Technology news

GUEST: Sexual harassment has made plenty of headlines in recent months, but more often than not, bad behavior doesn’t happen in the spotlight. As Oprah said in her Golden Globes Lifetime Achievement speech, sexual harassment happens in factories and in fields everywhere, to people of all colors, classes, and creeds.
In the modern office, there is one type of harassment that HR teams could solve using the very same innovation that enables it. I’m speaking, of course, of the kind

 Altered Carbon, released today by Netflix, is adapted from a science fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan. It tells the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a one-time rebel who’s forced to take on the role of detective and track down a rich man’s murderer. In this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Original Content podcast, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington and Anthony Ha offer their… Read More

Despite Apple CEO Tim Cook’s atypically specific comments yesterday establishing the iPhone X as Apple’s best-selling iPhone model, a report from Business Korea doubles down on claims that Apple will discontinue the device this year. The report suggests that Apple’s component orders are falling at an unusual rate, in the process impacting many South Korean companies.
According to the report, Apple’s sole iPhone X screen supplier Samsung Display has told partner firms that

A Donkey Kong fansite has removed three high scores from arcade legend Billy Mitchell after an analysis revealed he likely misled the community about playing on real arcade hardware and that he instead submitted emulator gameplay. On Donkey Kong Forum, Mitchell previously held the No. 20 score with 1.062 million points, right behind his long-time rival Steve Wiebe’s 1.064 million. The professional gamer and hot-sauce magnate now has the No. 47 score with his 933,900 result he played in pub

Players of the widely popular trivia app HQ are displeased with the news that the app’s next round of funding may come from Founders Fund, a venture firm founded by billionaire and Peter Thiel. Recode reported the news yesterday; today, the hashtag #DeleteHQ has started trending as users are speaking out against plans to raise money with Thiel’s company.
Trivia app HQ has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity since its launch, including a milestone of 1 million players just last month

Something we don’t talk about enough is American football.Just kidding! Something we don’t talk about enough is that period of time between September 2016 and December 2017 when Dutch police were training eagles to hunt drones. They had to stop doing it because the eagles didn’t really always feel like hunting drones, and they definitely didn’t feel like following orders from cops. It never really seemed like a great idea, and falconer Robert Muster told the NL Times at

The 2018 Mercedes-Benz A-Class is a sign that the automaker — known for its large, luxurious, and expensive cars — is starting to send its most advanced technology into more attainable vehicles.While the A-Class hatch was revealed in its production form on Friday in Amsterdam, we got a ride in a mildly disguised version last month in Las Vegas when we saw the Mercedes-Benz User Experience, or MBUX, infotainment system that launches with this car. The company’s executives said

GUEST: You likely already have plans for what you’ll be doing in 2018.
Maybe you’ve already bought tickets for an epic trip or committed yourself to getting fit this year. Sounds like fun!
But maybe 2018 is also the year that you should start the business you’ve always dreamed of.
Whether you know exactly what kind of business you want to open, or if you just long to be your own boss someday, you should know that 2018 is a particularly good year for starting a busines

Animal ears may not get as much attention as cool eyes or weird noses, but the glorious cheetah owes its running prowess in part to its inner ear.The cheetah is, famously, the fastest land animal; it can run up to 65 miles per hour. During these sprints, its muscles are straining hard, but its head remains completely still so the cheetah doesn’t lose balance. New research, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests this is because the cheetah’s inner ear (the part i

REVIEW: For the last five years, the Logitech C920 has been the best affordable webcam for streamers and content creators. The problem is that if you wanted to upgrade, you would have a hard time finding a significantly better option without spending hundreds of dollars. You could get Elgato’s $130 Camlink and hook up a DSLR for a professional looking image even in low light. Or you could look into the world of dedicated hand-cameras that use the same kind of image processing as an iP

Voice assistants are all the rage right now — Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are popping up in every connected gadget you can think of, from thermostats to refrigerators to headphones. This week, HP announced that it plans to bring voice assistant compatibility to its line of printers. They will work with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana (cute that HP is throwing Microsoft a bone here).
The company says that you can use a voice assistant to ask the

Amazon’s Super Bowl ad will air this Sunday in millions of homes across the country. But no matter how many times Jeff Bezos bewilderedly mutters “Alexa’s lost her voice?,” no Alexa devices should turn on during the commercial, according to Bloomberg.
That’s because Amazon has taken steps to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally trigger existing Alexa devices when it’s advertising new ones, with the company commenting to Bloomberg that “We do alter

