Technology news

Google and Amazon aren’t getting any closer to ending their bitter feud. In fact, today the user-hostile fight between them is only getting worse. YouTube briefly appeared to have blocked the Silk web browser on Fire TV from displaying the TV-optimized interface normally shown on large screens. As a result, trying to navigate YouTube and watch videos became a usability nightmare on Amazon’s popular streaming products.
We confirmed the TV interface wasn’t working around 5:00PM

GUEST: After a recent seminar at Stanford, I had a chat with adjunct professor Jerry Kaplan about artificial intelligence embodiment. The question was: Who are the thinkers and companies who are really pushing AI theory? Some experts believe that for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence (AGI) to function peacefully and effectively in society, it needs a body. Thoughts vary on the level of embodiment, the mortality of that body, and the complexity of sensing abilities and em

There’s a new king of the microSD card: Integral Memory’s 512GB microSD card, which packs a record breaking full half-terabyte of storage into the diminutive card format. You definitely should try not to lose it.
Try not to lose it
The previous record holder — SanDisk’s now paltry 400GB card — is still a bit faster at 100MB/s, whereas Integral Memory’s new 512GB behemoth tops out at a maximum speed of 80MB/s. The new 512GB microSD card is also classified as a

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
The short virtual reality film BattleScar starts before you even put on the headset. In Sundance’s experimental New Frontier section, viewers enter a booth that’s been transformed into a teen girl’s bedroom, circa 1978. A mattress sits on the floor, littered with a leather jacket and high boots. One

GUEST:Last week, Amazon announced its 20 finalist candidate cities for HQ2 – sending some to cloud nine and others … well, back to Earth. Of those cities, four were in what we consider the Midwest – Chicago, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Indianapolis. In no surprise to us, all of these candidate cities were safely in the top 10 of our rankings of Best of the Midwest: Startup Cities – with Indianapolis coming in at 8th, Colum

Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant’s new cashier-less grocery store in downtown Seattle, opened today to a mix of general curiosity and incredulity. How can a store function without cashiers? How do you pay, and how does the business know who’s buying what?Amazon has done a sound job of explaining many of the particulars of its new concept store, one the company hopes brings more online customers into contact with its increasingly important offline presence. There are cameras and senso

Listen, I’ll be the first to admit it: it’s not easy getting older. Personally, there’s something inescapably frustrating about feeling myself slow down when I simply can’t afford to. But more than that, I’m irritated when I can sense myself thinking something is a good idea because it’s familiar. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always viewed ‘comfort’ and ‘growth’ as two points on opposite ends of a spectrum. And while th

Media mogul and longtime internet adversary Rupert Murdoch today released a statement calling on Facebook to begin paying trusted publishers. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The memo calls on Facebook to begin paying a carriage fee, much like the model used by cable companies for networks like CNN and ESPN. “Trusted” publishers would receive a take of overall revenue in exchange for increasing user trust on the platform. Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news

(Reuters) — Netflix Inc snagged 2 million more subscribers than Wall Street expected in the final three months of 2017, tripling profits at the online video service that is burning money on new programming to dominate internet television around the world.
The results drove Netflix to a market capitalization of more than $100 billion for the first time. Shares jumped 9 percent to over $248 in after-hours trading on Monday after rallying throughout the month and rising 53 percent last year.

Facebook launched a new product today: Flicks, a new unit of time. Yes, that’s right. A unit of time, like seconds or minutes or hours. After all, why limit asserting your corporate dominance to social connections, the consumption of the news cycle, and advertising on the internet, when you can define the very flow of time itself?According the the GitHub page documenting Flicks, a Flick is “the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond,” defined as 1/705,600,000 of

A comment about mattress stores on the Reddit thread “What conspiracy theory do you 100% buy into and why?” recently received over 41k upvotes and sparked hundreds of responses in a matter of hours. And then it was mysteriously deleted. It’s tinfoil hat time. The Redditor — whose name we’re omitting just in case they’re currently on the run — theorized that popular retailer Mattress Firm was engaged in a money laundering scheme. The reasoning? Where the

