Technology news

When I last wrote about Knotch, the company had just patented its color-based feedback system that helps advertisers measure the effectiveness of their sponsored content.
Since then, it’s added a competitive intelligence product and now Blueprint, a tool for marketers who want to find the best topics, formats and partners to reach their desired audience.
Lara Vandenberg, Knotch’ssenior vice president of marketing and communications, told me that agencies had been asking the company t

Last week, news surfaced that Saudi Arabian officials were suspected to have killed US journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly torturing and dismembering him inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Across Washington, officials are now discussing ways to penalize the country for the killing, whether through sanctions or other methods. But that reaction could create unexpected problems for US tech companies, which have received billions in investment from Saudi Arabia in recent years.
Crown Prince

Netflix yesterday announced it would end its most popular original television program after its next season. Warning: This may make you cry. The Final Season, 2019. #OITNB pic.twitter.com/bUp2yY0aoK — Orange Is the New… (@OITNB) October 17, 2018 “Orange is The New Black” received wide-spread acclaim from critics and fans the moment Netflix debuted it back in 2013. The small-screen vehicle portrays life in a women’s prison, with a deft – if sometimes heavy &n

A lot of uncertainty hangs over the U.K. as it continues its slow march out of the European Union, but today one of the world’s biggest companies announced plans to expand its presence in the country. Amazon today said it would add another 1,000 workers in the U.K., including establishing its first corporate and R&D office in Manchester.
Amazonsaid it also plans to add more people to its R&D bases in Edinburgh and Cambridge — respectively known for developing search technolog

In July 2018, the European Commission ruled that Google had exhibited “anticompetitive behavior” in its dealings with Android partners. The Commission said that Google should not have required Android phone and tablet makers to install Chrome and search in order to install the rest of Google’s apps. And the Commission also said that Google should not have barred its partners from building devices based on forked versions of Android.
Google is appealing the ruling. But for the

Avi Reichental Contributor Avi Reichental is founder and CEO of XponentialWorks. He is a leading authority on 3D printing and exponential tech convergence. More posts by this contributorHow 3D printing is revolutionizing the housing industry  How 3D printing is revolutionizing healthcare as we know it
More or less since Nietzsche declared God “dead” nearly 140 years ago, popular wisdom has held that science and religion are irreparably misaligned. However, at a r

I’ve always found Kim Stanley Robinson’s futures intriguing. In recent years, he’s published some of my favorite science fiction novels: New York 2140, about a water-logged New York City contending with climate change, and Aurora, which follows the crew of a generation ship looking to expand humanity’s presence in the cosmos. This month, he’s back with a new novel called Red Moon, and we have an excerpt for you to read.Set in 2047, the US and China have returned to

After wrestling for more than a decade with the development of a technology that would create a three-dimensional map of the physical world, the team at 6D.ai is finally ready to open up to developers its toolkit that the company says has done exactly that.
When company chief executive Matt Miesnieksannounced the launch of 6D in March, he laid out a vision for its growth that had three goals: The company would build APIs to capture the three-dimensional geometry of the world; it would apply that

More bad news for MoviePass .
At the direction of New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson is now the subject of a fraud probe in New York state.
“We’ve launched a securities fraud investigation into ⁦@MoviePass⁩’ parent company,” Underwood confirmed in a tweet. “My office is committed to protecting New York investors and the integrity of our financial markets.”
The probe will examine whether the com

The Weather Channel is at it again: after terrifying viewers with a graphic that drove home the dangers of flooding during Hurricane Florence, the network has aired a new clip that highlights how climate change is making natural disasters even more devastating.
This one demonstrates the astounding speed of a wind-whipped inferno burning its way up a mountainside. In the video, meteorologist Stephanie Abrams starts out in an idyllic forest. But she points out that the key ingredients for a ragin

On the cusp of releasing one of the biggest games of the year, Red Dead Redemption 2, developer Rockstar Games has been forced to allay fears it’s overworking its employees. It’s attempted to assure fans by allowing staff to speak directly about their experiences. The whole kerfuffle started thanks to an interview with Vulture, in which Rockstar VP Dan Houser said staff worked several “100-hour weeks” during the year in order to make the game perfect. Since there wa

