Technology news

It wasn’t that long ago we were praising BenQ for a reasonably priced 4K HDR projector, the HT2550. That projector ended up selling for $1,500 in the US, and compared favorably to the budget 4K offerings from Optoma. But now, just a few short months later, BenQ is back with another $1,500 4K HDR projector: the TK800.
The TK800’s standout spec is its 3,000 lumen rating, which is a good bit brighter than the HT2550’s 2,200 lumens. BenQ also claims the TK800 has improved color ac

HP announced a new line of laptops, displays, and all-in-one desktops resistant to intense cleaning materials for people who work in hospitals and doctors’ offices.
There are three products. There’s HP’s EliteOne 800 Healthcare Edition All-in-One desktop, there’s the 27-inch HP Healthcare Edition Clinical Review Display, and there’s the EliteBook 840 Healthcare Edition notebook.
The laptop lets you disable the keyboard and touchscreen while cleaning, so that nothin

The US Department of Transportation convened a “listening session” on autonomous vehicles at its headquarters in Washington, DC, last week — and the key word here is “listening.” It was a chance for the private sector and federal and state regulators to get together to talk about the future, in which human driving becomes passé and driverless cars become the dominant form of transportation.Most people are still highly skeptical about self-driving cars, but i

There are plenty of battery pack cases for the iPhone X, but Mophie is the Kleenex of charging cases, and so far it hasn’t delivered anything but wireless charging bases for Apple’s flagship.
Well, that looks like it’s about to change. A product listing on the Wireless Power Consortium (as seen on Apple Insider) just popped up for a new iPhone X case from Mophie. It’s part of the Juice Pack Air line, and it looks just like Mophie’s wireless charging case for the iP

Taiwanese tech company Acer has made Buddhist prayer beads that can help keep track of recited mantras. The beads have a smart chip that tracks the number of times a mantra is repeated and displays the number on a smartphone app. (The chip senses how many times a user has rotated the beads through their hand. Each rotation marks one mantra.)
Buddhism is estimated to be practiced by about over a third of Taiwan’s population, according to the CIA World Factbook’s 2005 data, making it

Frances McDormand should have taken home the Oscar for Best Actress last night — literally because she did, in fact, win the category. Instead, her award was swiped off her table during the Governors Ball celebration after the ceremonies. Variety reports that Terry Bryant, 47, was arrested and charged with grand theft shortly after posting a Facebook video of himself drinking and galavanting around with the giant gold statue. Subtle.“My team got this tonight,” Bryant says in t

The Walking Dead has returned from its traditional midseason break, careening toward the conclusion of the comic’s “All Out War” saga and the end of the feud between Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his arch-nemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). But thus far, the show’s big bet on Negan has been a bit of a misfire, with ratings hitting staggering lows last year and Negan himself absent from roughly half of this season’s episodes.But a midseason premiere is an opport

A federal court is forcing Martin Shkreli to hand over the Wu-Tang album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to the government. Shkreli, a pharmaceuticals CEO who earned the nickname “Pharma Bro” for cavalierly hiking the price of an HIV treatment, was convicted of securities fraud in August 2017.Though he has yet to be sentenced, a judge ruled today that Shkreli must forfeit $7.36 million, part of which will come from boring assets that no one cares about, like an E-trade brokerage account

Essential first introduced us to our current notch-riddled reality, but maybe all these notches could have been avoided. Maybe, instead, we all could have had pop-up selfie cameras, like the one Vivo showed off at Mobile World Congress last week.Essential CEO Andy Rubin replied to a tweet a few days ago about that Vivo Apex concept phone by pointing to an Essential-owned patent for a similar pop-up camera. It filed it years ago. The company had considered foregoing the notch for a mechanical, p

Google has announced that its app for iOS is introducing several new changes today. The new tweaks are aimed at letting users discover and share information more fluidly across iMessage and the Google app itself.
For starters, the Google app for iOS now supports an iMessage extension that lets users search for and share things like videos, businesses, and more when messaging others. In the example below, icons like “Food” or “Nearby” can be tapped to discover and then sh

Strong winds can turn the most innocent objects — like branches and car dealership signs — into lethal weapons. Now, we can add beach umbrellas to the list.A 55-year-old woman died after a windblown beach umbrella hit her in the chest with about 800 pounds of force, according to new research. The freak accident happened so quickly that the woman’s companion didn’t even see the umbrella hit her. (A bystander, however, did.) The companion “noted only that the woman w

LG has set $3,000 as the baseline price if you want one of the company’s latest, most advanced OLED TVs. That’s for the 55-inch model of the C8 series, which includes LG’s new a9 processor for reduced noise and smoother gradation (less banding).
There will also be a less expensive B8 series in the lineup, but it will lack the new chip and should offer near-identical performance to last year’s sets. Stepping up to the 65-inch C8 will cost $4,000, and the 77-inch version w

