We’d heard months ago that Amazon would be using its Re:Invent AWS event to roll out some a new service related to building in mixed reality — augmented reality and virtual reality. And on the eve of the conference kicking off, it’s done just that. Today the company announced Amazon Sumerian, a new platform for
At Disrupt Berlin, we have a special treat for attendees who want to engage with our main stage speakers and other experts on the big topics in the tech and startup world. We call these Off the Record sessions (OTRs). Although technically not ‘off the record,’ they are a great opportunity to ask our speakers
Simon Lee, founder and CEO of Flitto Artificial intelligence-powered translation is becoming an increasingly crowded category, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all working on their own services. But tech still isn’t a match for professional human translations and machine-generated results are often hit-and-miss. One online translation service, Flitto, is now focused on providing other
I’ve been thinking about token sale marketing lately mostly because it’s been so bad. I’ve gotten hundreds of emails asking me to be an ICO advisor or evangelist or influencer primarily because the ICO marketing techniques come to us straight out of the spammiest corners of affiliate marketing. I’ve gotten emails from founders who have
More VC money sloshing around Europe: In what was probably one of the worst kept secrets in European VC, London-based Balderton Capital is announcing a new $375 million fund. I understand that it actually closed earlier this year, however, and I’m told has already been used to make ten investments. In fact, although the firm
For decades technology companies have enjoyed a near-unbroken run of great publicity. Products and services are lauded as shiny and covetable. Adoption is couched as inevitable. Direction goes unquestioned. Engineering genius is assumed. And a generous margin is indefinitely applied to gloss over day-to-day errors (‘oh, just a few bugs!’) — allowing problematic functioning to
Three years and seven phones later, it’s hard to argue with OnePlus’s methods. That’s not to say it hasn’t made its share of missteps along the way (it definitely has), but the company has produced quality phones at affordable prices basically since day one. OnePlus’s whole “never settle” tagline is less about offering up handsets
Smartphones are inarguably an addictive class of devices, and not just because they put an endless font of information at your fingertips. The very experience of holding the phone and touching it is itself associated with that pleasure — so much so that you might wish you were doing it even when you don’t want
Here’s a scary thought for decision makers inside large organizations grappling with digital transformation. You can actually be innovative and have mechanisms in place to react to disruptive forces, and still get steamrolled as layers of internal management turn your creative ideas into something unrecognizable. Kodak is a company that’s always held up as the
Holiday shopping sales are aplenty. Here are a few tips to keep in mind for Cyber Monday and throughout the season. For the hottest gifts, check out CNET’s …
In this week’s wrap-up, hunting down hard-to-find gadgets online gets simpler. Meanwhile, time’s running out to watch some quality films over on Netflix.
The $3100 GE GFD28GELDS isn’t as fancy as it looks, and its marquee feature is a pure gimmick that compromises performance. Don’t buy this — or any other …
Pokémon Go creator Niantic has raised a new $200 million in funding, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Series B raise was led by Spark Capital, and includes participation from Founders Fund, Meritech, Javelin Venture Capital, You & Mr. Jones and NetEase, Inc. Spark partner Megan Quinn is also joining Niantic’s board as part of
Snap Inc’s stock tanked after missing revenue expectations by $30 million last quarter, so Snapchat is looking to win over businesses with immersive new ads formats. This week it introduced two new forms of ads: Promoted Stories which string together multiple Snaps into a longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page that’s
Here’s a few tips to tell if a deal is actually a good deal before you buy on Cyber Monday. Subscribe to CNET: http://cnet.co/2heRhep Check out our playlists: …
A number of bed-in-a-box startups have taken different approaches to selling their mattresses and bed ware in the last year. Casper and Tuft and Needle, for instance, launched their own branded physical store locations. However, Purple, a mattress startup out of Utah that recently merged with a New York shell company, took a different approach,
Amazon has been one of the strongest driving forces behind the surge of e-commerce holiday sales around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the rest of the days leading to the end of the new year. Now, some of its workers in Europe have picked one of the biggest shopping days of the year to protest the
The HomePod is delayed to “early 2018,” new iMac Pro details are out before its December release and an Apple TV tip from a caller! Subscribe to CNET: …
Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that will show how many people are “talking about” individual, popular tweets. The metric shows up under some embedded tweets when they appear elsewhere on the web, and seems to replace both the retweet and replies totals with one, cumulative total. The new look for embeds as seen
Can a cryptocurrency push back against the tide of hate speech, ‘fake news’ and divisive politics? A new initiative, Ananas, is going to try. Effectively, they want to fight radicalization by “mapping ideologies”, providing a compass to navigate belief systems and using cryptocurrency to reward contributors. The UK-based new charitable foundation plans to create a
The UK’s digital minister has said the October 2016 data breach that Uber disclosed this week does affect UK users — though it’s still unclear how many are impacted at this stage. Making a statement in parliament yesterday, Matt Hancock said: We are verifying the extent and the amount of information. When we have a
Fintech startup Revolut has reached a big milestone. The company now has over a million customers across Europe two years and a half after launch. The company says that customers have saved $160 million in foreign exchange fees compared to a traditional bank account (£120 million). The startup tries to match the interbank rates as
The Moto Z is a phone built around a strong gimmick, but it’s a gimmick nonetheless. A little over a year after release, the company has added some interesting Mods to its selection, but none have offered an entirely compelling justification for the phone’s modular system. That certainly applies to the new Alexa Smart Speaker.
The Tesla Semi, the automaker’s all-electric transport truck, will retail starting at $150,000 for a version with 300 miles of range, and will also be available in a $150,000 version with 500 miles of range. Interested parties can pre-order them with a base reservation price of $20,000 – or, if they want a “Founders Series,”
Your holiday dinner table is set. Your guests are ready to gab. And, then, in between bites, someone mentions Alexa and AI. “What’s this stuff I’m hearing about killer AI? Cars that decide who to run over? This is crazy!” Welcome to Thanksgiving table talk circa 2017. It’s true that AI and machine learning are
In recent times, it’s Eastern Europe and Russia which have become a hot-bed of crytpocurrency development. But on a recent trip to Tel Aviv, Israel, I took part in what might well turn out to be a historic lunch. The lunch took place just after well-known tech investor Moshe Hogeg announced he would invest in
Another neat addition to end-to-end encrypted email client ProtonMail: It’s added a zero-access encrypted contacts manager that also digitally signs the contact info you store in it. The new features have been added to v3.12 of ProtonMail’s web client, with the Swiss-based startup saying it’s working on also bringing the feature to its Android and
To buy or not to buy? Tech Today gives you advice about Black Friday deals on LG OLED TVs. Subscribe to CNET: http://cnet.co/2heRhep Check out our …
Last month, Twitter started work on a new “save for later” feature for Tweets in your timeline that you wanted to flag to refer back to in the future. Now it’s given the feature a name — it will be called Bookmarks — and is running tests with it. The news was made public last
Tesla has managed to deliver something on time, even if it ’s falling behind its projections for the Model 3 electric car: It has completed production of a massive battery farm in South Australia, which is designed to capture and store energy produced by a wind farm and distribute it to the grid when it’s