Tech Biz

“I have a weird question for you,” I stammered, sitting in a hotel room across from Matias Duarte and Jon Wiley, the Google design leads for Android and Search, respectively. As a reporter, you tend to ask a lot of stupid sounding questions, and it’s generally no big deal. But I was about to ask Continue Reading →

University of Virginia associate professor Kamin Whitehouse thinks people want to know where everyone is in their house: Who’s taking the long shower? Who left the air conditioner on when they left the house? “Today’s smart home sensors are about appliances, lights, and devices in the home, but not really about the people,” said Whitehouse. Continue Reading →

Star Trek’s replicators were not only able to produce any food or products our far-off descendants wanted, they were also able to make it from any kind of waste products. It was the ultimate recycling scenario, one that the new Ekocycle Cube 3D Printer hopes to emulate by using a new filament made in part Continue Reading →

Facebook upset the Internet this weekend when a joint study conducted by one of its data scientists revealed that the company had socially engineered the news feeds of 689,003 users to make them feel feelings. For one week in January 2012, those users became unwitting guinea pigs as their feeds were flooded with either positive Continue Reading →

Twitter announced on Monday that it’s acquiring mobile ad startup TapCommerce. Re/code’s Ina Fried broke the news about the acquisition earlier this afternoon, reporting that the deal price was $100 million. (Twitter declined to provide a price). TapCommerce helps mobile businesses retarget their ads, i.e., target ads based on previous user activity — something that’s Continue Reading →

The migration of business to the cloud is accelerating. By the end of 2017, nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid IT models incorporating cloud-based networks into their infrastructure to some degree, Gartner predicts. Small businesses are riding the same trend. Technology provider CDW reports that the number of smaller enterprises using cloud solutions Continue Reading →

Microsoft is busy preparing a second update to Windows 8.1, but the company is largely focused on a larger “Windows 9” release due next year. ZDNet reports that a preview of codename Threshold — which may or may not be named Windows 9 once it’s released — will be available later this year. The public Continue Reading →

Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook’s experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for “informed consent”. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that “Facebook didn’t give users informed consent” to Continue Reading →

To Facebook, we are all lab rats. Facebook routinely adjusts its users’ news feeds — testing out the number of ads they see or the size of photos that appear — often without their knowledge. It is all for the purpose, the company says, of creating a more alluring and useful product. But last week, Continue Reading →

The keynote at Google’s big developer conference is over, and in its three hours(!) we found out about AndroidTV, Android Auto, and the next big release of Android for you phone. But there was also a ton of rumored stuff that Google didn’t announce. Here’s what was missing, and our best guesses at why. Coming Continue Reading →