Technology news

Amazon might be aiming to scale up its cashier-less stores, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that the company is testing the technology in larger stores.
In January, Amazon opened its first cashier-less store in Seattle, which was followed by additional locations in Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco. Those stores use cameras and software to detect what items customers pick up and charges them accordingly, allowing them to forgo the entire check-out process.Amazon&r

Early Monday morning, a crew of three astronauts are set to launch to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket — the first time people will ride on the Soyuz after the vehicle broke apart mid-flight in October with two passengers on board. Following an investigation, Russia claims to have identified and fixed the problem that led to the failure, deeming the rocket ready to carry people again.
The Soyuz has launched successfully four times since the accident. However, it h

Reuters reports that Nexstar Media Group has agreed to acquire the Tribune Media Company for $4.1 billion, which will make the combined company the largest television station operator in America. The deal could be announced on Monday.Based in Irving, Texas, Nexstar is presently the second-largest local television station owner in the country, just behind Sinclair. Should the acquisition go through, Nexstar would become the largest local TV operator in the US. Sources tell Reuters that the deal

Microsoft appears to be planning on overhauling its Windows 10 icons alongside its Office suite. The software giant revealed a new icon design for Office 365 earlier this week, and with it teased some Windows changes it has been considering. “It is a huge undertaking to build a common system and design 10 icons at the same time,” explains Jon Friedman, head of Office design at Microsoft. “Now that we have established the system we will start to scale it across all of Microsoft

Apple might finally be releasing an upgraded version of its AirPods in the first quarter of 2019, and and might redesign the device for 2020. 9to5Mac cites a new report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who says that demand for the devices will grow dramatically in the coming years.There were rumors all summer that upgraded AirPods would debut during this fall’s product launches, but they never appeared on stage. If Kuo’s predictions are correct, the new models will have “wirel

AWS, once a nice little side hustle for Amazon’s eCommerce business, has grown over the years into a behemoth that’s on a $27 billion run rate, one that’s still growing at around 45 percent a year. That’s a highly successful business by any measure, but as I listened to AWS executives last week at their AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, I didn’t hear a group that was content to sit still and let the growth speak for itself. Instead, I heard one that wants to do

Floom, the online marketplace and SaaS for independent florists, has raised $2.5 million in a seed funding. The round was round led by Firstminute Capital, and will be used by the London headquartered startup to continue to expand to the U.S., where it already operates in New York and L.A., and to further develop its software offering.
Additional investors include Tom Singh (founder of New Look), Pembroke VCT, Wing Chan (CTO digital experiences of The Hut Group), and Carlos Morgado (former CTO o

The world of Blade Runner is getting an anime series, raising an important question: does the world of Blade Runner need an anime series?Sure, the animated short Blade Runner: Blackout, which helped set up last year’s Blade Runner 2049, was pretty good, but a full-fledged series just seems gratuitous. For one thing, there are virtually infinite anime homages to Blade Runner — Bubblegum Crisis borrowed everything from the film’s character names to its iconic menacing pyramid. F

Scooter startup Limehas sought to back peddle on an explanation given by its VP of global expansion late last week when asked why it had hired the controversial PR firm, Definers Public Affairs.
The opposition research firm, which has ties to the Republican Party, has been at the center of a reputation storm for Facebook,after a New York Times report last month suggested the controversial PR firm sought to leverage anti-semitic smear tactics — bysending journalists a document linking

Tonight, the Syfy channel will launch its latest big science fiction show: Nightflyers, based on a story from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. The series poses a big question for viewers: does humanity deserve to be saved?
The story is adapted from a novella originally published in 1980 in the science-fiction magazine Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, long before Martin was a household name. He wrote it to refute a critical statement he read, claiming that science fiction and horro

Saturday Night Live aired its latest episode last night, hosted by The Crown and First Man star Claire Foy. One of the sketches took aim at Netflix’s enormous effort to produce as much original content as possible.“In 2019, we’ll have even more programming to choose from because we’ve. gone. crazy.” The mock ad goes on to highlights endless scrolling through the company’s originals, that that once you’ve reached to the bottom of the menu, there’s

Earlier this year, the International Space Station got a new “crew member” of sorts: CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), an interactive AI assistant that can float around the station and help answer astronauts’ questions — kind of like a specialized spaceflight cross between Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Clippy.
But CIMON’s debut — seen in a new video release by the European Space Agency — shows an early interaction with the space ro

Virtual Reality is in a public relations slump. Two years ago the public’s expectations for virtual reality’s potential was at its peak. Many believed (and still continue to believe) that VR would transform the way we connect, interact, and communicate in our personal and professional lives.
Google Trends highlighting search trends related to Virtual Reality over time; the “note” refers to an improvement in Google’sdata collection system that occurred in early 2016

In 1990, Kleiner Perkins rejected 99.4% of the proposals it received, while investing in 12 new companies a year. Those investees made Kleiner Perkins “the most successful financial institution in the history of the world,” boasting “returns of about 40 percent per year, compounded, for coming up on thirty years.”
Nowadays, the Valley’s VC poster child is Y Combinator, who invest in more like 250 companies annually. They’re famously selective, accepting someth

The year is winding down, the days are getting colder — you might say that winter is coming. But even if you’re not traveling anywhere for the holidays, you can still go et your vacation sightseeing fix through an unlikely source: aerial drone video collections. While Game of Thrones’ eighth and final season doesn’t arrive until next spring, fans have made a series of drone videos featuring famous destinations in Europe and North Africa where the show was filmed.For inst

Sex robots are everywhere at the moment (not literally – you won’t find them marching down the street just yet), but figuratively, as a growing number of ‘robot brothels’ divide public opinion as they feel out the market in the US and Canada. But if a robot hasn’t ‘had sex’ yet, does that make it a virgin? A crowdfunding campaign to open the world’s first consent-focused sex brothel launched by Abyss Creations employee Uni

Facebookis still dealing with the fallout from a New York Times report outlining the company’s strategy to fight back against criticism, particularly its work with Definers Public Affairs, an opposition research firm with ties to the Republican Party.
That work included a document that Definers sent to reporters suggesting ties between George Soros and progressive political groups criticizing Facebook. The Times story described the broad strokes of the claims made by Definers, but the docu

This, depressingly, is just so very 2018.
Brett Favre and Soulja Boy are doing some serious backtracking, after a report from BuzzFeed News revealed that the two had been tricked into making anti-Semitic statements via an app. And yes, the two celebs were paid for their misguided efforts. 
The app, Cameo, seems pretty harmless on its face. It connects Average Joes with celebrities, and allows the former to pay the latter to make some kind of statement. Cameo calls them "personalized video s