Apple’s parental controls in iOS 12 are rather inconsistent: certain sex-related terms are blocked, but other troubling results — such as alt-right websites and support for terrorism — are allowed, sex education site O.school spotted.
The settings are found under Screen Time, which Apple introduced last month in iOS 12. Using Screen Time, parents can set an iPhone to hide inappropriate content from children. But according to O.school’s findings, and as confirmed by The V

I’m sorry to direct Verge readers to a Post Malone song, but the grubby musician has made his latest music video hard to pass up: “Sunflower” is a collaboration with Swae Lee that the pair wrote and recorded to accompany Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the gorgeous upcoming animated film that follows Miles Morales (and basically every other Spidey that ever existed).
What we’ve seen in the trailers thus far have racked up early praise — The Verge included &mdash

There’s a new version of Tweetbot for iOS today, and this release will be especially appreciated by iPhone X, XS, and XS Max users. It comes with an optimized version of dark mode that’ll take advantage of OLED panels’ high contrast levels. (Apple previously listed 16 apps that offer “pure black mode,” so maybe Tweetbot wants to make it onto the second version of that list.) The app already featured a dark mode, but this new version should be slightly nicer on the

Google Maps’ ETA sharing feature, which lets the app share your navigation route with friends in real time, is coming to iOS today. The feature has been available on the Android app since last year, and was introduced with the clip above. The video shows some specific use cases for ETA sharing, like when you’re planning a surprise party and need to coordinate partygoers’ arrival times. It’s also just a neat, useful tool for when you want to know your friends’ where

Uberis reportedly developing a short-term staffing business to offer 1099 independent contractors for events and corporate functions, the Financial Times first reported. Dubbed Uber Works, the service would provide waiters, security guards and other temporary staffers to business partners, a source close to Uber told TechCrunch.
Uber has been working on the project for several months in Chicago, after first trialing the project in Los Angeles. Uber already has a vast network of drivers &mda

Is it legal to take someone else’s photograph, post it on Instagram, print out the Instagram post, and sell it as art? This is the question that appropriation art pioneer Richard Prince has been fighting in court for years. In 2014, Prince premiered New Portraits, an art series composed of blown-up, printed-out Instagram screenshots. One contained a shot of a Rastafarian lighting a joint, posted by a user called “Rastajay92.” Another featured a portrait of Sonic Youth bassist,

2016’s Hitman reboot was a fascinating experiment in reviving a classic formula with a new twist. IO Interactive, the developer behind the assassination sandbox series, decided to combine the best efforts of 2012’s more linear but highly polished Hitman: Absolution with the open-world spirit and heavy experimentation of the series’ first three major entries.
The result was one game with just six levels and a loosely woven story linking them together. But each one of those leve

The IEEE has showcased one of the coolest research projects I’ve seen this month: virtual smells. By stimulating your olfactory nerve with a system that looks like one of those old-fashioned kids electronics kits, they’ve been able to simulate smells.
The project is pretty gross. To simulate a smell, the researchers are sticking leads far up into the nose and connecting them directly to the nerves. Senior research fellow at the Imagineering Institute in Malaysia, Kasun Karunanayaka,

After accusing Amazon of conducting a campaign to poach its third-party sellers, eBay has filed a lawsuit in California to ban the competitor from misusing its platform, per The Wall Street Journal. eBay first sent a cease and desist letter to Amazon earlier this month claiming its employees were using eBay’s messaging feature to try to hire away third-party sellers for Amazon Marketplace, the e-commerce giant’s competing sellers platform.At the time, Amazon said it was “condu

The hype around quantum computing is real. But to fully realize the promise of quantum computing, it’ll still take a few years of research and scientific breakthroughs. And indeed, it still remains to be seen if quantum computers will ever live up to the hype. Today, though, we got mathematical proof that there are really calculations that quantum computers will definitely be able to perform faster than any classical computer.
What we have today are quantum computers with a very

On Thursday, Uber announced a new way for riders and drivers to communicate through the company’s app using voice over internet protocol, or VoIP. Much like Skype or FaceTime audio, Uber’s new VoIP feature uses an internet connection rather than cellular phone service to make calls. The ride-hailing company has been trialing the VoIP feature since June, and it announced its global availability today at a conference in San Francisco.Currently, Uber offers three ways for drivers and r

