David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune is an ambitious, sprawling, messy work of visual art. No wonder it's a classic — though many will argue about how successfully, it took Frank Herbert's vision of a feudal Near Eastern-esque society with all the trappings of science fiction and shot it for the big screen with some big names. (Remember Sting playing the villain?) Author Ron Miller served as production illustrator for the film, and amassed a sizable collection of sketches, production...
A lot of products come out each week — we don't highlight all of them, but all of them make it into The Verge Database. In Spec Sheet, a weekly series, we survey the latest product entries to keep track of the state of the art.
The US Army, along with defense contractor Lockheed Martin say they've successfully tested an autonomous vehicle convoy system that does away with human drivers in the name of safety and speed. Lockheed ran the test in Fort Hood, Texas earlier this month, and says the driverless convoys successfully navigated all sorts of "hazards and obstacles" including pedestrians, other vehicles, and basic changes in road topography.
"Omaha! Bellevue! Lincoln! Norfolk! Omaha! Beatrice! Nebraska City! Ralston! Omaha! Grand Island! Columbus! Lexington! Omaha! Hastings! Fremont! Plattsmouth! North Platte! Omaha!"
Delay of game. Five yard penalty.
Super Bowl XLVIII pits Richard Sherman and the Seattle Seahawks against Peyton Manning's Denvor Broncos. But this year the hosting venue may be just as important as the teams on the field. Football's biggest extravaganza is taking place at MetLife Stadium, and the NFL has invaded New York City in celebration. Manhattan's Times Square has been converted into Super Bowl Boulevard, a corporate spectacle that offers fans free games, food, and even a glance at the Vince Lombardi trophy. You can track all the latest Super Bowl XLVIII news, learn how to stream the game live on your smartphone, and see the best commercials right here at The Verge.
Flexible, fabric-like 3D-printed objects are becoming more accessible, and now it looks like inflatable objects are not far behind. Designer Richard Clarkson recently revealed his project Blossom , a 3D-printed flower made with mixed materials that allow it to be inflated with air — and bloom like a real flower. The project was completed about a year and a half ago, but because of restrictions from its collaboration with Objet—it, Blossom has only just been released for the public to see.
Clarkson used what he describes as "simultaneous deposition of different build materials in a single print," which means different substances were used in various amounts during one print job. The rigid structure of Blossom's flower is made of...
Time Warner Cable has long had a rotten reputation, but now that the cable company is facing a takeover from rival Charter Communications, executives are promising that they're working to turn TWC around. A big part of that plan involves significantly upgrading its services in New York and Los Angeles under a new brand by the end of the year.
The company unveiled the plan during an unusual 90-minute earnings call on Thursday. The new service is tentatively called "TWC Maxx" and the end result, according to the company, is that internet speeds will be bumped across the board. Time Warner Cable's "standard" tier will increase from a dismal 15 / 1 Mbps connection to 50 / 5, and "turbo" will go from 20 / 2 to 100 / 10 Mbps. For those with a...
Some of Apple's top executives met with officials from the US Food and Drug Administration last month, something that — together with new software rumors — could signal a new direction for the company's upcoming products. Apple's senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams, as well as the company's vice president of software technologies Bud Tribble met with the FDA on December 13th to discuss "mobile medical applications," reports The New York Times . The meeting appeared on the agency's public calendar, and shows that Apple met with Margaret Hamburg, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs.
In 2004, my friends and I made a rule: when we played Madden, no one was allowed to be the Atlanta Falcons. With them, you were unstoppable, because quarterback Michael Vick was unstoppable. Thanks to a 95 speed rating and 97 acceleration, he was the best rusher in the league and a near-lock to score any time he sprinted to his left. And if the defense against all odds managed to contain him, he had a 98 throwing-power rating and would just heave the ball downfield from any of a dozen awkward body contortions. He was all but flawless, dominant, perfect: he'd probably have been the league’s best defender, kick returner, and punter if he’d tried. In short: he broke Madden .
