Enlarge / Extended warranties and unlimited tech support—including on things you didn’t purchase from Best Buy in the first place—are bigger potential value-adds to Best Buy Beta than the ubiquitous free shipping. Best Buy Best Buy is floating a new membership program called Best Buy Beta in some test markets. The new program, somewhat like […]
The trailer for Recovery, which enjoyed its world premiere at SXSW 2021. The second edition of South by Southwest to take place in the middle of our in-progress pandemic just wrapped. Maybe this should’ve been obvious beforehand—since everyone from Michael Bay to Netflix rolled out shot-in-quarantine films in recent months—but the era of COVID-19 films […]
The power of data in gaming’s red-hot market Learn how to seize the power of data to attract and keep players, create personalized gaming experiences, and cash in on the industry’s seismic growth. Register Now Only Josef Fares could make a heartwarming video game about divorce. His newest creation, It Takes Two, debuted yesterday as a […]
Kids mode, where Google says you’ll get “rows with recommendations from kid-friendly apps.” This is what the Google TV interface normally looks like. Google You can pick a cool dinosaur theme. Google The parental controls look a lot more friendly and aren’t just something buried in the system settings. Google It sure sounds like Google […]
Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original. The recompiled versions haven’t done anything about the ever-present fog shrouding far-off objects, unfortunately. Shiny roads. Cool guys walking away from sunrises. A Github project that generated reverse-engineered code for Grand Theft Auto III and Vice […]
Enlarge Aurich Lawson / Getty Images Getting older video games to run on newer consoles may seem like a simple idea: the new boxes are faster, so older, weaker games should just work, right? Things never quite work out that way, especially when architecture changes dramatically between console generations, which is why we’ve been fascinated […]
How open banking is driving huge innovation Learn how fintechs and forward-thinking FIs are accelerating personalized financial products through data-rich APIs. Register Now The Linux Foundation announced today that an open source Magma platform for building wireless networks will now be managed under its auspices. Originally developed by Facebook, the founding members of the Magma […]
Enlarge / Tokyo residents find themselves trapped in a post-apocalyptic parallel world called Borderland, where they must compete in deadly games to survive. Netflix In the carefree, pre-pandemic Before Times, escape rooms were all the rage as fun group activities, where people had to solve a puzzle or mystery, or complete a series of tasks, […]
Launching IE in Windows 10 immediately brings up a page suggesting Edge. Samuel Axon Here’s Microsoft’s timeline for this series of changes. MIcrosoft Microsoft 365 apps will end support for Internet Explorer 11 by the end of 2021, Microsoft announced in a company blog post this week. It’s a big step from the company, which […]
The Sony ZV-1 was not a fluke. Vloggers are taking over, and camera manufacturers are reaching for this new market. Panasonic charged into the vlogging game Wednesday, June 24, with the new Lumix G100, a compact mirrorless camera built for the modern content creator. Like the recently introduced Sony ZV-1, the G100 includes a number of […]
OAKLAND, Calif. — By the end of his 15 years at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy, then the executive in charge of the company’s $ 115 billion advertising arm, had grown disillusioned with the business he had helped build. The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth, he said, had come at a heavy cost to the company’s […]
After years of wheel-spinning, Google is frantically trying to compete in the video messaging space, where the coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion in demand for video conferencing. Meet’s latest feature is noise cancellation for video conferencing, which can cut out a lot of the annoying background noises you would normally encounter in video […]
Germany’s forthcoming coronavirus contact-tracing app will trigger alerts only if users test positive for Covid-19. That puts it at odds with the NHS app, which instead relies on users self-diagnosing via an on-screen questionnaire. UK health chiefs have said the questionnaire is a key reason they are pursuing a “centralised” design despite privacy campaigners’ protests. […]
SEATTLE — At the end of February, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, were in France discussing climate change with President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace and celebrating atop the Eiffel Tower with the designer Diane von Furstenberg. Days later, paparazzi spotted the couple grabbing dinner at Carbone in New […]
Getty Between the fake news potential of deepfakes, the fear of robots stealing jobs, and the occasional call for automated systems to have control of the nuclear button, A.I.’s public image could do with a PR makeover here in 2019. Could saving a few million lives help? That’s something a new biotech pharmaceutical startup called […]