The tech world is gearing up for the next digital revolution. Buzzwords are everywhere: Crypto, NFTs, Web3. Tech icons from Mark Zuckerberg to Jack Dorsey have renamed their companies in their enthusiasm for the metaverse and blockchain technologies. In reaction to the rise of private cryptocurrencies, central banks are exploring whether to issue their own digital currencies, and policymakers are contemplating how to regulate private stablecoins&
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a session to amend and then vote on the Open App Markets Act, a bipartisan bill designed to rein in the monopoly power of smartphone app stores—mainly those run by Apple and Google. Notably, the bill would require those companies to allow users of Android and iOS devices to download apps from places other than the Google Play store and Apple App Store, a practice called sideloading. As you might imagine, Apple and Google and the lobby group
Earlier this week, the celebrity video shout-out platform Cameo announced that it was getting into NFTs (nonfungible tokens). Starting on February 17, fans of the 40,000 athletes, musicians, and other influencers who populate the platform will be able to mint a Cameo Pass via OpenSea. The NFTs, at a current cost of about $550, will give people exclusive access to Cameo events, such as parties hosted at the company’s Beverly Hills villa; meet-and-greets; merchandise drops; and celebrity Q&
Last September, Dr. Shuhan He, a faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Computer Science Lab, contributed an article to the Journal of the American Medical Association drawing attention to the creation of a comprehensive set of medical emoji. “The next step is for the medical community to better leverage these hard-won emoji. But how? And why?” he wrote. In his piece, the doctor outlined a rash of ideas for how clinicians could use these digital hieroglyphs.
The video game industry has never been shy about embracing a new technology, but the speed at which publishers and developers hopped on board the NFT hype train was dizzying. Seemingly overnight, game makers announced ways they planned to incorporate the tokens into their product, with one eye on the metaverse and another on bigger revenues. Players, though, are having none of it. And that pushback may be having an impact. The trickle of game companies backing away from NFTs that started in Janu
Tim O’Reilly has been a conversation starter within the tech industry for more than three decades. The company he founded, O’Reilly Media, launched the first true commercial website in 1993, and remains a tech-industry staple that publishes tech books, offers online education, and holds virtual events. O’Reilly saw firsthand the first wave of big dot-com companies swell, crest, and crash in the late 1990s. His company helped promote the rise of a new group of internet compan
One of the most notorious symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of taste and smell. There are varying estimates on just how many tongues and noses went out of business, but one study shows that as many as 1.6 million Americans lost their senses. Now a new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York University Langone Health, published in the journal Cell, finds that the culprit of this olfactory dysfunction may be our immune response to COVID-19. The new insight may help our understand
The Pozio Cradle is a phone-charging accessory with an unusual feature: It has the ability to defeat your smartphone’s microphone. People don’t normally buy new gadgets to block functions in their old gadgets, but the capabilities of smartphones—including personal-assistant services that might be listening silently—don’t make them normal devices. Hence the theoretical market for this $119 device from a Vancouver startup, which I first inspected in person at CES
Listen: let’s just get through February. We’re all in this together. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s the perfect time to stay inside and get some work done. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work efficiently, of course, so let’s continue to leverage time-savers and cool tools. We’ve got something of a retention theme this month, with apps purpose-built to supercharge your notes-to-self, intelligently organize your scans, and jog your memory
It was hardly a surprise when Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it was acquiring a major game developer this week. By Sunday night, video game Twitter was exploding with rumors that an announcement would be coming Monday. No one had Bungie on their prediction list, though. However, it’s unlikely this was a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard. Jim Ryan, president and CEO of SIE, says this acquisition has been in the works for the past