Technology news

My initial reaction to the #MeToo movement, the social media continuation of the sexual misconduct backlash that toppled prominent men like Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, was surprise. I wasn’t shocked to learn that sexual harassment and assault are so widespread — this has been my daily reality for as long as I can remember — I just didn’t realize that anyone besides the victimized actually cared. Very little in my observations of our culture, our criminal justice s

You probably haven’t heard of GAC, the Chinese automaker with big designs on the US market. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, GAC is seeking to up its profile in advance of its 2019 US launch with — what else? — an eye-catching, futuristic, mostly irrational electric car concept.The Enverge certainly attracted a lot of attention here in Detroit with its gull-wing doors, “floating” digital dash-screen, and alleged range of 370 miles on a sing

Emoji have become a language of their own, but until recently, the language made it hard to talk about climate change: There are no emoji about pollution, wildfires, or rising sea levels. So artists Marina Zurkow and Viniyata Pany launched a set of mobile stickers specifically about climate change, called Climoji.The icons depict melting sea ice, starving polar bears, dead trees, and flooded people. They’re intended to raise awareness about some of the most important issues of our time: g

Apple and Tencent have reached an agreement to allow tip-style gifts to again be sent through WeChat, a messaging application that boasts nearly 1 billion users. While the specific date for reintroduction of tipping was not given, the “feature with Chinese characteristics” has been the subject of discussions between the companies for months.
Tencent previously allowed WeChat users on iOS to send gifts to WeChat public account holders, a Chinese way of rewarding st

More senior development leads are leaving behind big publishers and triple-A blockbuster gaming to start something smaller and independent, and Wushu Studios is the latest example of this trend. Former Evolution Studios designers and directors, who worked on DriveClub and more, announced today that they have come together to start Wushu in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, with the goal of producing new kinds of gaming experiences. The company formed in August, and it has already worked on the

GUEST: We’re only as good as the moment, that fragile moment when we please or hopefully don’t disappoint the customer.— Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks
That quote comes from an interview with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz back in 2011. Retail has always been an industry where service quality informs success, where “the customer is always right.” But in the seven years since that interview, consumers have raised the stakes higher and have created considerably mor

Luxury watchmaker Ressence has a new prototype watch it’s showing off at the SIHH 2018 watch show (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, in case you were curious) called the Type 2 e-Crown Concept, as reported by Hodinkee. While it’s not quite a retail product just yet, it looks like the company may have figured out how to bring the disparate worlds of mechanical watches and smartwatches together.Ever since smartwatches first became popular, traditional watchmakers have strugg

On first mention, the 2019 Volkswagen Jetta may not sound like it’s worthy of making much of a splash. Yet Volkswagen used the 2018 Detroit Auto Show to launch a new version of the Jetta, its bread-and-butter sedan in the US. While the company promises a whole new range of EVs (some of which are retro-inspired), its compact sedan is still in charge of keeping the lights on for the automaker’s US arm.Still, it’s tough to get too emotional over the exterior. While the 2019 Jetta

BlackBerry announced a new service called Jarvis today that’s aimed at helping automakers test the code they’re loading into cars for security flaws.
Jarvis uses a technique known as static analysis to seek out bugs in the pre-built application binaries users feed it. That should provide automakers with the information needed to find those bugs before they can be exploited by an attacker who might put a car or its passengers at risk.
Providing automakers with security tools is key as

In December, Saudi Arabia lifted a 35-year ban on commercial theaters, and this past weekend the first movie screenings were opened to the public. One of the screenings was a double-feature of The Emoji Movie and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie in the city of Jeddah, Reuters reports.
These animated children’s movies might not be the most critically acclaimed films of 2017 — in fact, The Emoji Movie was actively terrible — but the screening is still a significant move