Deion Sanders was similarly unstoppable in Madden ‘95: I...
At 40th Street, the toboggan run is 60 feet tall and 180 feet long, topped with a gloriously huge NFL logo and shuttling down eight people at a time. To get in, you have to buy a ticket — a $5 strip of paper that looks eerily like the $25,000 pieces of paper they sell at the next machine over, the ones that actually get you into the Super Bowl. At the bottom of the toboggan run, there’s a pair of field goal uprights with fake icicles and a breeze of snowflakes. They aren’t real...
Verge staffers aren't just people who love technology. They're people who love stuff. We spend as much time talking and thinking about our favorite books, music, and movies as we do debating the best smartphone to buy or what point-and-shoot has the tightest macro. We thought it would make sense to share our latest obsessions with Verge readers, and we hope you're encouraged to share your favorites with us. Thus a long, healthy debate will ensue where we all end up with new things to read, listen to, or try on.
For its first ever Super Bowl ad campaign, T-Mobile recruited quarterback Tim Tebow to demonstrate just how marvelous life can be when you're contract-free. Of course, in the case of the former NFL star, his freedom comes largely thanks to a lack of interest from professional teams after his career sputtered out in recent years. "Everyone thinks I want a contract," Tebow says in one of the three spots. "But without one, I've done so much this year." Viewers are then treated to a firsthand look at some of those accomplishments.
Apparently being free from the commitment of an NFL contract gave Tebow the chance to help deliver a baby. He successfully apprehended Bigfoot, made an impassioned plea for world peace, and even donned an...
There's something about jumping that just feels good. It's a joyous experience, which is perhaps why so many video games use it as a central mechanic. Ian Snyder's The Floor is Jelly takes that familiar feeling and makes it even more exuberant — now you're jumping in a world made of bouncy gelatin, and it feels amazing. "The core of the idea was always jumping around on jelly," says Snyder.
While fun, movement takes a bit of getting used to. When you hit the ground, the world ripples...
Every single Super Bowl has been played in the Southeast, in the Southwest, or under a roof. This year, bitterly cold weather patterns are spilling out of the Arctic like hay bales falling out of a truck bed, and this is the year the Broncos and Seahawks will try to play a Super Bowl in New Jersey.
On Sunday, millions of people will watch the Broncos and the Seahawks battle for the NFL championship. This fall, we went deep behind the scenes with Fox's TV crew to see how its A Team turns football into television.
On January 10th, a federal judge in Delaware awarded nearly $2.4 million to Taser International in a patent lawsuit. The award was the final decision in a court battle with Karbon Arms, Taser’s last standing competitor in the industry focused on selling electroshock weapons to police. Taser claims to supply electroshock guns — the stunners known as Tasers in the same way that tissues are known as Kleenexes — to about 16,500 of the 19,000 police departments in the US. So it’s surprising that Taser even had a competitor, let alone one it needed to stand off against in court.
As it turns out, this battle has been ongoing in various forms for a decade. The judge’s award earlier this month was a debilitating blast to an already...
As professional sports go, the NFL stands out for two distinct reasons: it's exceedingly popular, and it's extraordinarily brutal. Just last week, for the 30th straight year, pro football was ranked the favorite sport of American adults by a massive margin. And the NFL is a money-making behemoth, attracting a growing number of fans to live games and raking in nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2012.
Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of VKontakte (VK), speaks at the Digital Life Design conference in 2012. Durov sold his remaining stake in VK earlier this week. (Hubert Burda Media / Flickr )
It's hard to imagine a situation in which Mark Zuckerberg would sell his stake in Facebook. It's even more difficult to imagine him fleeing from the police, battling takeover attempts from billionaires, or tossing $100 bills from his office window.
Yet that's exactly the scenario that's unfolded over the past few months in St. Petersburg, where Pavel Durov, the eccentric founder of social networking site VKontakte (VK), is suddenly persona non grata. Durov, 29, sold his remaining stake in VK this week, officially ending his tenure at the helm of...
