Category: Tech news

 An Oculus update posted today quietly removes a feature that blocked Oculus software from being played on other headsets — something that the community has been up in arms about for a month. The removal is essentially a mea culpa from Oculus, which over the last few weeks has faced hard questions from press and users about its strategy in locking down content to its own platform. Read More

 Are we living in a simulation? For whatever reason, this is a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. It all more or less started when Tesla Motors CEO (and soon to be SolarCity CEO — check one off for the simulation argument there) Elon Musk made a claim at the Code Conference that there’s such a high chance that we’re living in a simulation that it’s more likely we… Read More

 Along with news that it’s preparing to introduce live streaming support in its main mobile application, YouTube also this week announced a series of new features for its creator community. The details, which include a new Creator Hub, better support, a benefits program and other tools, were unveiled Thursday at VidCon, an event focused on online video and digital culture. In a… Read More

 Attention, budget-conscious tech enthusiasts. Today is the last day to get Disrupt SF tickets at the deeply discounted extra-early-bird price point of $1,795 apiece — $1,200 off the full ticket price and $200 cheaper than they’ll be tomorrow. Read More

 There are some men who want to watch the the world burn and others who want to offer it easily customizable embedded calculators. Mateusz Mucha belongs to the latter camp. Mucha is a sociologist by training who has built multiple small startups. His latest project, Omni Calculator, is completely bootstrapped and has three employees building clever calculators for various formulae. “We… Read More

 YouTube, sounding a little miffed that House representatives were livestreaming their sit-in using Periscope and Facebook Live, reminded its community that it has been offering livestreaming on its site since 2011, “before it was cool,” the company snarked in a series of announcements emerging from this week’s VidCon event. That may be true, but a single-purpose app… Read More

 Virtual reality is all the buzz nowadays. And why wouldn’t it be when analysts like Goldman Sachs make estimates that the industry is poised to surpass the TV market in annual revenue by 2025. That would make virtual reality bigger than TV in less than 10 years. These estimates are so massive because the breakthrough technology has the ability to extend itself into so many markets… Read More

 Location feeds linked to from these tags could inspire people to tweet more while out and about, fuel Moments about particular places, and improve Twitter’s ad targeting data. Better location functionality could be an important building block for Twitter’s future products and revenue potential. [Update: What’s new is that specific location tags now appear in the main… Read More

 What do you do when nobody is paying attention to your shiny new line of cameras? You could put together a campaign that shows how good your tech is and how it is the perfect match to your target audiences. Or you could go the other way, enlisting a Trump impersonator and an inexcusable dollop of stereotypes to try to get the word out. Guess which option 360fly chose. Yeah. Let’s talk… Read More

This connected bike computer shows you live stats about your ride, and can even share some of them to Facebook. The post Review: Wahoo Fitness Elemnt appeared first on WIRED.

 Eliot Peper has been lauded as the heir to William Gibson’s throne. He is a writer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco and is latest book, Cumulus, has become an online hit. The energy of his writing and the strength of his characters is palpable the story – a world in which surveillance is constant and inescapable – is fast coming true. What follows is an excerpt from… Read More

 In the spring of 2015, a group of Chinese scientists modified the DNA of 54 embryos using CRISPR/Cas 9 technology. Twenty-eight of those embryos were successful, but 26 — nearly half of them — failed, setting off a heated debate throughout the scientific community on the ethics of altering human genes. Regulators don’t currently allow the use of CRISPR on human DNA in the… Read More

 When you really need to get a signal in from Pluto, a direct connection isn’t always possible. Oh sure, when it’s a big project like New Horizons, you can make sure the line is clear and someone’s listening — but for routine updates from a Neptune orbiter or power-starved comet lander, there’s Delay Tolerant Networking, which just got its first big installation on… Read More

 Bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to Nerf battles — but… well, this one wins.
It’s a four foot tall recreation of the Nerf N-Strike Maverick — one of the greatest Nerf guns of all time. Oh, and it works. It shoots massive darts* at around 40 miles per hour. Read More

 The last we heard from AirBoxLab, the company was presenting an indoor air quality monitor called Alima in the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield at CES 2014. In the two years since that event, the company has rebranded the Alima as the Foobot, raised €2 million and shifted focus from simply monitoring air quality to improving it. When Foobot released a direct to consumer product back in… Read More