Mild spoilers ahead for The CW’s Black Lightning.
Black Lightning is one of broadcast television’s few black superhero shows. Based on the DC comics of the same name, Black Lightning follows Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams), a school principal and family man in his 40s, who’s conflicted between returning to the superhero life and ignoring crime on the streets.
But Black Lightning’s standout character is his eldest daughter, Anissa Pierce (Nafessa Williams). Anissa is a

Google’s latest Chrome update, version 64, is now making its way to Chromebooks with a number of much-needed, tablet-focused features. Those include a new split-screen feature for multitasking while in tablet mode, and a screenshot feature borrowed from Android, as noted by 9to5Google. While these are relatively standard upgrades, they do paint a picture of the future of Chrome OS as the rightful replacement for Android tablet software. As it stands now, Chrome OS is very close to taking

REVIEW: Fortune-499 brews up a delightful cross-genre adventure. It’s a role-playing game with deck-building in a world where magic and corporate espionage are inextricably intertwined.
The story centers on Cassandra — or Cassie — a young oracle who works in the magical resources department in an anonymous corporation. Monsters begin plaguing the company after an initial public offering (“Monsters love offerings from humans!” exclaims one of the many cheeky enemies)

ANALYSIS: The announcement that Civilization VI’s Rise and Fall expansion would include the leader Poundmaker of the Cree should have been cause for celebration. The Cree are worthy candidates: They’re the first geographically Canadian civ to be included, and Poundmaker himself is both a fascinating figure historically and a gorgeous, subtle in-game model. There was just one slight problem: The Cree, or at least, one of their spokespeople, found the idea offensive.
Such criticism fro

OPINION: Facebook banned Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies this week in an advertising announcement. The move was necessary (many ads on the social network really are peddling snake oil), but it was horribly executed.
The main issue is that the ban sends the wrong message. At worst, Facebook is suppressing potential innovation of future technology. At best, Facebook is being lazy and unwilling to properly police its own ads.
The announcement starts off innocently enough. Facebook simply wants t

I have a confession to make: Even though I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro while wearing an Apple Watch and listening to Apple Music through a pair of Beats X headphones, I haven’t preordered the HomePod. I had one in my shopping cart the first day it was available for purchase. I really did. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger and pay $350 for Apple’s new smart speaker.
The HomePod just doesn’t do enough to justify its price, especially for someone who already has

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

It’s been a few weeks since FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” order to reverse net neutrality passed at the commission, and in that time, various companies have put together protests and videos trying to illustrate the issue (including a rather clever ad from Burger King).
But video director Rob Bliss has taken things a step further. With the help of a few traffic cones and some very slow bicycling, he tried to create literal fast and slow lanes of tra

Following a series of increasingly concrete 5G rollout announcements from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, Sprint today committed to launching mobile 5G service nationally in the first half of 2019 — at somewhat higher prices. The commitment suggests that the fourth-place U.S. carrier may lag behind larger rivals AT&T and Verizon, which will begin 5G deployments later in 2018, but may beat T-Mobile, which is targeting 2020 for full nationwide 5G coverage.
Unlike Verizon, which thu

Sega announced today that Yakuza 6: The Song of Life’s release date will be pushed back a month. The PlayStation 4 game debuted in Japan and parts of Asia in December 2016, and was originally slated to be out in the West on March 20. Its new launch date is now April 17, though a demo will be available for players starting on February 27.An important update on Yakuza 6 : The Song of Life pic.twitter.com/8MILlBPI4x
— Yakuza Game (@yakuzagame) February 2, 2018Yakuza 6 is the seventh gam

SPONSORED: For a little over three years I’ve had the opportunity to run a studio called Chronosapien, which specializes in creating interactive content with emerging technology components. We work with a lot of different tech, but VR has captured us the most, so much so that we’ve started working on our own project for it, called Shapesong*.
Working on Shapesong has been unique from a number of perspectives. One of the most interesting aspects though has been learning how to maximiz

YouTube will start labeling videos it identifies as coming from state-funded broadcasters starting today. Under the changes, PBS, for example, would carry a label that states it’s a “publicly funded American broadcaster.” The move will affect a variety of sources and is designed to curb the spread of misinformation. The label will also link to the news publisher’s Wikipedia page. “We’re rolling out this feature to viewers in the US for now, and we don’t

