Category: Tech news

 Tesla has won the right to open and operate its own dealership in Virginia, after the state Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner reversed a ruling from September denying it a license. In his decision, the commissioner cited overwhelming public support, as well as unique sales and service requirements as reasons for his finding that “no dealer independent of Tesla” in… Read More

 Slowly but surely the Moto Z is getting an ecosystem. The promising handset launched with some solid specs and a handful of add-ons that made it the most fully formed modular handset to date — which, granted, isn’t saying a whole heck of a lot. And Motorola’s been working to add to those offerings by opening up its Mods to developers and even launching a handful of… Read More

 Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as a… Read More

 A fabulous piece of photographic history just sold at auction for $406,000, more than twice the estimated haul. This Nikon One was the third production camera — as in the third actual camera it built — from the now-famous company, and it’s the oldest one known to still be around today. Read More

 Are you upset your team isn’t playing in a championship game this weekend and need a reason to watch? Well here’s a reason to watch at least one game on Saturday: Referees will wear hats with built-in GoPros during this weekend’s NCAA Football Big Ten Championship Game between Penn State and Wisconsin. The project is part of a deal between FOX Sports Lab and GoPro to offer… Read More

 If you use iCal and have noticed a weird, sudden influx of calendar invites suggesting you buy bootleg purse knockoffs… you’re not alone.
Just before Black Friday, spammers started tapping a relatively new technique: sending spam as event invites to iCloud email addresses, rather than sending standard emails. By default, iCloud processes these and tries to add them to your… Read More

 Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up — whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying or because the topic itself is sensitive — like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More

 Founder Collective, the seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its third fund with $75 million in capital from a small group of limited partners whose anchor investors are the the firm’s three partners: David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley. “Unlike most funds, the partners are, in fact, the single-largest investor in [our new fund]. So… Read More

 We’ve got machine learning systems captioning images, synthesizing speech and translating between languages, but it seems we’ve been neglecting their cultural development. Would you believe the future rulers of this planet are largely ignorant of classical music? A new project looks to change that with a data set of pieces from great composers, annotated so the computers can… Read More

 Big tech companies have been creating accelerators left and right to evangelize their brands and get developers engaged with APIs and other open-source efforts. Today, Amazon joined the crowd by announcing a new program for startups developing conversational AI. This is Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, though its $100 million Alexa Fund has already invested… Read More

 At $720, Version 1.0 of Nike’s HyperAdapt self-tying shoes are for sneakerheads. They’re flashy and pricey, and while Nike isn’t revealing exact numbers, it’s clear that they’re an extremely limited edition. But one thing they’re not, according to Tiffany Beers, is a gimmick.
The Nike senior innovator has been working on the project for more than a decade now. Read More

 Cloud storage company Box reported third-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations with a record $102.8 million in revenue, a 31 percent increase year-over-year and above predictions of $100.64 million. Adjusted earnings per share showed a loss of 14 cents, better than the negative 19 cents that analysts were forecasting and a 17-cent improvement from… Read More

 Amazon’s popular Snowball storage container got a major update today at the company’s re:invent conference. Though largely overshadowed by the new batshit crazy AWS Snowmobile, the aforementioned Snowball will be getting a storage increase to 100 terabytes in addition to computing functionality. Users of the new Snowball Edge will be able to perform basic analysis on their data… Read More

 Reddit will start issuing warnings, timeouts and permanent bans to its most abusive trolls, but will also limit the content manipulation capabilities of its own CEO after he apologized today for ethical violations that shook the trust of the online community.
Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by the handle Spez, secretly edited users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit… Read More

 Amazon today announced the launch of AWS Greengrass, a new service that will be built into IoT devices to bring them better and smarter compute capabilities.
As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted in today’s keynote at Amazon’s re:Invent developer conference, Amazon expects that the majority of on-premises hardware will soon be IoT devices as enterprises move their servers into the cloud. Read More