For the longest time, the prevailing trend with mobile phones was to take last year’s handset and make it smaller. Shave a few millimeters off, shed a couple of grams, and give users the same experience but in a leaner shell. The rise of smartphones and their incessantly improving spec sheets derailed that habit, but now Sony’s returning to the old ways with its new Xperia Z1 Compact.
In all the important ways, this is still the Xperia Z1. The processor and camera are untouched, the...
The Vergecast is a discussion of all things relevant and irreverent in the worlds of art, culture, science, technology, and anything else our hosts might deem interesting. On this week's episode, Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, and Dieter Bohn talk about Google's attempt to sell Motorola to Lenovo, the declining sales of the iPod, and the obvious benefits of a Daft Punk helmet.
Back to the Future fans will get the chance to go back in time for the ultimate nostalgia trip next year, as a musical will open to coincide for the classic movie's 30th anniversary. Original director and screenwriter Robert Zemeckis will team up with co-writer Bob Gale to pen the book for the new stageshow, which is set to hit London's West End at first; the Associated Press reports that an expansion to Broadway is possible if the West End run proves successful.
Since 1977, the Academy Awards have handed out an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. So it would stand to reason that by combining them, you'd have a chronology of the best special effects ever made. That's what filmmaker Nelson Carvajal has done in the video below, providing a fascinating look at how the craft has made our dreams and nightmares appear possible over the years. Watch the lightsabers of Star Wars give way to dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the paint-filled heaven of What Dreams May Come, and see just how much the rise of digital has changed the medium with Avatar, Hugo and The Life of Pi. It all takes less than five minutes.
Perhaps you knew that Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, based his characters on his own family members: Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie Groening. Perhaps you even knew that his father, Homer, flew a B-17 bomber over Europe, worked as an advertising executive, and made many of his own films. What you probably didn't know is that Matt would cite one such early work as the inspiration for parodying his own relatives: a made-up story about Matt and Lisa having a bizarre animal adventure, which his father Homer turned into a movie.
This is that film. Produced in 1964 — when Matt was 10 years old — "The Story" follows Matt and Lisa strolling around Portland, Oregon's Washington Park and Zoo, set to an audio recording of Lisa telling...
We are only three days away from Super Bowl XLVIII and our tech writers are jazzed for the big game. Jacob Kastrenakes said, "Is that happening this Sunday?" while Adrianne Jeffries exclaimed, "That's football, right?" The energy is palpable, the competition is fierce, and The Verge is on football lockdown! Also, we made another episode of 90 Seconds on The Verge.
Carriers in the United States are mandated by law to maintain and offer copper-based landline phone service — even though the technology is well over half a century old. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is taking its first steps today to modernize that system with a new order that calls for companies like AT&T and Verizon to submit proposals for how to provide telephone service of the future using IP — the protocol that's used to transmit data on the internet. With those proposals, the FCC will allow companies to engage in experimental IP phone service that addresses the numerous different requirements that such a system needs to pass before replacing the country's universal wireline phone network.
Companies like AT&T...
Mice could slowly be replaced with monkeys as the prime animal subjects for human illness research. Scientists in China have successfully bred the first monkeys with targeted genetic mutations, which could lead to primates modeling sicknesses found in humans.
The team from Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University led by geneticist Xingxu Huang first targeted three specific genes in a monkey cell line in the experiment, and were able to disrupt them about 10 to 25 percent of the time. They then targeted genes in 180 single-cell monkey embryos, and implanted 83 of them in living mothers. Those implantations yielded ten pregnancies — and only one birth. It was not an easy task, but the newborn twin female primates are a hopeful...
Amazon just reported profits of $239 million, or 51 cents per share on revenue of $25.59 billion, results that came in slightly below what Wall Street expected. Analysts on average were expecting Amazon to earn 66 cents a share on $26.06 billion, a mismatch that sent shares down in after-hours trading.
It seems like Google can do no wrong with the markets these days. The consensus estimate on Wall Street was that Google would deliver $16.75 billion in revenue and earnings of $12.26 a share. It missed both those marks, clocking in at $13.6 billion and earnings of $12.01 a share. Still the stock was up slightly in after-hours trading.
