Tech News Feed

The latest Unpacked event kicks off at 11 a.m. ET., which you can follow via live stream.

Exceptional Minds, a visual effects post-production studios and trade school, caters to artists who are all on the autism spectrum. And it has a big client: Marvel.

Wal-Mart Stores is teaming up with Google to enter the nascent voice-shopping market, currently dominated by Amazon.com, adding another front to Wal-Mart's battle with the online megastore. From a report: Google, which makes the Android software used to run most of the world's smartphones, will offer hundreds of thousands of Walmart items on its voice-controlled Google Assistant platform from late September, Walmart's head of e-commerce, Marc Lore, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. Lore, who joined the world's largest retailer after it bought his e-commerce company Jet.com, said Wal-Mart would offer a wider selection than any retailer on the platform. Amazon, whose voice-controlled aide Alexa allows users to shop from the retailer, has the lion's share of the U.S. voice-controlled device industry, with its Echo devices accounting for 72.2 percent of the market in 2016, far ahead of the Google Home gadget's 22 percent, according to research firm eMarketer.

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Pepper the robot has seen a variety of gainful employment in its relatively short life. It's worked in a mobile phone store, a Pizza Hut and a French train station, but now it seems it's jacking in the corporate world for more spiritual pursuits: Bud...

If you're in the market for a smart speaker but don't fancy shelling out the full retail price for one, Amazon and Google might be able to help. Today, both the Amazon Echo and Google Home have been given price cuts that have taken them below the &po...

An anonymous reader shares a report: You could buy any drug imaginable, wherever you were in the world, on the Silk Road website. Hidden on the dark web, it made millions of dollars every week. The US government had been trying to shut it down for more than two years when tax agent Gary Alford was brought in to try to trace the money which passed through the site. In his spare time, Gary started searching Google to try to find the mysterious mastermind behind the site: Dread Pirate Roberts. And he was successful. Gary spent hours trawling the internet for the first ever mention of Silk Road. He says he came across a posting on Bitcoin forum. In the post, Roberts had shared his Gmail account. That escalated the investigation. Gary spoke with BBC describing the rest.

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While companies like ASUS, Acer and NVIDIA are working on making gaming laptops thinner and lighter, HP is going in the opposite direction with its huge Omen X Laptop. It weighs a whopping 10.8 lbs, which is close to other 17-inch gaming notebooks. I...

The image is of a fully-functional spacesuit SpaceX will use during its first crewed missions.

If you've been eagerly awaiting the return of the Galaxy Note after the drama surrounding last year's model, today is the day. At 11AM ET, Samsung will reveal the Note 8 and perhaps a few other things during the festivities. We'll be there to cover a...

The biggest beef for VR gamers is the lack of, well, VR games. That's about to change soon thanks to Bethesda, which revealed that all three of the VR titles it announced previously will be coming to the Playstation VR and HTC Vive by the end of the...

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer astronomers have constructed the most detailed image ever of a star -- the red supergiant star Antares. They have also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in Antares's huge extended atmosphere.

Fujitsu is reported to be the latest Japanese brand to want out of the phone industry.

An anonymous reader writes: "Mozilla engineers are discussing plans to change the way Firefox collects usage data (telemetry), and the organization is currently preparing to test an opt-out clause so they could collect more data relevant to the browser's usage," reports Bleeping Computer. "In a Google Groups discussion that's been taking place since Monday, Mozilla engineers cite the lack of usable data the Foundation is currently receiving via its data collection program. The problem is that Firefox collects data from a very small fraction of its userbase, and this data may not be representative of the browser's real usage." Mozilla would like to fix this by flipping everyone's telemetry setting to enabled and adding an opt-out clause. Engineers also plan to embed Google's RAPPAR project [1, 2] for anonymous data collection.

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Amazon's been ramping up its efforts in the education space since 2013, when it acquired TenMarks. The ed-tech startup helps teachers and parents create easy-to-digest curriculums for young students, which up until today were all about math. But now,...

 The SNES Mini is already causing heaps of FOMO anxiety thanks to pre-orders that are selling out near-instantly, but if any of us DO end up getting our hands on one, the console will have a neat trick up its sleeve for players: In-game rewind. This would allow players to set a suspend point (up to four can bet set at one time per game), and then rewind their gameplay to try to improve their… Read More

If virtual reality is going to go mainstream then it needs some big title launches. Bethesda is about to offer VR gamers three of the biggest.

Hundreds of thousands of Walmart products can be ordered using Google Assistant or Google Home starting next month.

Ladies and gentleman, meet the SpaceX spacesuit. Elon Musk just came through with the first pic of the astronaut gear via his Instagram. And, even though it's not a full look at the suit, it offers plenty to pick apart. Like, why is the American flag...

Apple famously planned to build an entire self-driving car, but abandoned that idea to focus on autonomous vehicle technology à la Uber and Waymo. Thanks to a New York Times report, we now know some of what happened and what Apple is doing now...

From the frivolous to the serious, Twitter’s shorthand for bringing together conversations has impacted how we communicate.