Sunday, March 4, 2018

Netflix’s ‘Icarus’ wins the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature

Icarus It was a quiet Oscar ceremony for the big streaming services, but Netflix’s doping film Icarus (directed by Bryan Fogel) did win the award for best documentary feature. The Big Sick, distributed by Amazon Studios, was nominated for best original screenplay, while Netflix’s Mudbound was nominated for best adapted screenplay, cinematography (amazingly, Rachel Morrison is the first… Read More

Netflix wins an Oscar for sports doping documentary 'Icarus'

Netflix didn't take home any Oscars for its critically beloved film, Mudbound, but it did get a win for Icarus, an explosive documentary about the Russian sports doping scandal. The doc, directed by Bryan Fogel, premiered at Sundance last year, after...

'StarCraft' 20th anniversary brings freebies and a short film

Blizzard is keeping up its habit of marking the anniversaries of major games. The original StarCraft is turning 20 on March 31st, and the studio is promising a slew of extras across its games to mark the occasion, including the classic real-time str...

HTC U12 leak points to the return of dual rear cameras

HTC said it would return to dual rear cameras in 2018, and we now have an idea as to when that might happen. LlabTooFer, a historically accurate source of HTC-related leaks, has posted what's claimed to be specs for the Imagine (aka U12), and its ce...

EU details its taxes on tech companies' revenue

The European Union has vowed to counter tech companies' tax maneuvers by targeting their revenue, and it's now clearer just what that will involve. In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the EU would...

Medics may slow biological time to save soldiers' lives

Battlefield medics frequently only have a brief window of opportunity to treat an injury before it's fatal or causes permanent disabilities, and it's frequently so fleeting that there's not much they can do. DARPA is exploring an unusual solution to...

Cuba's 'sonic attacks' may have been a side-effect of spying

Remember those 'sonic attacks' against the American and Canadian embassies last summer, making staff queasy and raising all kinds of questions as to what happened? There might have an answer. University of Michigan researchers have theorized that t...

Notes from Shenzhen — the next Greater Bay Area

 I just walked into Shenzhen, and boy, is my mind boggled. Let me just get all my knee-jerk chorus-line reactions out of the way, before we get to the weird stuff: yes, this place is amazing. Yes, the scores of shiny new skyscrapers look like something out of science fiction. Yes, the electronics markets are colossal hives of sensory overload, buzzing nonstop with small-scale high-tech… Read More

Advertisers pull out of InfoWars' YouTube channels

Brands are once again beating a hasty retreat after learning that they were running ads on objectionable YouTube channels. Several big brands (including Acer, Alibaba, Fox, Nike and Paramount) have suspended ads from InfoWars' channels after CNN de...

ICOs delivered at least 3.5x more capital to blockchain startups than VC since 2017

 Recently, we found that, for 2018, the amount of money being raised by blockchain and blockchain-adjacent companies via traditional VC rounds is on pace to surpass 2017’s highs. But despite more than $900 million in recorded venture funding in 2017, and more than $375 million in known venture funding for the first two months of 2018 so far, traditional VC rounds — convertible… Read More

Snapchat is stuck in the uncanny valley of AR glasses

 “Timing”, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said cryptically when asked what the greatest threat was for Snap Inc. “I think the big risks are always the really big product ideas that we’re investing in that are just hard to get right” he told the Goldman Sachs conference two weeks ago. The statements got lost amongst flashier quotes. He defended the Snapchat redesign… Read More

Snapchat is stuck in the uncanny valley of AR glasses

 “Timing”, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said cryptically when asked what the greatest threat was for Snap Inc. “I think the big risks are always the really big product ideas that we’re investing in that are just hard to get right” he told the Goldman Sachs conference two weeks ago. The statements got lost amongst flashier quotes. He defended the Snapchat redesign… Read More