Technology news

Sorry Santa Claus, Jeff Bezos is your Father Christmas now. Amazon, in its ongoing quest to utterly dominate the holiday season, has announced plans to start shipping real, live Christmas trees, come November.That news comes courtesy of The Associated Press, which notes that the seven-foot-tall Douglas firs and Norfolk Island pines will be sent via Amazon box, sans water. Shipping should occur within 10 days of being cut down, so as to keep them green. The firs will run around $115 a pop, along

Jed Grant Contributor Jed Grant has more than 25 years of experience in technology, finance and security. He is the founder and CEO of Peer Mountain, a decentralized P2P ecosystem of trust, and the founder of KYC3, one of the original regtech companies in Luxembourg.Blockchain is perhaps the most hyped technology of the past five years. The technology that allows us to create trustless immutable shared ledgers promises to bring transparency and honesty to commerce by disintermediating and decen

Verizon’s 5G broadband internet service will go live later this fall, with installations starting on October 1st in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, the company announced today. This marks the first 5G commercial service to launch in the US, and it sees Verizon make good on its promise to do so in November 2017. Verizon is calling it simply 5G Home.
This isn’t true mobile 5G, which will be the more impactful rollout of the new internet speed standard that was fina

Plextoday announced it’s shutting down its troubled Plex Cloud service, via a forum post that hasn’t found its way over to the company’s official blog – likely a choice the company made in order to downplay the news, or avoid media scrutiny. Plex Cloud, launched in fall 2016, was meant to serve as a way for Plex customers to save their files to online storage services like OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, instead of having to host their saved files locally on their own

After a two-year hiatus, Gawker is coming back. Peter Thiel,be damned.
Bustle-owner Bryan Goldberg,who paid $1.35 million for rights to the defunct gossip site in a bankruptcy auction in July, wrote in a memo to Bustle staff Tuesday that Gawker would relaunch next year with Amanda Hale, the former chief revenue officer of The Outline, as its publisher.
A spokesperson for Bustle confirmed the hiring and upcoming launch to TechCrunch, adding that Hale “will be responsible for building o

Gillian Hadfield ContributorShare on Twitter Gillian Hadfield is the author of Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy and a professor of law and strategic management at the University of Toronto; a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for AI; and a senior policy advisor at OpenAI. More posts by this contributorSafe artificial intelligence requires cultural intelligence To truly protect citizens, lawmakers need to restructure thei

Guy Beahm, best known as the boisterous PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streamer Dr. Disrespect, abruptly stopped his Twitch broadcast today following what he says was an attempted shooting at his house.News of this apparent shooting spread primarily due to Beahm’s live stream, where he can be seen playing Call of Duty only to leave his station following an unknown noise. He breaks character and says, “someone shot at our house. Broke the fucking upstairs window. This is the sec

Personal media player Plex told its users today that it’s shutting down its Plex Cloud service at the end of November, as spotted by Variety. The Plex Cloud service has had multiple technical issues and has been in maintenance mode for a few months.
The company said in a statement to Variety that “after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost.” We&rs

In a sign of how far Amazon’s shipping operation has come, the company will be selling and delivering seven-foot Christmas trees to customers this holiday season. And yes, they’ll be eligible for Prime shipping.According to The Associated Press, Amazon will start selling the trees sometime in November, letting buyers pick between Douglas firs, Norfolk Island pines, and other options. A seven-foot Fraser fir (sourced from a North Carolina farm) will go for $115.The trees will ship in

Applekeeps adding autonomous vehicles to its test fleet in California, boosting its ranks 27 percent since May, according to records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
The company now has 70 autonomous vehicles permitted to test on public roads, Mac Reports first reported. The permits, which are issued by CA DMV, require a safety driver to be behind the wheel.
Over the past 18 months, Apple has gone from just three autonomous vehicles to 27 by January, 55 by May and now

