Google CEO Sundar Pichai milked the woos from a clappy, home-turf developer crowd at its I/O conference in Mountain View this week with a demo of an in-the-works voice assistant feature that will enable the AI to make telephone calls on be…
China’s biggest ride-sharing company, Didi Chuxing, said on Friday it would halt for a week one of its domestic services, which it calls “ride-hitching”, following the death of a female passenger that sparked questions about safety.
The…
Google says it will take steps to ensure that humans are not fooled when they get called by software bots that can convincingly mimic the human voice.
Anyone called by the bot will be told they are conversing with a machine, Google told…
File sharing and storage company Dropbox Inc (DBX.O) beat Wall Street expectations for quarterly results and topped estimates for paying subscribers in its first financial report as a publicly traded company.
However, the company’s shar…
Music streaming app Tidal has been accused of inflating audience figures for two albums - Lemonade by Beyonce, and The Life of Pablo by Kanye West.
A Norwegian-language newspaper claims the move would have led Tidal to have paid disprop…
Network gear maker Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) is pulling all online ads from YouTube due to fears of the ads appearing on sensitive content on the platform, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, Karen Walker, said in a blog on Wednesday.
The…
Most Western technology companies are losing ground in Russia under the weight of restrictive rules and mounting local competition. Germany’s SAP (SAPG.DE) is thriving.
SAP is the clear leader in the Russian business-planning software m…
Uber Technologies Inc on Wednesday re-opened a contest to select the first international city to launch its proposed flying taxi project, following apparent delays in getting the service off the ground in Dubai, a previously proposed marke…
Researchers in the US say they have developed a low-cost chip that can detect cocaine in minutes.
The team hopes it will lead to the development of a portable cocaine breathalyser that can tell if a person has used the drug.
At prese…
The first things you notice are the chill in the air, the vast grid on the floor which makes you feel like you're on the film set of the movie Tron, and the whooshing sound of wheels skimming across aluminium.
The last thing on your min…
Drones that monitor crops, control mosquito populations and deliver defibrillators are to be tested in US airspace.
Ten commercial drone projects have been selected to try out new ways for unmanned aircraft to be integrated into the ski…
Google today announced a new version of Google Maps that will launch later this summer. All of the core Google Maps features for getting directions aren’t going away, of course, but on top of that, the team has now built a new set of feat…
Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday said it has set up model “smart” homes across the United States for shoppers to experience what it’s like for voice aide Alexa to dim the lights, turn on the TV or order more laundry detergent.
The rollout un…
BMW has been reprimanded after one of its TV adverts was judged to have promoted "faster, dangerous and irresponsible driving".
The ad was designed to show off the company's four-wheel drive system.
The UK's advertising watchdog said…
Match Group, the owner of dating apps including Tinder and Match.com, says it is not worried by the dating tool which Facebook unveiled last week.
The social media giant's move could help de-stigmatise the online dating scene, Match's c…
Messaging apps collectively passed the 5 billion mark for monthly active users last year, with Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger on track now to pass 2 billion users apiece. With messaging’s popularity showing no signs of slowing down, a n…
Hidden inside the code of Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased feature called Facebook Avatars that lets people build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments. It will let users cus…
US First Lady Melania Trump has been caught up in another plagiarism row, following the launch of her new online safety for children campaign on Monday.
A booklet put out by Mrs Trump bore a striking resemblance to one published under t…
Microsoft is launching a couple of features to Excel today that make the ubiquitous spreadsheet software a bit more powerful. Among the new features is support for Azure Machine Learning and custom JavaScript functions to Excel to extend i…
An artificial intelligence network has designed new levels for the original Doom video game.
The technique could be used to create future video games, more quickly and less expensively, researchers said.
The AI was "trained" to make …
Silicon Valley self-driving startup Drive.ai said on Monday it will launch a pilot program for an autonomous ride-hailing service in July in Frisco, Texas, with safety drivers present.
The initial pilot will run for six months and will …
The annual Digital Dialogue Conference has recently ended in Dubai calling for greater collaboration by African content producers to harness the dividend of the digital revolution. The conference organized by Africa’s number one pay-tv ope…
Walmart Inc’s (WMT.N) online grocery delivery partnerships with ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft have ended, according to two sources, a potential setback for the retailer’s ambitions to challenge Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) head-on with sp…
Most Facebook users in the US remain loyal, despite the recent data sharing scandal involving a political consultancy firm, a poll suggests.