Uber is testing an on-demand staffing business called Uber Works, according to the Financial Times. The service would make it possible for businesses to hire short-term workers for things like “events and corporate functions, such as waiters or security guards,” the report says. The company is trialing the service in Chicago after testing it in Los Angeles earlier this year.While still in the early stages, the new business would likely not directly compete with more consumer-facing

Nvidia’s expensive GeForce RTX graphics cards are now available, and several manufacturers have released their own takes on the RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti. And an increasing number of them are more affordable than Nvidia’s own Founders Edition reference cards.
In most cases, you’re looking at up to $100 off, which makes the RTX 2070 cheaper than the last-generation Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Currently, the savings vary depending on the card you’re after. The RTX 2080 a

Twitter yesterday released a bevy of data related to Iranian and Russian-sponsored misinformation campaigns started as long ago as 2009. The hope, in releasing the trove, is that academics and researchers will use it to come up with solutions to the propaganda problem plaguing US politics. November 6th represents the next symbolic test for US democracy. As the nation hurtles towards its Midterm elections, with both the House and Senate up for grabs, it’s become apparent that ‘electi

Amazon’s Alexa is getting Whisper Mode today, so everyone can start using their indoor voices. The feature, which allows the voice assistant to receive whisper commands and whisper back in reply, is now rolling out to users in the US, but it’s currently only available in English. It’ll most likely come in handy for parents who can whisper to Alexa to play a lullaby and for generally keeping noise to a minimum as to not wake a sleeping partner or baby.
We first saw previews of

Rockstar employees are speaking out against reports that the developer forces its workers into extreme crunch. The company has given its staff permission to share their experiences online, according to dozens of Rockstar developers on Twitter, many of whom say they’ve never endured the harsh work conditions that the company has recently come under fire for.On October 14th, Vulture published an in-depth piece on the making of Red Dead Redemption 2. One line specifically caught the attentio

If you’re heading out to meet someone, there are plenty of ways to inform them of your location and estimated arrival. Chat apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, LINE and iMessage, for example, offer location-sharing functionality, while navigation apps like Waze and CityMapper and even ridesharing apps like Uber offer live updating ETAs. Now, Google Maps’ own ETA feature is at last coming to iOS. The feature is also getting a few tweaks following last year’s launch on Android, the co

YouTube and Eventbrite have partnered to give fans a direct way to purchase tickets to artists’ live shows.A button will now appear below videos for musicians with official Artist Channels (like Post Malone, Ariana Grande, and Drake), which fans can use to purchase tickets directly through Eventbrite. YouTube will continue to add more artists and venues as the partnership expands. The company previously partnered with Ticketmaster to provide a similar retail experience. Eventbrite and Tic

Apple isn’t done with product events for 2018. Today the company issued media invites for an October 30th event in Brooklyn, New York where it’s widely expected we’ll see new iPad Pro tablets and potentially several updates to the Mac lineup. The event’s tagline is “there’s more in the making,” and its location is a bit of a surprise. It was reasonable to believe Apple would again present its new products in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park after la

It’s been over a decade since Dell bought Alienware as a way to shore up its gaming business, and it seems like it’s an investment that’s paid off: the company revealed today that its gaming business is worth $3 billion, according to a tweet from analyst Patrick Moorhead.
BOOM! @Dell and @Alienware’s @AzorFrank just told the group that it’s gaming business is a $3B business. This is the first public disclosure of this data. He said that is 3X the size anyone else&r

Square is launching a new point-of-sale hardware device called Terminal, which can accept credit card and mobile payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and NFC. Square Terminal is a portable all-in-one device that can process payments over Wi-Fi and print out receipts, signifying the company’s focus on expanding its services to more types of sellers and buyers.
Square’s goal with Terminal is to get businesses to replace their legacy payment terminals with Square Paymen

Google now allows third-party developers to build support for their apps directly into Gmail’s compose window. The integrations, first announced back at Google Next in July and available starting today, mean that an app like Dropbox can now add a button to the bottom of the compose window that you can click to quickly add a shortcut to one of your available files, for example. Other apps announcing add-on support include Box, Atlassian, and Egnyte, with more on the way, according to Googl