At its education event in Chicago earlier this year, Apple announced a $49 Logitech Crayon that was only available exclusively to schools and educators. As of last week, Apple has changed its tune, and the Crayon is now available for the rest of us at $69.99. The question of “which stylus to get” between the Logitech Crayon and Apple Pencil is really only an issue if you have the latest $329 iPad, which is the only iPad the Crayon is compatible with.Though it can be seen as a cheape

Today, eBay revealed a nifty new piece of augmented reality software that makes use of both the front-facing iPhone X camera and Apple’s ARKit framework. By tracking head motions using the 3D sensors in the TrueDepth camera, which is the same hardware that enables Apple’s Face ID unlock feature, eBay developed a way to transmit input commands by just moving your head.The system, which eBay is calling HeadGaze, seems to work similarly to eye tracking, although it would understandably

The sophisticated head-tracking system like the one built into the iPhone X may have been intended for AR and security purposes, but it may also turn out to be very useful for people with disabilities. A proof of concept app from an eBayintern shows how someone with very little motor function can navigate the site with nothing but head movements.
Muratcan Çiçek is one such person, and relies on assistive technology every day to read, work and get around. This year he was interning

OkCupid users can now pick their pronouns. The company rolled out the new gender-expressive option yesterday, a feature that’ll allow users to choose between he / him, she / her, and they / them. The options join the 22 gender and 13 sexual orientation choices already available to users. The pronouns will show up as a menu when users who identify as any gender other than man or woman sign up for the service. People who have a sexual orientation under the LGBTQ umbrella will also see the m

Twilio, a company best known for supplying a communications APIs for developers has a product called Twilio Flex for building sophisticated customer service applications on top of Twilio’sAPIs. Today, it announced it was acquiring Ytica (pronounced Why-tica) to provide an operational and analytical layer on top of the customer service solution.
The companies would not discuss the purchase price, but Twilio indicated it does not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its &ldquo

September is Applehardware season, where we expect new iPhones, a new Apple Watch and more. But what makes the good stuff run is the software within.
First revealed earlier this year at the company’s annual WWDC developer event in June, iOS 12 and macOS Mojave focus on a running theme: security and privacy for the masses.
Ahead of Wednesday big reveal, here’s all the good stuff to look out for.
macOS Mojave
macOS Mojave will be the sixth iteration of the Mac operating system, named 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 Toronto International Film Festival.
One of the upsides of our wired world is that it’s easy to get information. Anyone with a smartphone who wants to know how to gap a spark plug, make 12 different kinds of quiche, avoid traffic on the way to a destination, or charge up a phone can readily find that information in seconds. But there are co

A recent user survey sent out by Dropbox confirms the company is considering the addition of an electronic signature feature to its Dropbox Professional product, which it refers to simply as “E-Signature from Dropbox.” The point of the survey is to solicit feedback about how likely users are to use such a product, how often, and if they believe it would add value to the Dropbox experience, among other things.
While a survey alone doesn’t confirm the feature is in the works, it

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Universityhave created a method to turn one video into the style of another. While this might be a little unclear at first, take a look at the video below. In it, the researchers have taken an entire clip from John Oliver and made it look like Stephen Colbertsaid it. Further, they were able to mimic the motion of a flower opening with another flower.
In short, they can make anyone (or anything) look like they are doing something they never did.
“I think there

Meet Paysend’s global account, a new way to hold, spend and send money in multiple currencies using a mobile app and a card. It looks a lot like Revolut’s basic features. But the company is trying to provide a more focused and robust experience from day one.
“We are quite different from both a technical infrastructure and consumer offering viewpoint. We own and control our own processing and this gives tremendous ability and flexibility to deliver a wide variety of services whi

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged 1-to-1 with another “stable” currency. In most cases, these coins are pegged to the US dollar and, as such, allow for true transfers of actual fiat currencies between parties using the blockchain. If you’re nodding off right now thinking about this, I would posit that these moves, however minor right now, are an important step forward in cryptocurrency acceptance.
The latest stablecoin to hit the virtual streets is the Gemini Dollar. This