Google made $14.4 billion in revenue and earned $8.62 a share for this same period a year ago. Last quarter Google brought in $14.8 billion and earned $10.47 a share. Profits rose from $3.39 billion this time last year to $3.92 billion this quarter.
The big story last quarter was the mounting losses at Motorola. That continued this quarter, but for the final time. Google announced yesterday that it was...
The Vergecast is a discussion of all things relevant and irreverent in the worlds of art, culture, science, technology, and anything else our hosts might deem interesting.
On January 29th, Google stunned the smartphone industry when it announced plans to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo — less than two years after completing its own buyout of the American handset maker. Lenovo is paying $2.91 billion in cash and stock for Motorola, and the Chinese manufacturer has high hopes; it expects to sell 100 million smartphones within a year of finalizing the acquisition. If successful, the purchase will give Lenovo an immediate stake in the US smartphone market.
Google will keep the vast majority of patents it acquired in the original Motorola deal, and it's also bringing Motorola Mobility's Advanced Technology and Projects group onto the Android team. The announced acquisition must pass a number of regulatory...
The next time you're looking to order in online, you might want to head to Foursquare instead of Seamless. That's because you can now find out which restaurants near you accept orders from Seamless or Grubhub straight from Foursquare's mobile and web apps. If you're not a Foursquare user it might not sound like a significant change, but with the update the check-in service could become the primary way to find out where to order delivery.
Under the surface of Paper — Facebook's new mobile app that's half news feed, half news reader — lies an important new feature that works just like Twitter's well-known "retweet." At the bottom of any post inside Paper, you can tap an arrow symbol to bring up a Share dialog and then tap Reshare to share the post with your friends and followers.
Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Though Massachusetts does not allow the death penalty, Tsarnaev is facing federal charges including the alleged use of a weapon of mass destruction. "After consideration of the relevant facts, the applicable regulations and the submissions made by the defendant’s counsel, I have determined that the United States will seek the death penalty in this matter," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. "The nature of the conduct at issue and the resultant harm compel this decision."
"The nature of the conduct at issue and the resultant harm compel this decision."
Only three people have been executed at a federal level since...
By Nilay Patel and Ben Popper
Google’s romance with Motorola was star-crossed from the start. With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola it wasn’t just taking on an ailing manufacturer — challenge enough — but simultaneously competing with Google’s own hardware partners in the Android ecosystem, meaning it had to tread carefully. The payoff for all that heartache? Motorola’s impressive collection of 24,000 patents and patent applications. Unfortunately for Google, the much-ballyhooed war chest of intellectual property didn’t hold up in the courtroom.
Google’s initial motivation for buying Motorola was extremely simple: Motorola’s patent portfolio included core pieces of standard technologies like Wi-Fi and GSM. At...
Tom Perkins has been blasted by everyone from The New York Times to executives in the venture capital firm he co-founded since comparing the "plight" of wealthy Americans to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Now the The Wall Street Journal has given its two cents, with the editorial board penning a piece defending his sentiment about the unfair treatment of the super-rich. Perkins later apologized for his comparison after much backlash, but he did not apologize for his larger thought about what he calls the constant vilification of the 1 percent by liberals and the press.
Just like its villains, From Dusk Till Dawn is getting a new life. The cult film is being turned into a TV series for the El Rey Network, which released a teaser earlier this month and has now released a full-length trailer that showing gangster drama, menacing vampires, and more than a few links to the series' source material. While the show looks to take itself a bit more seriously than the film, it's probably a better option than trying to recreate Quentin Tarantino's unique style of writing. The film's director, Robert Rodriguez, is at the series helm though, so fans may still want to tune in to its March 11th premiere to see how it turns out — it's not like From Dusk Till Dawn isn't known for surprises.
