Technology news

For the past 18 months, Kathy Winter has been vice president and general manager of autonomous driving at Intel. In car time, that seems like a long while, especially as self-driving cars were one of the biggest themes at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas last week.
I attended Brian Krzanich’s keynote speech at the opening of CES, and then I spoke with Winter the next day. Krzanich said that Intel is building a fleet of 100 autonomous cars to begin testing self-driving car sof

In 2014, Fox rebooted Carl Sagan’s classic documentary series, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host. Four years later, Fox and National Geographic have announced they will be bringing the series back for a second season, titled Possible Worlds.
The networks made the announcement today during the Television Critics Association winter press tour, and deGrasse Tyson and producer Seth McFarland confirmed the news on Twitter, saying that the season will a

Chelsea Manning, the former US Army private who was convicted of leaking documents to Wikileaks, has filed paperwork to run for the US Senate in 2018.According to the filing, Manning will run as a Democrat in Maryland. The Washington Post reports that Manning did not respond to a request for comment, but says that she will be challenging the state’s senior senator, Democrat Ben Cardin, who is up for reelection this year. In addition to Manning, Jerry Segal, Richard Vaughn, and Debbie Wils

French company Enhancia has been working on the concept for its MIDI ring for over a year, and it’s finally coming to Kickstarter in March. The tiny accessory, worn on the index finger of your right hand, allows a user to trigger musical effects like pitch bends or vibrato by making specific movements while playing a keyboard.
The ring, which is lightweight and made out of a soft plastic with a metal accent, communicates with a hub that is connected to your computer. The hub both charges

AMC has renewed its zombie horror show The Walking Dead for a ninth season, which will premiere later this year.While the show has seen its ratings decline in recent seasons, it has remained a powerful one for the network. With the renewal, the network is promoting showrunner Scott M. Gimple to chief content officer for the franchise, where he’ll oversee both The Walking Dead, and Fear the Walking Dead as well as other “potential brand extensions.” He will be replaced as showr

ARM executive Rene Haas is responsible for the shipment of billions of chips. As the executive vice president and president of IP Products Group at ARM, he interacts with the customers that license ARM’s product designs and use them in chips that are made in very large numbers.
Thanks to ARM’s domination of smartphones, the company and its customers have shipped 120 billion chips to date. But there’s a big opportunity in the expanding internet of things, or making everyday obje

GUEST: Drones are going to see significant new capabilities in 2018. The use of multiple high-functioning cameras as well as upgraded Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) will enhance navigational acumen far beyond that of today’s drone models. This, combined with ultra-fast charging and longer-lasting batteries, means the drones of 2018 will have far greater range and performance flexibility.
Expect to see more and more sectors incorporating drones into their operations this year as

Earlier today, Hawaiian residents got a disturbing alert on their phones and on television: a missile inbound island, and people should take shelter immediately. The notification was quickly confirmed to be false, and Hawaii outlets are reporting that it was sent in error.
The alert, which read “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” alarmed residents, who posted screenshots of the notification on Twitter, and prompted them to take

North Carolina is a good place for entrepreneurs of color to land — Durham is ranked a top city for black-owned businesses and plays host to the Black Wall Street Homecoming entrepreneurship conference, as well as Google for Entrepreneurs Exchange for Black Founders. Now a young organization called BLKTECH Interactive is catalyzing the Charlotte tech and startup community.
Started in 2016, BLKTECH Interactive is the Queen City’s first community initiative supporting te

As addiction rates for illicit drugs has skyrocketed in the United States, many turned to Google to try and find places where they can find help — only to run into new issues. An entire industry has emerged online to advertise addiction treatment centers through the search engine, sometimes using deceptive tactics. Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Google is putting its global rehab advertising efforts on hold.Last year, a Verge report examined some companies used Google to take advantage

After an onslaught of announcements about self-driving cars at CES, it’s almost hard to believe that even if you want to buy an autonomous vehicle, you can’t.It’s a strange era, as car companies try their hand at something new: selling an idea, rather than a product that doesn’t yet exist, and won’t for some time. But throughout 2017, automakers, suppliers, startups, and giant tech companies spent billions of dollars on R&D, followed by millions of dollars mark