It’s an Academy Award tradition for hosts, participants, and viewers alike to complain that the awards ceremony is too long. At the 90th annual Oscars ceremony on Sunday night, host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke out of the long-running complaint, dangling the prospect of an $18,000 Jet Ski as a prize for the winner who gave the shortest acceptance speech. It was a charming gag, but if the Academy is serious about shortening the speeches, a Jet Ski isn’t going to do it. It’s just no

There are a couple of omnipresent narratives for the history of women in tech. One is simplistic and linear: men built computers and the internet, and now women are struggling to break in. A more nuanced version includes pioneers like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, who helped invent programming as we know it, or NASA’s “human computers,” highlighted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. But that narrative consigns women’s influence to the very beginning of computing history,

Spotify is cracking down on users who run modded versions of the software that remove some of the restrictions of free accounts, as reported by Torrent Freak. The company has been sending out emails over the past few days to those with the hacked accounts, saying it has “detected abnormal activity on the app” and disabled the account in question. Spotify hasn’t deleted these accounts outright, and users can reactivate them once they uninstall the illicit software and download

 Massive chipmaker Qualcomm, currently targeted by aggressive acquisition attempts by Broadcom, is now delaying a pivotal meeting with shareholders this week that would determine its fate going forward by at least a month to comply with regulators regarding the deal. The CFIUS — the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — has requested that Qualcomm delay the… Read More

A recurring complaint about social media is that it fosters “echo chambers,” where people are encouraged to consume only content that reflects views they already hold. These bubbles of positive affirmation have been blamed for the spread of fake news, and are the subject of serious concern for those who use social media regularly. But there’s some good news: If the data in one recent study is anything to go by, the average social media users might not be opposed to outside vie

Google’s new ‘Machine Learning Crash Course’ is now available and it’s free for everyone. If robots are coming for your job this class will prepare you for your next one. This same course has been taken by more than 18,000 Google engineers, and this is the first time it’s been made available to the general public. It’s part of the company’s ‘Learn With Google AI’ initiative. According to Google it’s free because the world needs to unde

Ladies and gentleman, this is crypto number 5! One, two, three, four, five everybody log on, so come on Let’s ride to the Mt. Gox, the boys say they want some Bitcoin, but I really don’t wanna, block bust like I had last week, I must stay deep because hashrate is cheap, I like Ethereum, Dogethereum, Castilo and Litecoin, and as I continue you know they’re getting sweeter. Enough of that So what’s up big BTC! The Bitcoin is booming once again while everything else so

Tencent’s hit mobile strategy game Honor of Kings is proving to be a little too popular in China. This weekend, the company announced plans to introduce new contracts in the game that would let kids and parents negotiate terms for playtime. “With the proposed feature, children can exchange their playing time by doing housework or reaching certain [academic] scores,” Tencent chief executive Ma Huateng said at a press conference, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
First lau

Black Mirror has been renewed for a fifth season on Netflix. The streaming service confirmed the renewal in an email to The Verge and released a cryptic teaser on Twitter with the tagline “Be Right Back.”
The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology series premiered on Netflix at the tail end of 2017. The six-episode season explored topics like dating apps, surveillance, robotic dogs, and the Black Mirror universe itself. Some episodes were more successful than othe

Facebook has apologized for a survey that asked users for their opinion on allowing pedophiles to solicit sexual pictures from children on the platform. The Guardian reported on a small survey designed to gauge users’ opinions on Facebook policy. Alongside questions about topics like violent extremism, it asked how users would handle “a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.” One possible answer was “this content should be allo

Chinese social media network WeChat, which is used for everything from chatting with friends to booking travel and making payments, has reached 1 billion user accounts globally, reports the Financial Times. The sheer number of accounts demonstrates the app’s dominance, though it’s important to note that user accounts means the number of accounts, not individual people. Users can register for more than one account and may open an account for work and one for private use, for instance

A Malaysian Apple reseller had to cancel its warehouse sale over the weekend after 11,000 people lined up hours before the actual event to buy iPhones priced as low as $50 USD. According to the advertisement leading up to the event, retailer Switch was selling off its stock largely consisting of demo products, including iPhone models 5S to 7, iPad minis and Pros, Apple TVs, MacBooks, iMacs, and iPod Touches. Just 10 units of the $50 iPhone 5S were up for grabs, and only one unit each of the 16G

Google is selling Zagat to The Infatuation for an unspecified amount, according to a report from The New York Times. Google had originally bought the restaurant review company back in 2011 for $151 million, but earlier this year, reports broke that Google was looking to sell Zagat.Since that acquisition, Zagat restaurant listings have been integrated into Google Maps, and Google employees have been running Zagat.com. The company has failed to steward the review site, however, which has become l

“Above all, I love cats. I admire their elegant body structures and agile movements,” Rongzhong Li tells me via email when asked why he chose a cat instead of something easier to recreate as a robot. Li is an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and creator of open source robotic cat OpenCat. After his robot was featured on IEEE Spectrum’s fantastic weekly roundup of robot videos, he tells me his email has been flooded with possibilities for th

