Verizon names Los Angeles as the second of four cities to receive 5G rollout before 2019

My boss’ boss’ boss was on CNBC this morning touting Verizon‘s new 5G services and naming Los Angeles as the second city in America to be treated to a commercial rollout of the new networking technology. “I think we’re a lot closer than people think,” says Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdam of the nation’s move to […]

Lime is reportedly trying to squeeze up to $500 million out of VCs

Lime, the electric scooter and bike company, is looking to raise up to $500 million in new funding, Axios reports, citing sources. The round could come in the form of both equity and debt, according to Axios. To date, Lime has raised $132 million from investors. Its most recent round was just in February, when […]

Twitter algorithm changes will hide more bad tweets and trolls

Twitter’s latest effort to curb trolling and abuse on the site takes some of the burden off users and places it on the company’s algorithms. If you tap on a Twitter or real world celebrity’s tweet more often than not there’s a bot as one of the first replies. This has been an issue for […]

Scientists ripped a memory from one snail and injected it into another

A team of neuroscientists at UCLA yesterday unveiled the results of an experiment involving snail brains that could radically change our understanding of how memories work. That is, if the rest of the scientific community can suspend its disbelief long enough to give the group’s ideas serious consideration. The scientists, led by Dr. David Glanzman, extracted RNA from the brains of Aplysia – sea slugs – and then injected it into the brain of another Aplysia. According to the researchers’ white paper, this resulted in the transfer of memories from one creature to another: Here, it is demonstrated that the…

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Guess the killer in Snapchat’s murder mystery show

Tomorrow, Snapchat will debut its latest show, the scripted murder mystery series Solve, that invites the audience to guess the killer. Each four-minute episode dramatizes a real crime and asks viewers who the culprit was before revealing the truth -...

Here maps helps the Mercedes S560 tackle sharp corners

As the car approaches a sharp bend on a back road in Northern California, the $155,000 (starting at $99,900) Mercedes-Benz S560 slows down of its own accord. I guide it through the corner with a bit of help from lane keep assist. Then, as the vehicle...

Lynq is a dead-simple gadget for finding your friends outdoors

If you've ever been hiking or skiing, gone to a music festival or state fair, you know how easy it is to lose track of your friends, and the usually ridiculous exchange of "I'm by the big thing"-type messages. Lynq is a gadget that fixes this problem with an ultra-simple premise: it simply tells you how far and in what direction your friends are, no data connection required.

Julian Assange’s protection reportedly cost Ecuador millions

The Ecuadorian government has apparently spent quite a bit of money protecting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. According to a report at The Guardian, the country had the full assent of the Ecuadorian president and foreign minister to "protect" Assa...

Amazon Sumerian, a platform for building AR, VR and 3D apps, is now open to all

Last November, AWS announced a new product called Amazon Sumerian, a toolkit and platform for developers to build “mixed reality” apps — that is, using virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D — without needing to have any specialised programming or graphics skills. And today, after running the service in a private beta for the last several […]

Google’s Pixel Buds learn some new tricks

I/O may have ended, but Google’s still trickling out news at a steady rate. The latest update comes from one of the more unexpected corners of the Googleverse. Pixel Buds, the company’s hotly anticipated and lukewarmly received bluetooth headphones are getting a nice software update. In a blog post today, the company highlighted some new […]

Blogger gets a spring cleaning

Blogger, the blogging platform Google acquired back in 2003, is somehow still alive and kicking, even though few people remember it still exists. But alive it is — and it’s even getting some updates to its Google+ integration that will see all those 20 people still on Google+ rejoice. After a year of inactivity, Blogger’s […]

Cheaper VR is coming: will it be enough to kick-start consumer interest?

For years, we’ve been teased with the promise of a technological revolution, with the onset of virtual reality (VR). Oculus Rift was released in March of 2016, with demos portraying the technology as being incredibly powerful, immersive, and to some users, life-changing. But sales were underwhelming. Even today, though sales are steadily improving, the total number of VR headsets is failing to meet the sky-high user expectations that led up to their debut. Part of this is due to excessive hype, built up by VR companies trying to sell more products and reinforced by the cultural expectations we’ve set for…

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Sarah Guo breaks through at Greylock, becoming one of the first female general partners in the firm’s 53-year history

Sarah Guo didn’t necessarily set out to become a venture capitalist. She certainly didn’t imagine she would become one of the first general partners at one of the oldest venture firms in the country. Yet Guo is both of these things today. Indeed, the venture firm Greylock Partners, which Guo joined five years ago as […]