GUEST: Telling your startup’s story is important everywhere, but it’s especially important if your startup is located outside of a coastal hub. With fewer resources available, especially capital, you need to break out of the pack and get noticed. Here are a few ways you can make your startup more compelling to investors, future employees, users, customers, and just about everyone else. VentureBeat’s Heartland Tech channel invites you to join us and other senior business le

AI developed by Microsoft and Alibaba, independently, last week became the first to beat humans at reading comprehension. The reported implications of this technological advancement seem to indicate machines with the ability to read better than humans have arrived or will very soon. This probably isn’t the case, however. What this definitely means is chatbots are getting a little better at their jobs, update-by-update, thanks to cutting-edge research in deep learning networks. And two gia

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating the inspirational leader who died fighting to bring racial equality to the United States. Since 2015, Apple has commemorated this holiday by replacing its homepage with an MLK photo and quote or reflection. This year’s quote — “the time is always right to do what is right” — is especially noteworthy, as Apple CEO Tim Cook evoked the same phrase in November 2013 when discussing Apple’s so

Blizzard revealed today that World of Warcraft’s 7.3.5 patch is coming out tomorrow. The update notably adds level-scaling to older zones. Blizzard introduced level-scaling in the latest expansion, Legion.  It lets players tackle zones in any order, with monsters and rewards scaling appropriately.
The feature was only available in the Legion zones, but the patch will bring level-scaling to all previous continents, including Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland, Northrend, Pandaria, and

Ever look down at your $1,600 Tag Heuer smartwatch and think, “Gosh, this really could use $195,400 of diamonds on it?” Apparently someone at Tag Heuer did, because at this year’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie Genève watch show (also known as SIHH 2018), the company announced the Tag Heuer Connected Full Diamond, a name that is as unsubtle as the 589 diamonds that stud the entire watch, spotted by Droid Life.Despite the flashy adornment, the Tag Heuer Conne

Team Dignitas announced today that it has signed a Super Smash Bros. Melee team, the first in its 14-year history.
Team Dignitas is one of the most recognizable names in esports and was acquired by the Philadelphia 76ers in 2016. It owns teams for popular competitive games, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (men’s and women’s teams), Heroes of the Storm, Smite, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The Melee team includes players Hugo “HugS” Gonzalez from

If you’re interested in the recent update to Google’s Arts and Culture app, which uses machine learning to match your selfie to a lookalike in an extensive library of classic art, you’d better hope you’re in the right place. Though the update is several weeks old by this point, it finally seeped into public view by way of several tweets from celebrities who showed their artistic doppelgangers. This google arts and culture app is pretty amazing. Feel real strong about my

These days, it’s almost impossible to talk about any kind of science-fiction TV anthology without comparing it to Charlie Brooker’s future-fears series Black Mirror. It’s the question most SF fans and telephiles will immediately ask. The new Amazon Prime Video anthology Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams does have some comparison points to Brooker’s series, and it’s unlikely that either Amazon or its UK television partner, Channel 4, mind having their fledgling

Indiegogo made its name as a crowdfunding site where startups could get cash for their big dreams. But the San Francisco company is moving beyond that idea to helping startups with design for manufacturing and hardware distribution.
In ten years, Indiegogo has raised $1.3 billion for 800,000 entrepreneurs. That has given the company a lot of insights. Indiegogo CEO David Mandelbrot said the company started taking advantage of its relationships with hardware distributors and designers a couple of

Infiniti’s Q Inspiration midsize luxury sedan concept has all the design accents that scream “the future,” but the engine under the hood is rooted in the past.Nissan’s luxury vehicle division revealed the Q Inspiration Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The car is a stunner, with a Tesla-esque windshield-sunroof hybrid, short hood, and swooped, coupe-like roof line. And even with an onboard computer brimming with all of Nissan’s advanc

The new 2019 Ram 1500 has many things you’d expect from a truck: vast towing capacity, a bountiful maximum payload, and loads of horsepower. But it also has something you might not expect: a massive 12-inch touchscreen display embedded in the dashboard that supports both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The display is just shy of the 17-inch behemoth found in the Tesla Model S or X, but after spending a few minutes with it on the show floor here in Detroit, it feels just as vibrant and sha

