Technology news

It’s no secret that Disney CEO Bob Iger sees the company’s upcoming streaming service as a crucial part of the company’s larger strategy, and a new report from Variety reveals what he has been calling the project: Disney Play.Currently slated to launch in late 2019, Disney Play is the company’s answer to Netflix, a direct-to-consumer streaming service that will feature an assortment of exclusive Disney library titles as well as a robust lineup of original TV shows and fi

It’s no secret that Disney CEO Bob Iger sees the company’s upcoming streaming service as a crucial part of the company’s larger strategy. A new report from Variety rounds up some essential details about the service, and its place in the larger entertainment landscape.
Currently slated to launch in late 2019, the service is the company’s answer to Netflix, a direct-to-consumer streaming service that will feature an assortment of exclusive Disney library titles as well as

Samsung’s 860 Evo 1TB solid state drive is $179.99 at B&H Photo and Amazon, which is $70 off of its regular cost. Launched earlier in 2018, this model succeeds the popular 850 Evo with improved LPDDR4 DRAM and 64-layer 3D NAND.
While the more budget-friendly Evo series isn’t quite as fast as Samsung’s Pro series, this is still one of the best SSDs you can buy, regardless of whether you’re upgrading or building your PC from scratch. If you’re looking for the sam

Apple made a huge deal about 3D Touch when it came to the iPhone in 2015. Now, just three years and phone generations later, Apple’s pressure-sensitive screen technology might be on its way out the door.
Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis said today that it’s “widely understood” that some of this year’s iPhones won’t include 3D Touch, according to MacRumors, which saw his note to investors.
“We’re going to waste a whole year of engineering ... if it d

For anyone who has ever been a reader, there’s much to sympathize with in Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. The UCLA neuroscientist, a great lover of literature, tries to read Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, an old favorite, only to realize that she finds him boring and too complex. She wonders why he ever won a Nobel. And Wolf, who previously wrote Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, is horrified that this is what has happened to her ability to

For nearly half his life, Yuji Horii has been obsessed with giant dragons and cute blue blobs. In 1986, he partnered with composer Koichi Sugiyama and artist Akira Toriyama — best known for creating Dragon Ball — to design a new role-playing game for the Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES. The goal was to streamline the game, making RPGs approachable for even casual players, while still retaining the feeling of going on an epic quest. The result was Dragon Quest, which went on

Toyota will invest $500 million in Uber in a deal that values the ride-hail giant at $72 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. As part of the agreement, the two companies will work jointly on developing self-driving cars. That’s a slightly higher valuation for Uber than what it got last December when Japan’s Softbank acquired a 20 percent stake in the ride-hailing business.The news comes as Uber has been scaling back its in-house self-driving car project in the wake of a fa

Mixed reality company Magic Leap just released its not-quite-a-development-kit headset, called the Magic Leap One. Responses have been mixed. It’s an ambitious and functional product, but one that’s made significant compromises without delivering a uniquely powerful experience. But Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has delivered one of the harshest assessments so far, calling it “a tragedy in the classical sense” and prompting Magic Leap’s CEO to respond with an exte

Google will unveil its Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones on October 9th, according to Bloomberg, with the event scheduled to take place in New York City. (The date and location were mentioned in Mark Gurman’s report on the upcoming 2019 iPhones.) The Pixel and Pixel 2 were both announced on October 4th in 2016 and 2017, respectively. The launch target and new event location — previous Pixel events were held in California — comes after weeks of thorough leaks, photos, and plen

CD Projekt, the Poland-based game publisher responsible for The Witcher, just published 48 minutes of gameplay footage for its upcoming title Cyberpunk 2077, a futuristic sci-fi open-world game that generated a lot of buzz at this year’s E3. The demo, first streamed live on the studio’s Twitch channel and since published to YouTube in 4K, is the same behind-closed-doors footage select members of the press and notable game industry figures saw in Los Angeles in June. For a vast major

Tumblr is changing its community guidelines to more explicitly ban hate speech, glorifying violence, and revenge porn. The new rules go into effect on September 10th.
“It’s on all of us to create a safe, constructive, and empowering environment,” Tumblr writes in its blog post. “Our community guidelines need to reflect the reality of the internet and social media today.” The previous version of the guidelines can still be viewed on GitHub for comparison.
“The

Drake’s single “In My Feelings” has had a cultural moment this year. The song’s opening line “Kiki, do you love me?” is a catchy tune that sparked an inevitable flurry of memes and inspired its very own viral dance challenge. It’s paid off. According to Spotify, users streamed “In My Feelings” more than 393 million times between June 1st and August 20th, making it the most streamed song of the summer.Drake is one of the most meme-able musica

Tinder co-founder Sean Rad, along with nine other plaintiffs, sued Tinder’s parent company IAC / Match Group earlier this month over alleged devaluation. The case centers on stock options and, ultimately, how much the original team deserved to be compensated for their work on Match’s most profitable app.
The Verge reported last week that a source close to Tinder suggested that although Rad claims Tinder was undervalued in July 2017 at $3 billion, he still exercised his options and e