Canal+ gives up on its cable box, switches to Apple TV

French premium cable television company Canal+ is slowly moving away from building its own set top boxes. As Next INpact spotted, you can now subscribe to Canal+ and get an Apple TV 4K with Canal+’s myCanal app already preloaded. Canal+ has been around for decades and was the first premium TV channel in France. Over […]

AT&T’s DirecTV Now live TV service launches a DVR, upgrades the app with new features

AT&T’s over-the-top streaming service for cord cutters, DirecTV Now, is finally beginning to roll out its cloud DVR feature – a year and a half after its launch. The DVR has been in testing since last year, with AT&T in seemingly no hurry to push out the feature that’s since become a baseline for live […]

Google Compute Engine now offers VMs with up to 3844GB of memory

Sometimes, you just need more RAM. That’s especially true when you want to run memory-hungry enterprise applications like SAP’s HANA database or high-performance computing workloads. Until now, if you wanted the Google Compute Engine to run applications like that, your options topped out at 624GB of memory. Starting today, though, the company is going beyond […]

Zuckerberg again snubs UK parliament over call to testify

Facebook has once again eschewed a direct request from the UK parliament for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify to a committee investigating online disinformation — without rustling up so much as a fig-leaf-sized excuse to explain why the founder of one of the world’s most used technology platforms can’t squeeze a video call into […]

Twitch lets you filter PUBG streams based on how many players are still alive

Twitch this week announced a new feature which allows viewers to filter streams in the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds by the number of players left in the game. No one likes a chicken dinner when it’s cold. Be there for the big moments by watching @PUBG on Twitch with our new custom filters. pic.twitter.com/A4w2z0Bs2s — Twitch (@Twitch) May 15, 2018 The context: The filters let you choose PUBG streams with more than 50 players remaining, 25-50, or less than 25. You can also filter streams by those who are playing solo or in teams. Twitch’s announcement tweet implies the filter’s for…

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MemSQL raises $30M Series D round for its real-time database

MemSQL, a company best known for the real-time capabilities of its eponymous in-memory database, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series D round, bringing the company’s overall funding to $110 million. The round was led by GV (the firm you probably still refer to as Google Ventures) and Glynn Capital. Existing investors […]

Tweetbot 3 arrives with a new look…and a reprieve from Twitter’s API changes

One of the more popular desktop clients for Twitter, Tweetbot, is today launching a completely rewritten version of its software, Tweetbot 3 for Mac. The updated app introduces new features like timeline filters, a new notifications view, an upgraded navigation sidebar, and more. At the same time, the company is also detailing what impact to […]

Quarterback lets top esports gamers and streamers create their own fan-based leagues

In an effort to tie the top gamers and streamers more directly with their fans, a new company called Quarterback has just raised $2.5 million to create and manage fan-based leagues for the superstars of the esports and streaming world. The company raked in its seed round from investors led by Bitkraft Esports, which is […]

How to save your home WiFi from weak signals and evil hackers

Everybody seems to love Wi-Fi. So do I. After all, who doesn’t want to have seamless internet access, across different devices, while roaming around their house? But this apparent ease of installation and usefulness can make your Wi-Fi network slow and vulnerable to attacks. To help you out, here’s how we can improve the overall state of our home Wi-Fi networks. Better router placement The placement of a wireless router is very important in deciding whether it’ll cover your whole house or not. Most people don’t think of their router as a beautiful device they can show off to their peers. That’s…

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Music payments startup Exactuals debuts R.AI, a ‘Palantir for music royalties’

Exactuals, a software service offering payments management for the music industry, is debuting R.AI, a new tool that it’s dubbed the “Palantir for music.” It’s a service that can track songwriting information and rights across different platforms to ensure attribution for music distributors. As companies like Apple and Spotify demand better information from labels about the […]

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus now support ARCore

ARCore is Google's answer to Apple's ARKit -- an easy tool for developers to make augmented reality Android apps. It's a great idea, and an awesome way to make AR more accessible to all levels of developers. The catch was that it was only compatible...

Netflix and ESPN are working on a Michael Jordan documentary series

Netflix used to be a solid option for watching ESPN's 30 for 30 series. Then parent company Disney decided to launch its own sports streaming service and the documentaries disappeared from Netflix. Well, today's news should help: The pair are officia...