Kaz Hirai plans to step down as Sony’s president and CEO on April 1, when company executive Kenichiro Yoshida will take over the top spot. Yoshida is Sony’s current executive deputy president and chief financial officer. Since Yoshida didn’t rise through the ranks in Sony’s game division as Hirai did, you could say that the reign of PlayStation is over at Sony. Hirai will remain chairman.
Hirai’s impending departure is one of a number of former PlayStation leaders t

Yesterday, GoPro released its final financial figures for the last quarter of 2017, giving us a wholesale look at how the company performed across the year, including how it finished during the holiday stretch. The results aren’t as bad as they were during the company’s awful 2016, but they’re not great either.GoPro had already guessed in November that it was in for an underwhelming fourth quarter, and that was two months before it canceled the Karma drone and laid off hundred

ANALYSIS: When Apple released the cellular-capable Apple Watch Series 3 in September, it didn’t realize that a tiny component — its next-generation embedded SIM card (eSIM) — would lead China to quickly and abruptly cut off Apple Watch phone service within its borders. This morning, the cellular Apple Watch belatedly became available to order in China’s Hong Kong territory and Singapore, spotlighting the surprising challenges eSIM faces as it becomes critical to

Facebook has reportedly removed a group that claimed to have sabotaged the score of The Last Jedi on Rotten Tomatoes, and also planned to review-bomb Disney’s upcoming film Black Panther, according to Marvel Studio News.
With Black Panther coming to theaters this month, a member of the group “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” created an event to leave low ratings and negative reviews for the film as well as Solo: A Star Wars Story. The group als

Once upon a time, a person who wanted to get across town had only a handful of options: car, bus, subway, or walking. Today, there are dozens of ways to get from point A to point B, and not all of them equal (or equally priced). The proliferation of “mobility” services, like ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and car-sharing, is giving many city residents anxiety about what were previously fairly simple travel decisions. Aiming to cut through this clutter, Google’s urban innovation s

PRESS RELEASE:New investment accelerates global expansion of IoT data solutions and brings AI-driven financial products to the connected equipment market in partnership with HSBMONTREAL–(BUSINESS WIRE)–February 2, 2018– Mnubo, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, today announced that it has raised $16.5 million in Series B financing, as part of an oversubscribed round, to accelerate the international growth of its SmartObje

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DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe have become increasingly popular over the past few years — some 26 million people have taken them — a

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DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe have become increasingly popular over the past few years — some 26 million people have taken them — and were a big gift item during the hol

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DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe have become increasingly popular over the past few years — some 26 million people have taken them — and were a big gift item during the holiday season. The possibilities are quite literally endless — from finding your birth mother after 47 years to discovering that

YouTube may soon have stronger punishments for creators who damage the platform’s reputation. CEO Susan Wojcicki outlined the company’s goals for 2018 in a blog post last night, the most notable of which is the promise of new policies intended to punish creators who do “something egregious that causes significant harm” to the community at large. “While these instances are rare, they can damage the reputation and revenue of your fellow creators, so we want to make s

The video game industry sought to celebrate one of its founders, Nolan Bushnell, with an award as a pioneer this week. But prominent gaming women, including congressional candidate Brianna Wu, objected because they felt it was inappropriate and tone-deaf to give such a man an award in a year with so many #MeToo and Time’s Up incidents coming to the fore in so many industries.
Using the hashtag #NotNolan, they pointed out his sexist behavior from the 1970s while running Atari. A day later,

Dell has confirmed rumors that it’s mulling a possible “business combination” with cloud computing subsidiary VMware.
Suggestions that the two companies could merge first started circulating on Monday, and further credence was given to the rumors through additional reports as the week wore on. Now Dell has stated in an SEC filing that it’s “evaluating potential business opportunities,” which include a direct public listing for Dell Technologies and a &ldq

In an effort to make its solar power products more visible to mainstream customers, Tesla will be setting up a designated retail space inside Home Depot stores across the US to promote and sell its solar panels and Powerwall batteries. The spaces will include 12-by-7-foot displays, and some shops will offer demonstrations of the products, Bloomberg reports.
Tesla will be building its retail spaces at 800 Home Depot locations (the home improvement chain has approximately 2,200 stores nationally)