As Apple looks to set itself up to Wall Street as the de facto standard of what a smartphone can — and should — look like as consumer demand evolves over time, it was able for the large part to deliver on that claim as it showed up with a big beat in the fourth quarter. Read More
Nintendo’s having a good year, and it looks like the latest Mario is set to make it even better. Super Mario Odyssey is the fastest-selling Mario ever, in the U.S. at least, breezing past a million sales in under five days here and selling more than 2 million worldwide — and counting. Read More
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs smart city subsidiary is working with Toronto to help plan a brand new community, but nothing’s set in stone on that front yet, with a 12-month lead-up period during which they’ll work out the project and make sure all involved agree to move forward. But that doesn’t mean Sidewalk has to wait at least a year to start exploring how some of its… Read More
Music streaming business Pandora reported earnings after the bell on Thursday. Adjusted earnings per share were negative six cents, better than the negative eight cents that Yahoo Finance analysts were predicting. Revenue was $378.6 million, an 8 percent year-over-year increase from last year. Yet it’s beneath the $380.57 million that analysts were expecting. Read More
WeWork has money to blow, so the $20 billion startup is putting some of it toward a second headquarters — this time in San Francisco instead of New York, Recode reports. The plan is to locate the HQ in the new 61-floor Salesforce Tower, which is slated to open next year. Read More
Anyone who has used modern meeting software knows it’s still fraught with challenges trying to get everyone into the meeting, futzing with the hardware or software and smoothly integrating external documents like PowerPoint presentations. Cisco is trying to improve and simplify the meeting experience with voice commands, and today it introduced Cisco Spark Assistant, a voice… Read More
Elemental Path has come a long way since it debuted its first Cognitoy at Disrupt in 2016. The smart toy maker debuted on Kickstarter with an IBM Watson-powered toy dinosaur kids could talk to. It’s now launching a whole new dino robot, the STEMosaur. The new dino looks similar to Elemental’s original smart toy but is now a translucent green and lets kids put it together and… Read More
Mobile’s contribution to holiday shopping, in terms of both visits and sales, has been growing every year. But the 2017 holiday shopping season will hit a new milestone: for the first time ever, mobile visits to retailer’s websites are expected to surpass desktop visits during the months of November and December. Consumers shopping from the desktop will continue to account for… Read More
In the face of fierce competition from Spotify and Apple Music, Pandora has been growing its in-app subscription revenues, according to new data from Sensor Tower. The streaming music service earned the number one spot on the chart of top grossing apps in Q3 2017, excluding games. It’s the first time Pandora has held that position since the third quarter of 2015.
Fueling the music… Read More
Blue Apron just can’t catch a break. The New York-based cooking kit business released its third-quarter earnings before the bell on Thursday. The results were mixed. The company handily beat revenue expectations, but its losses were also worse than expected. Read More
At Google’s Go North event today in Toronto, which features a slate of speakers focused primarily on artificial intelligence, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt spoke to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (and actually asked him some tough questions on NAFTA negotiations and his feelings about Trump, surprisingly). Trudeau talked a lot about the Canadian perspective on innovation, and about… Read More
The posters and trailers for Thor: Ragnarok promised something different — a movie that’s a little more psychedelic than your typical Marvel film, a little more retro, while taking itself a lot less seriously. Ragnarok mostly delivers on that promise. The film, which officially opens tomorrow in the U.S., is directed by Taika Waititi, best known for the comedies What We Do In… Read More
How can companies stop the best employees from leaving? Money. A good corporate culture. But some people are dissatisfied with the skills they’re gaining in their roles. Rallyteam has found that talented millennials often leave companies because the jobs aren’t challenging enough or leading them to their desired career path. The startup is working with corporations to keep… Read More
Once Alphabet’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind had masted the ability to defeat the best human Go players in the world, it tried to beat its own best attempts using an approach based strictly on a virtual Go player that was totally self-taught. That Go-playing virtual intelligence was called AlphaGo Zero, and it managed to rediscover over 3,000 years of human knowledge around… Read More
VMware announced today that it was acquiring VeloCloud, a startup that focuses on cloud-based wide area networks (WAN), those networks that span a broad area across data centers or regions. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.
The news confirms a report that The Information first reported yesterday.
The company appears to be an excellent fit as one of the primary use cases is… Read More
Just when you thought great burger debate had abated, Snapchat has arrived to pour more lighter fluid on the grill. This week, Snap unveiled a cheeseburger AR filter, and it has the same devil-may-care attitude as its famous sibling, the dancing hotdog. Lettuce catch you up on the drama. On Saturday, author Thomas Baekdal had emoji lovers everywhere scratching their heads when he noticed… Read More
At Google’s second annual Go North conference, much of the focus is on artificial intelligence and its impact on our world. The conference kicked off with a discussion between OpenAI Director Shivon Zilis and AI Fund Director of Ethics and Governance Tim Hwang, and both shared perspective on AI’s progress, its public perception, and how we can help ensure its responsible… Read More
Alexa is getting its first celebrity voice, and it’s Oprah. Before you get too excited, Oprah won’t respond to your day-to-day questions, as Alexa does – instead, the addition of Oprah’s voice is part of a holiday shopping promotion between Oprah’s O magazine and Amazon, where Oprah will help Alexa customers shop her “Favorite Things.”
O, The Oprah… Read More
Aufmerksamkeit, menschen! You know what makes Disrupt Berlin Europe’s premier tech conference for startups, entrepreneurs, investors and hackers more exciting (who knew that was even possible)? Free tickets to the Hackathon. That’s right. We just released the first round of free Hackathon tickets into the wild. They’re available on a first-come, first-served basis until… Read More
Children who are about to rock, we salute you. The Loog Pro is a guitar made just for kids and features three strings that can be tuned in various open tunings for easy playing. The original Loog guitar was an acoustic marvel, small enough for a toddler but enough versatile for older players. This new Pro model, which costs $199 online, basically cleans up the concept and offers a very… Read More
