Technology news

 After raising $4.4 million last March, Virtualitics has closed a $7 million Series B round led by Centricus with participation from The VR Fund. The startup is building a sort of “Excel for VR,” that lets people see data in a more immersive and collaborative way. “[B]usiness intelligence platforms need to be 3D and collaborative by design in order to help companies gain a… Read More

Major spoilers ahead for Black Panther.
Cultural critics have had a lot to say about how Black Panther’s Erik Killmonger is a sympathetic villain, and how black viewers can identify with his point of view. He’s a casual murderer with a lengthy kill list literally carved into his own body, but Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) isn’t just fighting for personal reasons. He’s avenging his father and his lost childhood, but he identifies with other black people who’ve grow

The Academy Awards may be happening this weekend, but after the best of 2017 is all sorted out, there will be time to watch other movies and TV shows — and streaming services are there with plenty of programming options this March. Netflix is continuing to lean into its original television shows, with the second season of Jessica Jones arriving on March 8th, the latest episode of David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction debuting on March 9th, and the new series On My Bl

YouTube indicated that as the platform ramps up human-powered moderation efforts, new moderators may have mistakenly removed or flagged right-wing videos and channels. Bloomberg reported the news this afternoon, quoting a YouTube spokesperson saying that “as we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals.” The spokesperson said that YouTube’s policies had not chang

It’s 2018, how should you make an app? Here’s the short answer: nobody knows. But maybe that’s a good thing.
Yesterday, Google announced the official beta release of its Flutter app development framework (as seen on 9to5Google). It’s one way to make an app, and it’s especially well-suited to fancy user interfaces.
”But wait,” you ask, “didn’t Google just announce Kotlin support for Android development? Why would Google want me to learn Flutt

The last time director Alex Garland and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst worked together, they created Alicia Vikander’s Ava, the robot star of Ex Machina. For their follow-up collaboration, Annihilation, they had a much bigger set of challenges. Garland’s newest film is a heady mind-trip that explores humanity’s self-destructive impulses, but it’s also a walking tour of the gorgeous and the grotesque. The story of Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist who joins

We’ve heard rumors that LG won’t call its next G-series phone the G7, and that the company scrapped its internal plans for the phone to start fresh. But today, Israeli publication Ynet published a video of a device that’s clearly marked as the G7 with the codename Neo. It’s unclear whether this is actually the device LG will be releasing or if it’s just to show some work the company’s done on one of its next phones.Ynet reports this phone has a notch, of cour

Logitech has announced some updates to its Craft keyboard, expanding what users can do with the customizable creative input dial, along with releasing an open SDK that will allow app developers to build their own integrations for the Craft keyboard.
The biggest addition is support for Adobe Lightroom Classic CC, allowing users to access 11 different editing tools (including saturation, tint contrast, and shadows) through the dial. Like the other integrations on the Craft, tapping the dial allow

Machine learning and AI are some of the biggest topics in the tech world right now, and Google is looking to make those fields more accessible to more people with its new Learn with Google AI website.
Google has been pursuing AI education for a while, both with advanced projects like TensorFlow and more playful projects like cat doodles and a machine vision experiment meant to showcase AI projects in more practical ways.Google envisions the Learn with Google AI site serving as a repository for

Electric bikes are a dime a dozen these days, but a new one from Copenhagen-based startup Kvaern has two things that stand out: a unique compact style and a solar-powered battery pack for charging.The €999 ($1,200) Kvaern bike is pedal-assist (meaning you still have to do some work) and uses a 250W motor that’s built into the frame to get up to 15 miles per hour in just a few seconds, according to the company. An integrated battery is good enough for about 30 miles of range, which al

The first observation of the earliest stars in the Universe suggests they were forming about 180 million years after the Big Bang. The radio signal used to make this observation, though indirect, backs up some theoretical models about the evolution of the early Universe.In the beginning, the Universe was made mainly of gas — mostly hydrogen — and a heavy, mysterious material known as dark matter. Over time, pockets of hydrogen gas collapsed to form the first stars, and there was lig

Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service, has filed for an initial public offering seeking $1 billion. The Sweden-based company co-founded by Daniel Ek, who has remained its CEO since its 2006 inception, and Martin Lorentzon has more than 71 million paying users as of December 2017. The company also enjoys an overall user base that includes ad-supported free listeners of 159 million, far outpacing the competition from Apple, Google, Tidal, and others. Spotify will trade on the

Will you be in Austin on March 9th? Because South by Southwest will be starting right around then, we’ll be taping a live episode of The Vergecast, and, hey, you should come and be part of our audience. Nilay, Dieter, Ashley, and Casey will go onstage and crack jokes about technology and also probably brand activations.We may or may not do something dangerous with a drone (though leaning toward “not” now that I’m writing this sentence). Doors open at 11AM CT and the show

