. 
Ripple's price rose 42.7 percent in the last 24 hours alone according to CoinMarketCap, with its market cap surging to $73.6 billon. 
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