Fledgling cryptocurrency startup TRON got its first big break three weeks ago, when anti-virus pioneer John McAfee shilled its TRX coin to his 500,000-plus followers. Days after that, the McAfee effect was on full display and TRON’s value had skyrocketed from a measly 4¢ to almost 29¢. But it seems this astonishing bull run is gradually coming to a halt – and not without reason. Tron is a long term Hodl. Those who are flipping it are losing out. — John

Sega‘s Twitter is having a little bit of fun. On January 12, the account tweeted out a simple picture of a light bulb with the date January 16 on it. Today, a new tweet features the same light buld, the text “two-morrow,” and the logo for Two Point.pic.twitter.com/AWSOJ5W6XC
— SEGA (@SEGA) January 15, 2018Two Point is an England-based studio founded by ex-Lionhead employees, notably Mark Webley and Gary Carr. Those two worked together on series like Theme Hospit

If we feel the technology we rely on is changing us, can we trust that change? After all, the revolution of today is the mundane of tomorrow. Our successors will find the moral panics around smartphones as quaint as we now think of 20th-century moral panics over television. That isn’t to deny that technology changes us — just that humanity is endlessly adaptable, and we can find ourselves within a new normal with startling rapidity. We will always be living part-biological, part-tec

Naughty America was the only porn company allowed into the show floor at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. For the second year in a row, the company demonstrated its virtual reality porn experiences. I met with Ian Paul, chief technology officer at Naughty America, to talk about how porn continues to lead technologies such as blockchain.
The company’s booth showed off a new alternative point-of-view VR view where you see the, uh, action from the female’s point

Toyota’s new 2019 Avalon was just announced at the 2018 North American International Auto Show, and the new model includes a long-awaited and welcome addition: Apple’s CarPlay platform, a first for a Toyota car, according to AppleInsider.Toyota has famously abstained from adopting either CarPlay or Android Auto in its cars. Back in 2015, John Hanson, the national manager of Toyota’s advanced technology communications, commented to The New York Times that the company “pre

…. 1,000 attendees…. 8 keynotes… 45 round-table sessions… 61 million Twitter impressions… 22 very helpful volunteers… 1,500 mentions of @TNWNYC…. 1 Startup NYC Founders Cafe by Google Cloud… 1,000 coffee cups for the Startup NYC Founders Cafe… 5,000 unique users watching our Instagram story… 1 trending hashtag, #TNWNY These 10 numbers briefly summarize TNW New York, where 1,000 decision-makers came together to explore the dig

“It’s the world’s thinnest notebook,” said Steve Jobs as he introduced the MacBook Air 10 years ago today. Apple’s Macworld 2008 was a special one, taking place just days after the annual Consumer Electronics Show had ended and Bill Gates bid farewell to Microsoft. Jobs introduced the MacBook Air by removing it from a tiny paper office envelope, and the crowd was audibly shocked at just how small and thin it was. We’d never seen a laptop quite like it, and it

The holiday season and well-intended New Year’s resolutions are already just a distant memory. But digital storytellers are still digesting the news that Storify will be shutting down its services in a few months time. Creatives and journalists who carefully curated their content to showcase their portfolio must now face up the fact their work is now marked for deletion on the Storify platform. Thank you to everyone who has contributed stories to our Storify community. Unfortunately,

SPONSORED: Presented by LogMeInWe are amid a customer experience revolution. Gartner predicts that by 2022, approximately 65 percent of all customer service interactions will be digital or text-based versus phone. With today’s customers being much more demanding and much less brand-loyal than they once were, companies across industries are beginning to recognize CX as a key competitive differentiator and are making sweeping changes to keep up.
The art of good customer service existed

