Category: Tech news

 It hasn’t been a fun time to be Intel. Last week the company revealed two chip vulnerabilities that have come to be known as Spectre and Meltdown and have been rocking the entire chip industry ever since. This week the company issued some patches to rectify the problem. Today, word leaked that some companies were having a reboot issue after installing them. A bad week just got worse. Read More

 Intel had a bad week last week. It was so bad that the chip maker has to be thrilled to have CES, the massive consumer technology show going on this week in Las Vegas, as a way to change the subject and focus on the other work they are doing. Read More

 Luma, a three-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based maker of smart Wi-Fi routers, has been acquired by First Alert, a maker of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors that is itself a subsidiary of Newell Brands, a public company whose other holdings include Rubbermaid. Read More

 New York-based Boxed, the startup for buying food and household items in bulk, is in talks to be acquired by Kroger for about $500 million. Other retailers are also expected to be making bids. The news was first reported by Forbes and confirmed to TechCrunch by a source with knowledge of the situation. We’re hearing that the company is aiming to make a decision this weekend. Founded… Read More

 According to a new report, the same group that hacked the Democratic National Committee actively targeted the U.S. Senate through the latter half of 2017. The revelation comes out of a new report from Trend Micro, a Japanese firm that has revealed similar phishing schemes taking aim at foreign governments in the past. Read More

 You may not think much about the switches that sit underneath the keycaps of your keyboard, but there are many enthusiasts who really, really care. The trend is clearly going toward slim keyboards — and that’s not lost on Cherry. At CES this week, the company introduced a new line of keyboard switches that may just be small enough to bring mechanical keyboards to more laptops. Read More

 Planetary Resources, the space mining company backed by Google’s Larry Page and Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, has taken another step in its quest to actually mine resources from asteroids and other planetary bodies. The company successfully launched its Arkyd-6 CubeSat, which is holding an experimental technology designed to detect water resources in space. Read More

 The Yesojo Nintendo Switch projector dock got a lot of attention when we covered the launch of its crowdfunding campaign last year, but at CES, it was on display and working, with the company ready to ship to its early backers. We got to spend some time with the portable projector, which gives your Switch a high-resolution screen you can take with you anywhere – and we came away very… Read More

 Netflix was the top earning app of 2017 that wasn’t a mobile game, according to Sensor Tower’s new year-end report on the most successful apps and publishers across Apple’s App Store and Google Play. In previous years, the top spot had gone to Spotify, and before that, LINE. But this was Netflix’s year to shine. The service saw gross subscriber revenue of approximately… Read More

 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, are donating $33 million in the form of a scholarship grant to help 1,000 undocumented immigrant high school graduates with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status attend college. The Bezos grant comes through TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for Dreamers. Read More

 Just a few weeks ago I was in Utah for the holidays, spending time with the many family members my husband and I both have there. At one family gathering, a cousin began talking about how he bought a brand new home and sold his own home all without a real estate agent on a site called Homie. Read More

 Cortana gets no respect. Microsoft’s smart assistant is actually pretty solid, all things told, but it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. Maybe it’s a problem of marketing —the company was quick to point at Build in May that its smart assistant now has 141 million monthly users. More likely though, it’s a problem with… Read More

 Facebook shares fell around 5 percent on Friday following the news that the company would retool its News Feed to boost social interactions over stories from publishers. Mark Zuckerberg announced the news on Thursday evening in a post on his own Facebook page to expected investor skittishness. Read More

 One in six Americans now own a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from NPR and Edison Research – a figure that’s up 128 percent from January, 2017. Amazon’s Echo speakers are still in the lead, the report says, as 11 percent now own an Amazon Alexa device compared with 4 percent who own a Google Home product. Today, 16 percent of Americans own a smart… Read More

 IBM has been a company adrift for the last several years with 22 straight quarters of declining revenue. Against that backdrop, The Register published an article yesterday suggesting there could be massive changes afoot for the company’s Global Technology Services group. Global Technology Services is the business consulting arm of IBM that deals with infrastructure support and… Read More