Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” era, one characterized by military jackets, black sequins and snarls, is coming to a close and, apparently, that means her one-year-old mobile app is too. The Swift Life, a gamified app developed in partnership with freemium mobile games maker Glu Mobile, announced this week that it would shut down effective February 1. Users…
A hacker has targeted and released private data on German chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German lawmakers and officials. The data was leaked from a Twitter account, since suspended, and included email addresses, phone numbers, photo IDs and other personal data on hundreds of senior political figures. According to a government spokesperson, there was…
An ongoing case in Singapore is testing the legal boundaries of virtual conferences. A court in the Southeast Asian city-state this week convicted human rights activist Jolovan Wham of organizing a public assembly via Skype without a permit and refusing to sign his statement when ordered by the police. Wham will be sentenced on January 23…
Samsung always has a huge presence at CES, but it isn’t the giant TVs and flashy next-generation gadgets that have my attention this year; it’s this simple, flexible monitor that looks like it would be right at home in any workspace. It’s called the Space Monitor, presumably because it gives you space, not because it’s…
Several weeks ago, the WSJ reported that SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, was set to raise $500 million from earlier shareholders and the Scottish money management firm Baillie Gifford & Co. in a bid to help get its internet-service business off the ground. The Hawthorne, Ca. company still hasn’t announced the round, but it nevertheless made…
Vengo, a six-year-old, Bethpage, New York-based startup that makes touchscreen vending machines for a wide variety of uses and clients, has raised $7 million in new equity funding, shows a new SEC filing. That roughly doubles the amount of money the company has raised over the years, including from such notable investors as Brad Feld,…
Very rarely does an early technology garner such an air of inevitability like AR has in the past few years. 2018 was supposed to be a year where the foundational tech for augmented reality was built out a bit and the industry took a couple big leaps. Things started off well-enough, but momentum really doesn’t…
Netflix has issued a warning to its customers thanks to a meme challenge that has gone viral in which people are choosing to put blindfolds on and navigate the world around them just like the characters in the horror movie “Bird Box.” Let the hilarity and the hospital visits begin. For those who spent the…
Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl! This occurrence reveals…
My parents are approaching 60. When they were young, they hung out at diners, or drove around in their cars. My generation hung out in the parking lot after school, or at the mall. My colleague John Biggs often talks of hanging out with his nerd buddies in his basement, playing games and making crank…