The Overwatch League had its opening day on January 10, hosting the new esports endeavor’s first three matches. At its peak, the Twitch stream topped out at 425,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, according to Blizzard.
But the Overwatch’s League debut wasn’t the largest event in esports history. Dota 2’s International 2017 tournament peaked at 5 million concurrent viewers, for example. But the Overwatch League is a newer endeavor. Dota 2 has had years to build its esports

The Nissan Xmotion may look like an SUV on the surface, but to take step inside is to enter a dense forest of technology. The concept car, revealed today at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, has a total of seven digital touchscreens inside, making it one of the more aggressive attempts by an automaker in recent memory to sweep aside the manual controls of the past and fully embrace a pixelated future.Is it overkill? Sure. We’re already hearing complaints about the Tes

Actor Aziz Ansari has responded to allegations of sexual misconduct published this weekend on the website Babe.
In the report, a 23-year-old woman recounts a 2017 date with Ansari that she says turned sour when they went back to his apartment after dinner. She says Ansari was persistent in trying to undress her and initiate sex, even after she told him she was uncomfortable. The Babe report includes a text screenshot from the following day in which the woman tells Ansari, “It’s like

Sheng Fu founded Cheetah Mobile in 2010, and it found a business making security apps such as Security Master for smartphones. Now it is a publicly traded company valued at $2.2 billion, with revenues of $707 million in 2016. It is targeted almost $800 million for 2017 revenues, after expanding into a variety of other areas, including utilities such as Clean Master for both smartphones and the PC.
I met with Fu when the company opened its Silicon Valley office in 2016, and we met once again at C

PRESS RELEASE:Georgian Partners leads growth financing as True Fit’s Genome® Platform and data collective become the intelligent data layer for personalizing the world’s largest consumer verticalBOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 15, 2018– True Fit, the retail industry’s data-driven personalization platform for apparel and footwear today announced a new $55 million Series C investment, led by Georgian Partners with participation from existing investors Jump Ca

Ford Motor Company said Sunday that it would more than double its investment in the production of electric vehicles, promising to spend $11 billion on the technology by 2022. The auto giant will roll out 16 fully electric cars within five years, the first of which would arrive in 2020.
It was a dramatic escalation in Ford’s crosstown rivalry with General Motors, which has seen its stock prices rise thanks to its commitments to both electrification and autonomy. GM has said it plans to rol

Tag Heuer’s latest Android Wear smartwatch, the $1,200 Connected Modular 41, is Swiss-made and a nice choice if you’re looking for something with a bit more weight and quality than most wearables. The Connected Modular 41 is water resistant up to 50 meters, and features GPS, an NFC sensor for contactless payment (Android Pay), and customizable TAG Heuer dials.It’s designed for smaller wrists with a watchface diameter of 41mm, and it features a AMOLED 390 x 390 screen with impr

Every January, the auto industry gathers in Detroit for the (terribly named) North American International Auto Show. It falls just after CES and reminds us that, for all the futuristic tech we saw in Las Vegas, car companies are mostly concerned about selling cars today. This year is no different. We have a handful of concepts that could become cars in a matter of years, not decades, but the bulk of the show is new SUVs, crossovers, and sedans that you’ll be able to buy within a few month

If you listen closely to most optimistic discussions about the future of retail, you’ll sense an underlying fear. It’s a fear that manifests in an over-reliance on futuristic technological advancements (Oh look, holograms are coming!) or on filling the room with exciting new statistics about the continued dominance of ecommerce — such as how online sales will continue to shatter records in 2018. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is standing center stage and wagging its trunk

PREVIEW: The lootbox monetization model is coming under attack. The biggest beefs are coming from players disgruntled about in-game items in Star Wars: Battlefront II. But when it comes to games, this model goes all the way back to Magic: The Gathering (and if we go further in time, we’re looking at good ol’ baseball cards).
Fantasy Flight Interactive’s first game ditches random packs for sets and expansions of specific cards in The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game, which is