New York City has been overrun with Super Bowl talk, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell took the stage in a hotel in the heart of Times Square to announce the company's newest initiative: NFL Now. It's a personalized video network, he said, with ways for fans to find highlights, analysis, and more — all from the NFL. It's available on the web, as well as on apps for Windows, iOS, and Android, plus on the Xbox One; Microsoft has long been a big partner of the NFL.The service is launching this summer, for free (Verizon, Yahoo, and Microsoft are among the launch partners), along with a paid premium service called NFL Now Plus.
Essentially, users will pick their favorite teams and name their fantasy players, and then NFL Now will deliver...
Prospect is a 15-minute sci-fi short set on a "toxic" planet that utilizes custom props and costumes instead of CGI. It tells the story of a teenage girl who, while scouring the planet for a valuable resin, loses her father to a bandit attack and is forced to "grow up quick." Apparently inspired by classic sci-fi like Blade Runner and Star Wars, the Kickstarter-funded short was shot in Washington's Hoh rainforest. The full short is due for release soon, but its creators have released a short trailer. It's high on indie sheen, retro costumes, and at the very least leaves us wanting to see more.
I started wearing Durr at the beginning of perhaps the busiest Verge week of the year, CES. Due to the passing of a relative I skipped the journey to Vegas and stayed back in London, tasked with keeping the site ticking overnight while my colleagues got some well-deserved sleep. At 6AM on the first morning of the week, I attached Durr to my wrist, activated vibrations, and got to work.
Within seconds of starting my shift, big news broke from Google. After reading through various press...
With Google and Samsung developing a closer Android partnership than ever, this week might not be the best time to try and make inroads in the hypercompetitive Android smartphone business. The Korean company already enjoys a vast lead over its rivals and is now ideally positioned to continue dominating in both the US and abroad. Shrugging off the size of that challenge, Lenovo has decided to buy Motorola Mobility for $2.91 billion and step up its efforts at becoming a smartphone vendor with a truly global reach.
The world’s biggest PC maker today, Lenovo, was anonymous to many until just recently. But in 2005, the Chinese company that only two years earlier had renamed itself from the generic Legend acquired a brand name and cachet...
Three and a half years after launching on Android, SwiftKey's popular predictive-software keyboard has finally come to iOS. iPhone and iPad users can now get personalized, predictive typing from the company, though there's a catch, and it's a big one: it can only be found in one new note-taking app. Tired of waiting for Apple to open up iOS to other software keyboards, Swiftkey's piggybacking on Evernote with a new app called SwiftKey Note. It gives users a barebones version of the popular note-taking service that includes SwiftKey's predictive text feature to speed up typing.
Mint is one of the most popular personal banking apps around — it can aggregate everything from credit card transactions to property assets into one interface for tracking and budgeting, with broad support for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. As of today, it's also the first such app to suport that most popular of cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin. Mint has added integration with digital wallet Coinbase, letting you pull account balance and transaction information and generally keep track of your Bitcoin spending the way you would any other currency.
Adding an account requires your Coinbase API key, not — as with some banks on Mint — your password. If you're worried in general about letting a third-party site access sensitive information,...
To mark the launch of the new Facebook app Paper, Mark Zuckerberg has given a lengthy interview to Bloomberg Businessweek . Speaking about the company's Poke app, which was thought to be a Snapchat competitor but failed to make an impact, Zuckerberg dismisses the app as "more of a joke." Apparently unconcerned by Poke's poor performance, he explains that "a few people built it as a hackathon thing, and we made one release and then just kind of abandoned it and haven’t touched it since."
Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg laments that Facebook's move to mobile was "not as quick as it should have been," despite the company recently announcing that more than half of its revenue comes from mobile advertising. The full interview...
While Apple shipped 26 million iPads in its latest quarter and Samsung shipped 14.5 million tablets, both up from last year, IDC is warning that the overall tablet market in the US appears to be reaching saturation. "It's becoming increasingly clear that markets such as the US are reaching high levels of consumer saturation and while emerging markets continue to show strong growth this has not been enough to sustain the dramatic worldwide growth rates of years past," warns IDC’s Tom Mainelli.