I love running custom games of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Even when I die during one of these matches, the fun isn’t over, because I can go into a spectator mode and watch the rest of the fight as a free-floating camera. The best part about this is that I can use the in-game proximity chat to speak with the remaining players. On Friday, I used this power to help build a team of survivors from beyond the grave.
On Friday nights, I get together with some viewers on Twitch.tv/jeffgr

Google started rolling out Android 8.1 Oreo in December 2017. One feature, however, was only turned on today: Wi-Fi connection speeds under the names of public networks.
Mobile devices already show Wi-Fi signal strength via an icon with four or five bars. The more bars, or the fuller the icon, the stronger the signal.
Google is now taking this a step further by adding connection speed ratings, which can change with signal strength, but also depend on the original source of internet speed, among

Google today announced plans to expand its investments in France, including its intention to create a new AI research team, its second such research initiative in two months after opening an AI center in China.
“Our new research team will work closely with the AI research community in France on issues like health, science, art and the environment. They will publish their research and open-source the code they produce, so that everyone can use these insights to solve their own problems, in

Suppose you’re looking for a single person, somewhere in the world. (We’ll call him Waldo.) You know who he is, nearly everything about him, but you don’t know where he’s hiding. How do you find him?
The scale is just too great for anything but a computerized scan. The first chance is facial recognition — scan his face against cameras at airports or photos on social media — although you’ll be counting on Waldo walking past a friendly camera and giving i

Microsoft's newest OneDrive for Business feature lets users restore files from any point in time over the past 30 days. Files Restore, as Microsoft calls it, lets users review changes made to files over those 30 days, including who made changes and at what time. They can then revert the file back to any prior state. The feature starts rolling out today to OneDrive for Business users, and will also work for recovering user-deleted files as long as they remain in the Recycle Bin.
You can get an i

Some of the cool, more subtle features of Android 8.1 are still rolling out weeks after the first significant update to Oreo was released. For instance, today Google announced that Oreo will now display the speed of nearby open Wi-Fi networks to help you decide whether they’re even worth the effort of connecting to. The Wi-Fi settings menu will now display one of four speed labels: Very Fast, Fast, OK, or Slow.
The difference between Very Fast and Fast, according to Google, is that you ca

In most alternate-universe fiction, the world is different from ours, and the audience knows why. AU stories are thought experiments, where a writer changes one piece of the world, then follows through the logical changes that result. What if the Nazis won World War II? What if the Confederacy won the Civil War? More frivolously, what if the crew of the Starship Enterprise were all bad guys? The fun of AU stories comes from the reasonable working-through of the scenario — the feeling that

Letgo, an upstart competitor to sites like Craigslist, is probably best known for a few cute commercials that have made the rounds over the past few years. While it may not have quite the same level of cultural relevance as Craigslist, the secondhand marketplace app is getting a big addition today with the option to let users sell or rent houses and apartments on the app, according to TechCrunch. (That’s a big jump from used bed frames and scooters.)As noted by TechCrunch, Letgo is one of

GUEST: Artificial intelligence assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant have been a major topic of discussion over the past few months. From the release of the Google Home smart speaker to huge sales of Amazon Echo devices over Christmas, there’s been a buzz in the air for months — and that buzz is still building in 2018.
Rumor has it Apple will release the HomePod smart speaker soon. This has prompted a flurry of speculation about how it’s too little, too late for

Last week, a Missouri State student accidentally swiped left on a girl named Claudia. One mass email (and presumably several confused Claudias) later, and the two have found each other again, if only to laugh together on Twitter. Like any good investigator, Hayden Moll took what little he knew about his missed connection — her name was Claudia and she attended Missouri State — and applied an effective method to find her. By which I mean he proceeded to email every Claudia in the col

Microsoft introduced its Windows Mixed Reality platform in October, with headsets from Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung. After only three months on the market, Amazon is offering some massive discounts on a range of Windows Mixed Reality headsets this week. Road to VR reports that the following headsets are discounted:
Acer Windows Mixed Reality Headset with Controllers - $218.99, discounted by 45 percent (usually $399)Lenovo Explorer with Controllers - $245.99, discounted by 39 percent (usu