We’re baaaaaaaack!  Top trending tech news: 🚗 Uber denied MIT’s claims drivers earn less than minimum wage (TNW) 😮 30% of the web now runs on WordPress (TNW) 😬 Zuckerberg lost $3 billion last week (Bloomberg) What we’re talking about: Fox created a misleading viral video about how “Liberals” want to remove all “MAN” words. In a show of solidarity with all MANs, and to sound more like a supe

Less than two weeks after launching out of California, SpaceX is ready to fly its next Falcon 9 rocket, this time from Florida. Tonight, the company is tasked with sending up a hefty communications satellite for operator Hispasat, called Hispasat 30W-6. However, it looks like SpaceX will not attempt one of its signature rocket landings at sea after takeoff.
Many thought this rocket would be expendable. The satellite’s weight — more than 13,400 pounds (6,092 kilograms) — makes

Amazing, unexpected news: Why’d You Push That Button? has recently been declared the official podcast of Texas!Just kidding, but we’re going there anyway. Our very first live episode will be recorded (and live-streamed) from SXSW on March 9th at 4 PM CT (5 PM ET). We’ll be at The Belmont (305 W 6th St) in downtown Austin and we hope you will be, too, asking smart questions and generally sending us good vibes while we discuss a harrowing topic: all the ways technology encourage

Netflix’s newest updates give parents more granular control over the content their kids watch. They can now set custom PINs for specific movies and TV shows, regardless of age recommendations. So if you think Moana isn’t appropriate for your 10-year-old, you could have a PIN lock the movie. Parents can already set broad PIN protections that lock up content at specific maturity levels.The company also says it’s going to display these maturity levels at the start of each program

Microsoft has been slowly adding more email intelligence to its Cortana digital assistant, but it has resisted integrating it directly into Outlook mobile. That’s about to change, soon. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Outlook plans tell The Verge that the company is currently testing Cortana within Outlook on iOS and Android.
The Cortana integration will allow users of the popular mobile email client to listen to and respond to emails with their voice. This will be particularly us

Smart shoes that can track your workouts aren’t a new thing. Pizza Hut, however, has created smart shoes that are the polar opposite of fitness. The Pie Tops II, a sequel to last year’s Pie Tops sneaker, are here as part of an ad campaign for March Madness (via AdWeek).Despite existing primarily as a marketing tool, the Pie Tops II are real shoes. Like the original Pie Tops, the Pie Tops II can order pizza — from Pizza Hut, naturally — through a button built into the ton

After having racked up millions of downloads across Android and iOS over the past couple of years, the mobile blockbuster title Alto’s Adventure got a sequel last month, in the form of a beautiful labor of love: Alto’s Odyssey. Created by Team Alto – a collaboration between UK-based artist Harry Nesbitt and Toronto, Canada-based studio Snowman – the iOS title has received rave reviews and is topping the App Store charts across the globe. While Alto’s Adventure saw

The first and most important question anyone should ask about Detective Pikachu, the new crime-solving, neo-noir Pokémon spinoff game for the Nintendo 3DS, is how it got made at all. The game features a talking Pikachu that sounds indistinguishable from a 1930s-era Dashiell Hammett protagonist, equipped with a deerstalker hat, magnifying glass, and gruff sensibility.The sheer alarm at hearing the franchise mascot speaking, and with a voice and personality that feels profoundly out of pla

Search might be getting a facelift in the months to come. It seems Google is currently experimenting with a revamped version of its signature Material Design layout for its search engine service, as spotted by sharp-eyed Reddit users. Here are a couple of screenshots to check out for comparison. The former is the old design, the latter is the revamped version: Unlike the previous version, the new format has much more defined borders and accentuates the older card-box view. It remains unclear ho

Tech companies have an innate aversion to paying their fair share of tax, with many well-known giants avoiding their responsibilities thanks to legal (but morally repugnant) schemes like the Dutch sandwich, the double Irish, and the double Irish with a Dutch sandwich. The good times are coming to an end, courtesy of the European Commission, which is planning a special “tech tax.” This tax, which is due to be announced later this month, will see specific companies taxed not on their

 Accounting and financial controls are some of the most important functions of a modern company, but they are also serious cost centers. Hiring a full-time bookkeeper can be prohibitively expensive, and it can be difficult to find financial analysts and part-time CFOs that a company’s leaders can trust. Companies rely on accounting firms to manage these processes, but firms are often slow… Read More

Glass has become the material of choice for premium mobile phones, and it looks like that’s set to remain in vogue this year. As my colleague Vlad Savov notes on Twitter, most of the 2018 flagship phones will feature glass from front to back.The Nokia 8 Sirocco, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 devices, Sony’s Xperia XZ2, ZTE’s latest Blade V9, and the Asus Zenfone 5 all feature glass backs. Last year’s LG V30 and Huawei’s Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro devices used glass, and t

Xiaomi, one of the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturers, is planning to enter the US market by next year. The Chinese gadget maker recently expanded into western Europe, and the US smartphone market is next on its radar. The Wall Street Journal reports that Xiaomi could bring its smartphones to the US as early as the end of this year. “We’ve always been considering entering the US. market,” says Xiaomi Chairman Lei Jun. “We plan to start entering the market by