Harman Kardon is releasing a new smart speaker that’ll support Google Assistant called the Citation 500. It’ll be shown for the first time at IFA 2018, and it will be available for preorder in Europe at the end of September.The speaker comes in gray and black wool cover options, similar to the fabric-wrapped Google Home speakers. What’s not similar is the cost: the Citation 500 is priced at £549, or approximately $700 USD. That’s about $300 more expensive than the

Microsoft’s Xbox subscription service is now official: a store link to the new Xbox All Access plan went live this morning, and it details how it works and how much it will cost. As reported by The Verge last week, the plan lets you lease an Xbox One X or standard Xbox One S for either $34.99 or $21.99 a month, respectively. The plan resembles one Microsoft offered more than six years ago when it sold a subsidized Xbox 360 with Xbox Live Gold at the end of that generation’s lifecycl

Amazon today opened its second Amazon Go store in Seattle — just a bit earlier than the projected fall timeline that was reported last month. The opening is part of Amazon’s gradual rollout of its cashier-less convenience stores that are expected to launch in other cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Unlike the first location, the second Amazon Go store is smaller and will not feature a working kitchen or a liquor section. Designed to cater to office workers, t

In keeping with Google’s push into digital well-being, YouTube is continuing to roll out more tools that give users a clearer overview of their usage habits. When users open their account menu, they’ll now see an updated profile that shows the amount of time they’ve viewed videos that day, the previous day, and over the last week.“Our goal is to provide a better understanding of time spent on YouTube, so you can make informed decisions about how you want YouTube to best

Samsung is offering Note 9 owners free Gear VR adapters so that they can use the most recent model of Samsung’s virtual reality headset with the company’s latest smartphone. If you own both the Note 9 and Gear VR with Controller, the new USB Type-C adapter can be obtained by calling 1-800-Samsung.The Note 9’s “increased size” has led to compatibility issues with last year’s headset, according to Samsung. The display is only 0.1 inches bigger than the Note 8,

Streets of Rage is back. The iconic ‘90s side-scrolling beat-’em-up from Sega is getting a fourth installment from developers LizardCube (Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap), Guard Crush Games (Streets of Fury), and Dotemu (Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap).
The trailer, which dropped today, features protagonists Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding (no word on Adam Hunter) kicking ass to a guitar-heavy soundtrack in a few separate city locales. The developers promise an exciting new s

Last night, not long after I put my kids to bed, I made some coffee and turned on my PS4 to play Fortnite. It wouldn’t have made the best spectator experience: I sat perched on an in-game cliff for several minutes, barely moving. I wasn’t playing stealthily, trying to avoid detection from other players. I wasn’t even armed. Instead, I was staring intently at a giant purple cube, hoping it would move. Five minutes into the match — in which I somehow remained unharmed &mda

With great automation comes great responsibility. You may love your smart thermostat and door lock, but as long as they’re on the open network, they’re targets for all manner of digital attacks. And because the devices are smaller and simpler, they don’t have nearly the protection of your laptop or phone. The result is an unsettling thought: as you add more gadgetry, you’re also adding more ways for hackers to break in.
It’s a persistent vulnerability, and it&rsquo

Berkshire Hathawayhas reportedly agreed to buy a stake in One97, the owner of India’s largest digital payments service Paytm . This would mark the first time the investment firm has invested in an Indian startup. According to Indian financial news site Mint, which first broke the news, Berkshire Hathaway, the investment firm headed by Warren Buffett, is set to buy shares worth about $300 million to $350 million, at a valuation of about $10 billion to $12 billion.
Another report in Bloomber

The tech world is waiting expectantly for Apple to announce its latest batch of iPhones. The devices will likely be unveiled sometime in the second week of September (the company’s usual drop date), and rumors this year have been pretty consistent, pointing to the launch of three new devices. A new report from Bloomberg is the latest to follow this prediction.Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Debby Wu say that some inside Apple are labeling this another “S year” — meanin

Facebook has banned a number of high profile accounts in Myanmar that it says helped “inflame ethnic and religious tensions” in the southeast Asian country.In a blog post, Facebook again admitted it had been “slow to act” to the situation in Myanmar, where the minority Muslim Rohingya population has been the target of a genocidal campaign fueled by propaganda spread on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. In a report released by the United Nations today, investigators

Travelstop is a new startup in Singapore that aims to bring the benefits of business travel management to SMEs and other smaller companies in Southeast Asia.
The company launched its product today after being founded in November 2017 by three entrepreneurs who worked at TravelMob, the Singapore startup bought by HomeAway in 2013. Prior to TravelMob, the trio — Prashant Kirtane (CEO), Vijay Aggarwal (CTO) and Altaf Dhamani (CPO) — worked together at Yahoo Southeast Asia