Worldwide tablet shipments grew to 76.9 million during the all important holiday season quarter according to IDC, 28.2 percent more than the same period last year. However, the growth appears to be slowing. Apple shipped 74.2 million iPads during...
This morning, Facebook is announcing a new standalone iPhone app called "Paper." Contrary to earlier rumors, it's much more than just a news reading app — it's a complete reimagining of Facebook itself. Once you've used it, you may never want to open the standard Facebook app again. Although it doesn't replicate every feature of Facebook's main app, it has enough to fill the majority of what people use it for, and it's simply much, much better.
Paper takes the standard Facebook News Feed and recreates it as an immersive, horizontally scrolling set of screens. It also is a new way to post to Facebook (and Paper) with an elegant WYSIWYG editor that borrows the styling of Medium and Svblte blogging systems. Finally, yes, it's a news...
Award-winning actress and part-time SodaStream salesperson Scarlett Johansson has left her role at the charity Oxfam due to her new position with the carbonated drinks company. Johansson had been an ambassador for Oxfam for eight years, but blames "a fundamental difference of opinion" for the soured relationship. The Avengers and Her star came under fire recently for endorsing SodaStream, an Israeli company that manufactures some of its products on occupied land in the West Bank.
Yo! Check it because you're about to get hit with the hottest stories of the day. It's been a CRAZY day of news and Bryce Slayde has got your back, dishing out what you have to know. So sit back, chillax, and get ready for 90 Seconds on The Verge!
Facebook has released its results for the fourth quarter of 2013 and the numbers are strong. It posted $2.59 billion in revenue and earnings of 31 cents a share. Analysts were looking for Facebook to pull in $2.33 billion in revenue with earnings of 27 cents a share. That compares to $1.59 billion and 17 cents a share for the same period last year. It's also a touch above the $2.02 billion and 25 cents a share Facebook notched last quarter. The stock is currently up slightly in after-hours trading.
Most notably, the company reported that 53 percent of its revenues now come from mobile advertising. That is a big milestone for Facebook, which stumbled badly during its IPO over concerns that it was struggling to migrate its ad business...
Google is selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, giving the Chinese smartphone manufacturer a major presence in the US market. Lenovo will buy Motorola for $2.91 billion in a mixture of cash and stock. Google will retain ownership of the vast majority of Motorola's patents, while 2,000 patents and a license on the remaining patents will go to Lenovo. With the deal's closing, Lenovo will pay Google $660 million in cash and $750 million in stock, with the remaining $1.5 billion paid out over three years.
Samsung may be planning to cut back on its oft-criticized Android customizations. A new report from Re/Code claims that the company recently met with Google to begin working out an agreement that could see Samsung's software move closer to Google's vision of Android. Discussions reportedly began after Samsung unveiled its Galaxy TabPro at CES. Google executives were apparently so displeased with the major changes in the tablet's Magazine UX — which has been compared to Flipboard and Windows 8 — that they felt compelled to open a dialogue with the number one Android manufacturer.
It's unclear what the exact outcome of those talks will be, but Re/Code's sources say Samsung may consider dumping Magazine UX entirely in future hardware....
Steven Wise has been waiting more than 30 years to give chimpanzees their day in court. A lawyer who specializes in animal protection, Wise is widely credited as a pioneer in the animal rights arena: he’s taught classes on the subject at schools including Harvard and John Marshall Law School, has written four books and countless journal articles, and is the former president of the influential Animal Legal Defense Fund.
But it’s only in recent months that Wise’s work has made national headlines. In early December, the Nonhuman Rights Project — a group that Wise founded and now runs — filed three landmark lawsuits on behalf of captive chimpanzees living in New York state. With ample scientific evidence on their side, Wise and...
During a US Senate hearing on Tuesday, US Attorney General Eric Holder again confirmed that the Department of Justice is investigating the massive Target hack. "While we generally do not discuss specific matters under investigation, I can confirm the Department is investigating the breach involving the US retailer, Target," Holder said. But the DoJ's search isn't limited to the perpetrators. Holder's testimony included a stern warning for anyone using the stolen customer information for illegal purposes. "We are committed to working to find not only the perpetrators of these sorts of data breaches. but also any individuals and groups who exploit that data via credit card fraud."