Facebook’s moderators can’t possibly look through every single image that gets posted on the enormous platform, so Facebook is building AI to help them out. In a blog post today, Facebook describes a system it’s built called Rosetta that uses machine learning to identify text in images and videos and then transcribe it into something that’s machine readable. In particular, Facebook is finding this tool helpful for transcribing the text on memes.
Text transcription tools

If you had a cup of delicious coffee this morning, there’s a good chance those beans came from Colombia, which has famously been growing and selling them for centuries. But the country hasn’t produced any coffee makers — until now, anyway. The FrankOne is a clever device that puts a versatile vacuum-extraction technique in a compact, single-cup form factor.
Of course, it’ll have to hit its Kickstarter goal first. Eduardo Umaña, the designer of the FrankOne, explain

PayPal,now with 19.5 million businesses and 250 million customers using its payment rails to sell and buy goods and services, is today taking the wraps off a new feature that it hopes will bring more transactions to its platform. The company is launching Funds Now, instant payouts to businesses using PayPal for their transactions.
The feature will come as standard to all companies in good standing with PayPal — that is, with no complaints or fraud flags on their accounts. It’s eventu

U.S. tech companies continue to be the most active acquirers in the world, says a new report from Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge. 
The pair crunched data on 22,000 startup exits since 2010, recording about 4,200 so far this year. U.S. companies, though less active this year than last, have acquired approximately 2x more startups than their European counterparts.
Overall, 2018 is a flat year for M&A activity, despite a record-setting 2017. 
Here are a few key takeaways from the

Anaxi‘s mission is to bring more transparency to the software development process. The tool, which is now live for iOS, with web and Android versions planned for the near future, connects to GitHub to give you actionable insights about the state of your projects and manage your projects and issues. Support for Atlassian’s Jira is also in the works.
The new company was founded by former Appleengineering manager and Docker EVP of product development Marc Verstaen and former CodinG

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted AliveCor the designation of “breakthrough device” for its ability to detect a rare but dangerous blood condition called hyperkalemia without taking any blood from the patient.
Hyperkalemia is a medical term describing elevated potassium levels in the blood and is usually found in those with kidney disease. The correct amount of potassium is critical for the function of nerve and muscles in the body, including your heart muscle. A bloo

Memes are the language of the web and Facebookwants to better understand them.
Facebook’s AI teams have made substantial advances over the years in both computer vision and natural language recognition. Today, they’ve announced some of their latest work that works to combine advances in the two fields. A new system, codenamed “Rosetta,” helps teams at Facebook and Instagram identify text within images to better understand what their subject is and more easily classify the

PingCAP co-founder and CEO Max Liu
PingCAP, the company behind MySQL-compatible distributed database TiDB, said today that it plans its global operations after raising a $50 million Series C. The round was led by Chinese venture capital firms Fosun and Morningside Venture Capital, with participation from returning investors including China Growth Capital, Yunqi Partners and Matrix Partners.
Based in Beijing, the company says it will also use the new capital to build more cross-cloud products. Pi

Apple has been live-streaming its product announcements for years, but the company has always tried to keep the events on-platform — until now. TechCrunch reports that, this year, Apple will also be streaming its iPhone announcement on Twitter, where it has the chance to reach a new audience that might not know to check out Apple’s website for a streaming link.
This is Apple’s second major expansion in streaming options this year. For WWDC, the company also opened streaming up

Sonos stock is still struggling to recover after a disappointing earnings report sent shares of the audio hardware manufacturing company plummeting.
The stock is currently down over 18 percent in trading on the Nasdaq after yesterday’s news that the company lost 45 cents per share on revenues of roughly $208 million for the quarter.
The losses put Sonoson pace for its worst day since debuting on the public markets in August.Sonos sees modest gains on first day of tradingRevenue was down pr