Stratolaunch, the world’s biggest airplane, hit a new milestone recently, taxiing down the runway at 46 mph. While that may not sound like much, it’s worth watching the video to see this 500,000-pound beast with twin fuselages and a wingspan of 385 feet lumbering down the concrete. The chase cars look like Micro Machines next to this thing.It’s a big improvement over a low-speed test conducted last December, in which the Stratolaunch traveled down a runway at just 28 mph. Prev

PlayStation Plus might be a little worse of a deal starting next year, with Sony announcing that it’ll no longer be offering free PS3 games and Vita games through the service starting in March 2019 (via Polygon).
Sony first started offering free games to PlayStation Plus subscribers back in 2010, and has since continued to build out the service to offer two PlayStation 3, two Vita, and two PS4 games to subscribers each month. Starting on March 8th, 2019, that will change to just two PS4 g

Discord has recently shut down several notable alt-right, white nationalist servers as it attempts to purge toxic content, as reported by Polygon. The affected servers include the neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, Nordic Resistance Movement, Iron March, and European Domas.
“Discord has a Terms of Service (ToS) and Community Guidelines that we ask all of our communities and users to adhere to,” a Discord representative told Polygon. “These specifically prohibit hara

The nice thing about smartwatches is that they put information right on your wrist so it’s easy to check. But what if that information was even more visible? What if that information was right on the back of your hand?
That question, I can only assume, is what led to the creation of Haier’s Asu watch, an enormous smartwatch with a built-in projector. The projector allows the watch to display information on the back of your hand, essentially serving as a second screen.
Haier uses the

After a few days of teasing, Blizzard has finally revealed the next hero to join the ever-growing roster of its colorful team shooter Overwatch: an armor-clad support character name Brigitte. In the fiction of Overwatch, Brigitte is the daughter of the mechanically inclined hero Torbjorn, and an apprentice to Reinhardt. Blizzard has been hinting at the reveal for a few days through some cryptic clues, including a letter penned by Torbjörn, and several pieces of art for what appeared to be

Twitter is globally launching its Bookmarks feature today, giving users a new way of saving tweets they like and might want to revisit. Before, this could be done by liking a tweet, but now you can save them without tapping the heart and directly engaging with a tweet. Another difference is that with Bookmarks, only you know you’ve saved something; the other user doesn’t.To bookmark something, you tap or click the new share icon beneath a tweet. (The new icon is where the DM icon wa

AI research and video games are a match made in heaven. Researchers get a ready-made virtual environment with predefined goals they can control completely, and the AI agent gets to romp around without doing any damage. Sometimes, though, they do break things.Case in point is a paper published this week by a trio of machine learning researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany. They were exploring a particular method of teaching AI agents to navigate video games (in this case, desktop

Huawei’s rumored P20 phone lineup is becoming clearer. Today, VentureBeat reporter Evan Blass published an image of the P20 Lite, which is expected to round out the full phone lineup, which includes the P20 and P20 Pro. All the devices will likely feature a notch at the top, similar to the iPhone X, as well as 18:9 displays.Blass reports that the P20 Lite will be a 5.6-inch phone with a 1080 x 2250 display and a rear fingerprint scanner. It’ll feature an octa-core Kirin 659 chipset,

We return from the depths of the hashrate / with an economic outlook that ain’t great / went to war with Goldman and Telegram / lost $400 million on ICO scams Coin returns So I’m writing this bit the day before because I literally got up at 6AM, didn’t stop working and thus didn’t actually have time to write this newsletter, but Bitcoin is $10,415 as I write this, which is tied to…well, I don’t really know, again. Coindesk says it’s something about a m

After days of external pressure, YouTube has banned the channel of Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi group tied to multiple killings. As Motherboard reported today, both Atomwaffen’s primary and backup YouTube channels have been banned for “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech,” according to a site message. The Daily Beast previously reported that YouTube planned to keep the videos online, simply demonetizing them and adding a warning about offe

On March 6th, 2017, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest weather satellite, called GOES-16, detected wildfires in northern Texas from space — before firefighters in the area even received 911 calls. NOAA quickly alerted local officials, who began evacuating people.“We saved lives,” says Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service at NOAA, “well before we even went operational.” In fact, NOAA had just gotten access to t

Google is releasing Hangouts Chat this week, a service that allows users to message each other privately or in groups, and work collaboratively on projects. The software was first unveiled in March last year, but to date, it has only been available to companies enrolled in Google’s Early Adopter Program. Now, it’s open to all users signed up to G Suite, Google’s software for businesses that includes Gmail, Google Docs, and so on.
Hangouts Chat represents a big overhaul of Goog

Few things are more frustrating than not being able to find your phone right as you’re heading out. An app called ‘Clap to Find My Phone‘ wants to save you from that frustration. Take a wild guess how it works. The app is currently Android only, and it seems unlikely to be any use on iOS, where you’d likely have to keep the app open at all times for it to work. But if you are on team Google, you can set it to work even if your ringer is off or do not disturb is turned on