Montana’s governor signed an executive order today that would force internet service providers with state contracts to abide by net neutrality rules, even while the FCC has repealed those rules nationally.Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, said in a tweet announcing the order that “Montana’s future depends on a free and open internet,” and noted that it was the first state in the country to attempt the plan, which would go into effect July 1st. The New York Times reports th

Blasting aerosols into the sky to reverse climate change seems like an exciting proposition, but it may be too dangerous to attempt: If we try and then suddenly halt this form of geoengineering, it could cause more damage than climate change itself, according to new research.Global warming is a pressing problem, and some scientists believe that sending a plane to spray sulfate aerosols into the sky will help cool down the Earth. In a study published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evo

Springbuk, an Indianapolis-based provider of health intelligence software, announced today that it has raised a $20 million series B round. The round was led by HealthQuest Capital and Echo Health Ventures. St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures and Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures also participated in this round.
According to Crunchbase’s data, Springbuk’s series B is the largest raised by an Indianapolis company since media startup The Odyssey raised a $25 million series B i

Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of publishing empire News Corporation, issued a statement today proposing a new licensing deal between media organizations and platform-owning tech companies. His goal: get entities like Facebook and Google to pay money to publishers, effectively in exchange for the value news outlets bring to those platforms.Citing the popularization of “scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable,&rdq

PRESS RELEASE:Kony Base Camp Provides a Comprehensive Resource for Developers to Access Kony Resources, Training, and Expertise to Deliver Apps FasterAUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 22, 2018– Kony, Inc., the leading enterprise mobility and digital applications company, today announced the launch of Kony Base Camp, a curated online community designed to empower both professional and citizen developers to gain the modern IT skills needed to accelerate the development and de

The U.K.-based charity SpecialEffect received $621,777 (£446,000) in donations from game companies during its annual One Special Day event in September. The charity focuses on making games more accessible to folks with disabilities. It runs other fundraisers throughout the year, and this one particular is structured so that developers and publishers can contribute 100 percent of their games’ sales on the day of the event. This year’s One Special Day will take place on September

As Congress scrambles to reach a budget deal, the federal government is still shut down. That means hundreds of thousands of federal employees will not be returning to work this week — including employees for the national agencies that deal with science, like the National Institutes of Health or the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since we don’t know how long the shutdown will last, it’s impossible to say how far-ranging its effects will be. But we can look to the agencies&rs

How excited are you for a pending awards ceremony that is still over a month away? Very?If so, you can watch the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards at 8:22AM ET tomorrow, January 23rd. The announcement will be live-streamed from the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, where it will be 5:22AM! Technical awards like cinematography, costume design, sound editing, and visual effects are announced first. The major award nominations — including the acting awards, best documentary, bes

If your city’s old parking garage needs upgrades, a 5G-focused mobile phone carrier could pay to improve it — and share the fees with the city, Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Hoettges suggested in a wide-ranging Bloomberg interview. Carriers’ evolution from selling data packages to offering larger solutions will kick off a “revolution” in 5G services, Hoettges said, ultimately benefiting consumers, cities, companies, and carriers alik

Thor: Ragnarok has quickly spread across torrent sites after customers were able to prematurely download the title an entire month before its planned mid-February digital release. The error is apparently the result of a miscommunication between Vudu and Apple.Both companies participate in the Movies Anywhere program, which lets consumers watch their digital movie libraries across devices and various apps such as iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, and others. It’s a fantastic

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief, breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Director Panos Cosmatos once said that his 2010 debut film Beyond the Black Rainbow was “a sort of imagining of an old film that doesn’t exist,” inspired by a childhood obsession with the box art of horror movies he wasn’t allowed to watch. His new follow-up Mandy, which Cosmatos describes as

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, is adding a new city to its roster of testing locations: Atlanta. Today, the company announced its intention to bring its fleet of autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans to the ATL, but wouldn’t disclose many additional details beyond that.
Waymo began mapping downtown Atlanta last week, a spokesperson said. An up-to-date, accurate 3D map is crucial for the operations of self-driving cars. They rely on data for the vehicle’s sen

Nokia has announced that it’s pulling the Pulse Wave Velocity (PWV) feature from its Body Cardio smart scale due to regulatory approval issues. The removal will come in a mandatory software update on January 24th, and Nokia isn’t offering any details as to when (or even if) the feature will be returning. For now, the company has suspended sales of the Body Cardio, although it plans to resume them sometime in the first few months of the year with the feature removed.The Body Cardio s