Target has said data on roughly 40 million credit and...
Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
Twitter's new head of news, Vivian Schiller, announced her first project today: a partnership with CNN and the New York startup Dataminr. The initiative will help journalists cover breaking news by making sense of the flood of public information on Twitter. Dataminr uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the Twitter firehose of data and ighlighti the needle in the haystack so CNN reporters can find the most important, relevant, and reliable facts and images from around the world.
Using machine learning algorithms to analyze the Twitter firehose of data
Dataminr is a five-year-old startup that until now has largely worked with clients in financial services, helping big banks and hedge funds make real-time investment decisions by...
Not so long ago, wood was everywhere in the world of consumer electronics. In the middle of the 20th century, everything from televisions to microwaves to radios came as a bundle of technology housed inside a wooden case or cabinet. These gadgets were imposters, disguised as furniture so as to slip into our homes unnoticed next to the armoire and the wood-paneled wall. So they were made to feel natural, to feel like part of our homes.
Soon, though, gadgets became the focal point of our...
Creating stem cells is becoming easier than ever thanks to a new technique being developed by researchers in Boston and Japan. The technique allows for the creation of embryonic-style stem cells by doing little more than applying stress to existing adult cells. Like other stem cells, this new type is incredibly malleable and can be transformed into almost any other cell type, but their simple creation is said to make them a faster option — and their creation could potentially lead to a new understanding of how cells work.
A WhiteHouse.gov petition demanding that pop star Justin Bieber be deported has somehow managed to cross 100,000 signatures. That's the threshold required to earn an official response from the Obama administration. "We the people of the United States feel that we are being wrongly represented in the world of pop culture," reads the petition, which was created immediately after Bieber's recent run-in with the law. "We would like to see the dangerous, reckless, destructive, and drug abusing, Justin Bieber deported and his green card revoked."
Bieber, originally from Canada, was recently arrested in Miami for drag racing, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest. (The former two charges have since been dropped.) "He is not only...
Currently Google Glass lets you send messages, make calls, and do other standard things that smartphones can do, but it's still lacking in games. In an effort to get game developers on the Glass bandwagon, Google has demoed five mini games for Glass that are super simple, but also show the gaming potential of the headset.
By saying "Ok Glass, play a game," users can access the mini games from the main voice menu. Each game takes advantage of a specific Glass technology: Tennis uses the gyroscope and accelerometer to detect head tilts and hit the ball; Balance also uses the accelerometer to keep a bunch of shapes from toppling over; Clay Shooter uses voice recognition to shoot clay pigeons out of the air; Match has you pairing objects...
Sundance describes the New Frontier portion of its annual film festival as a "creative space" for "multimedia performances, transmedia experiences," and other interactive art forms. This year that translated into a room of pure sensory overload: orange-red walls with matching plush couches, video projections, and in one corner, five stations gilded in chrome. That’s where a constant stream of visitors would sit down, plug in, and get transported into another world.
Oculus had come to Sundance.
Since its Kickstarter debut, much of the public focus on the Oculus Rift VR headset has been on its potential as a gaming device. The uses there are obvious, but talking to Nate Mitchell, Oculus’ VP of product, it’s clear the company sees...
Scribd has arrived on the Kindle Fire. The document sharing and ebook subscription service is launching an app for Amazon's tablets today, giving Kindle Fire owners a way to begin storing Scribd content, rather than just browsing its website as they could before. Though Scribd already offers apps for iOS and Android, launching on other platforms — especially on one with an eye toward reading — is an increasingly valuable step: Scribd launched a subscription ebook rental service last October, and the only way to store books for offline reading has been to use one of its apps.
The subscription service includes over 100,000 books, with its catalog's most notable support coming from HarperCollins. Like other subscription ebook services,...