Interaxon started out developing wearables like its Muse headband meditation tool, and it’s now applying its learnings to virtual reality. Its new Muse Virtual Reality aftermarket add-ons will attach to the HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR headsets to pick up users’ brainwaves and collect information about how they’re reacting to stimuli. The company is planning on sending out software development kits to developers in Q2 of this year and rolling it out to markets in Q4.
Like Inter

Is everyone in your life talking about I, Tonya, or just me? I saw it last weekend, and I thought there was too much focus on the bumbling idiots and not enough skating. Also, as many other people have mentioned, it felt like the writer was trying really hard to get laughs at moments that weren’t really that funny.
Lucky for me, no one tries to be funny in the trailers below, unless you think baby pandas rolling around in the grass is funny.
Check out seven trailers from the week.Hellrais

FEATURE: Old tabletop game properties are enjoying a renaissance right now. Designers are dragging franchises such as Magic: The Gathering, Talisman, and Ogre out of the ‘90s and doing something new, whether that’s a new implementation of an old game or a new way of experiencing these worlds. This resurgence of interest in legacy tabletop games is felt across multiple mediums, whether they be in the tabletop realm or branching out into video games, and it’s shown no signs of sl

There were some pretty wild prototypes at CES this year, like LG’s rollable TV and Razer’s smartphone / laptop combo. It’s the type of stuff that’s interesting to see, but you’re not supposed to have it in your home anytime in the near future. However, there are plenty of CES products that are available for preorder now, like the GoPro Fusion and the Ryze Tech Tello Quadcopter. We’ve rounded up a few products from the show that you can already buy.
Now let&rs

In December, a dispute following an online wagered Call of Duty match resulted in the death of a 28-year-old Kansas man after a faked call led a SWAT team to his house. Los Angeles police quickly arrested Tyler Barriss, the man responsible for making the call, and this week, he was charged with felony involuntary manslaughter and two additional counts.The Wichita Eagle reports that Barriss made his first appearance in a Kansas courtroom on Friday, where authorities charged him with involuntary

Amazon’s Alexa strategy is to be everywhere: ubiquitous, omnipresent, and all-knowing, like some AI god. In pursuit of that goal, the Seattle-based company certainly covered some ground at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The extension of the Home Skills API to control microwaves and ovens adds to the more than 800 skills and more than 1,000 devices that Alexa can control in the home today.
When it comes to cars, however, Alexa has made fewer inroads.
That’s

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A young man discovers that he’s destined for greater things in the galaxy, joins a mysterious, semi-religious order that act as the guardians of peace in said galaxy, and finds himself fighting an oppressive, genocidal regime bent on controlling the collective, galactic civilization. If that sounds like Star Wars, you’d be right, but it’s also the plot of comic book author Michael Moreci’s debut novel, Black Star Renegades.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced this week that his company had created Intel Studios, a place where Hollywood creators could go to learn how to create immersive media, ranging from virtual reality games to non-VR sports entertainment.
He showed a video of what it the next generation of entertainment could look like. In the video, a bunch of cameras recorded a Western movie scene from a variety of angles. Intel showed the scene would have looked boring from one angle. But put together from a b

Any webmaster worth their salt is constantly reading, watching, and learning more about SEO. Google usually rolls out quite a few big changes throughout each year and while some updates are larger than others, they are all very important to keep up with. Of course, merely responding to SEO trends and acting after changes have already taken effect is not the most effective way of doing things. Predicting how the face of SEO will look like in the coming months is equally or perhaps even more impo

While a lot of CES’s flashier showings revolved around cars, or massive televisions, or VR, or robots, equally revolutionary are less-conspicuous bits of tech that aim to make life easier for a subset of users. Case in point, the Freemie Liberty breast pump, which debuted this year. What is it? The Freemie Liberty pump, developed by Dao Health, is hands-free and is attached to a timer. Mothers can set the timer to pump, and it will stop when the timer runs out. This frees the mother up to