Epic is unlocking the power of the cloud for its Unreal Engine 4 game-development tools. The company has acquired Cloudgine, a startup that enables Unreal Engine 4 to run certain game computations in the cloud, for an undisclosed amount.
Cloudgine’s tech uses cloud servers to enable console, PC, and virtual reality games to render content and interactive objects without worrying about the platform. This is a concept that has shown up in a handful of games, like Titanfall and Forza Motorspo

Intel has a patching problem. All last week, users reported computers spontaneously rebooting after installing Intel’s Spectre/Meltdown patch. Now, Intel seems to be giving up on those patches entirely. In a post today, executive vice president Neil Shenoy announced that Intel had located the source of some of the recent reboot problems and is recommending users skip the patches entirely until a better version could be deployed.
“We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, syst

The self-driving taxis that were operated by Lyft and Aptiv in Las Vegas during CES are getting their tour of duty extended, according to Fortune. At the Detroit Auto Show, Aptiv CEO Glen De Vos said the fleet of semi-autonomous BMWs would continue picking up and dropping off passengers in and around the city, despite the fact that the annual electronics show ended on January 12th.Coming soon to another cityPerhaps more interestingly, the two companies are in talks to bring their self-driving c

PRESS RELEASE:Strategic investment positions AXA to accelerate its payer-to-partner strategyCHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 22, 2018– Maestro Health, a leading all-in employee health and benefits company, today announced it has taken a major step forward in its strategy to make health and benefits people-friendly again. Maestro Health will join forces with AXA Group and continue to empower people in the U.S. and abroad to live better lives. Together, they will take steps to tra

Google has announced that its enterprise-focused Hangouts Meet app is now officially supported on iPads and Android tablets.
The news comes almost a year after the internet giant revealed it was splitting the Hangouts platform into two core services: Hangouts Chat is all about bringing instant messaging to teams, while Hangouts Meet is focused on videoconferencing.
In the intervening months since launch, Google has iterated the Hangouts Meet product — it extended suppor

I’d love to place my hands on a soft, squishy Pikachu body for dozens of reasons, but today I’m thrilled to add a entry to my growing list: Pikachu has fallen, and it can’t get up. During a publicity appearance, this butterball spun around a little too fast and slammed its face into the ground. While wearing a business suit.
This real-life cartoon moment is brought to you by a Twitter user, who captured the whole thing on camera. Poor Pikachu.
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VB EVENT: Chris Heivly, the entrepreneur-in-residence at international startup accelerator Techstars, is one of the speakers at VentureBeat’s inaugural Blueprint conference, happening on March 5-7 in Reno, Nevada. At Blueprint, speakers including Heivly will discuss how tech companies can create higher paying jobs across America and expand economic opportunity for all.
As entrepreneur-in-residence, Heivly is working with Techstars — which now operates more than 36 accelerator program

For all the problems Uber is facing, at least one thing appears to be going fantastically right: its food delivery business.
During an appearance today at the DLD Conference in Munich, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he was confident that the company’s UberEats food delivery business was in a strong position to trounce rivals such as the U.K.’s Deliveroo and Germany’s Delivery Hero.
“UberEats is absolutely exploding,” he said. “I think we’ll be the large

Disney has released a new trailer for its adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. This new trailer focuses on Meg Murry (played by 12 Years a Slave’s Storm Reid), a young girl who’s having trouble at school after her father mysteriously vanishes.We’ve gotten glimpses of the gorgeous world in Ava DuVernay’s upcoming film in a pair of trailers, which laid the groundwork for the story: Meg’s father Alexander is a scientist who created the Tess

Ando, the delivery-only restaurant started by David Chang last year, has been acquired by Uber Eats, according to TechCrunch. The startup will cease delivery of its gooey cheesesteak sandwiches and crunchy chicken fingers in New York City (its only service location) as it begins to merge with the ride-hail giant’s food delivery service.“Starting Jan 22nd, 2018, we will no longer be serving customers in New York — online or via our Union Square location — as we will be im