Facebook admitted last month that the data of 87 million users had been improperly shared with …
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett on Monday said buyers of bitcoin, which he has characterized as “rat poison squared,” thrive on the hope they’ll find other people who will pay more for it.
Likening bitcoin demand to the tulip mania …
Fresh from filing for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise as much as $10 billion, the Xiaomi empire is taking big steps in Europe.
The company announced today that it plans to enter France and Italy on May 22 and May 24, respectively. W…
New data is showing that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more complex and causing more financial damage than ever.
This is according to the recently published 2017 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from …
Cambridge Analytica has been ordered to turn over information it has on US citizen David Carroll by the UK's data protection watchdog.
The data demand stems from legal action by Prof Carroll, who wants to know what information the firm …
At Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s annual shareholder meeting, Buffett credited Apple with developing “extremely sticky” products to which consumers become attached and endorsed Apple’s decision to buy back its own stock, saying it was the techno…
China has asked the United States to amend a seven-year ban on American companies selling components and software to Chinese telecom equipment firm ZTE Corp, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Friday.
The appeal came durin…
Last October, Google launched its Advanced Protection Program for users who want to ensure the highest degree of protection for the data they store in services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive. Users who need that kind of protectio…
In April, Spotify and Hulu teamed up on a discounted bundle of both of their services for $12.99 per month, following a similar deal for students launched last fall. Now, it seems, the streaming service is considering expanding its ente…
There’s little that’s more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most p…
Are Cambridge Analytica and its parent SCL Elections as dead as they seem?
The businesses issued a statement on Wednesday, saying they had started bankruptcy proceedings, blaming a "siege of media coverage" related to the Facebook data-…
Shares in Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) dipped slightly on Friday but trading activity surged after a 50:1 stock split aimed at making it easier for retail investors to buy into the South Korean technology giant.
The shares wer…
Google announced on Friday a new set of policies around how it will verify election advertisers in the U.S. Specifically, any advertiser who want to buy an election ad on Google in the U.S. will now have to go through additional verifica…
Twitter's 330 million users are being urged to change their passwords after some were exposed in plain text on its internal network.
An error in the way the passwords were handled meant some were stored in easily readable form, said Twi…
Security researchers have found eight novel flaws in computer chips that are similar to the "serious" bugs found earlier this year.
In January, computer firms rushed to fix the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that, under certain conditions, …
Action-camera maker GoPro Inc’s first-quarter revenue beat expectations and it reported a smaller-than-expected loss on Thursday, benefiting from aggressive marketing of its cameras and controlling expenses.
The company recently exited …
Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it would open a new Australian fulfillment center in the southwest of Sydney, the country’s biggest city, in the second half of 2018.
Amazon would begin recruiting immediately for a range of roles includi…
Perennial smartphone struggler HTC has revealed its newest smartphone — the U12/U12+ — will launch on May 23. The big spoiler from the company is that the phone will include… components.
That isn’t exactly an informative tea…
Tesla reported its Q1 2018 earnings today, posting adjusted losses of $3.35 per share with revenues of $3.4 billion. This is technically a beat, as analysts expected Tesla to report a loss of $3.48 a share with revenues of $3.22 billion…
Germany’s justice minister has asked Facebook (FB.O) Chief Executive in a letter to be transparent with users by giving them more control, saying allegations of the improper use of data for millions of people is unacceptable, a German medi…
Chinese smartphone and connected device maker Xiaomi is bringing its blockbuster initial public offering to Hong Kong, where it could raise about $10 billion in the largest listing globally in almost four years.
The IPO plans, filed on …
The past several weeks have made clear that people want more information about how Facebook (www.Facebook.com) works and the controls they have over their information. And today at F8 we're sharing some of the first steps we're taking to b…
General Motors Co said on Thursday it was working with design software company Autodesk Inc to manufacture new, lightweight 3D-printed parts that could help the automaker meet its goals to add alternative-fuel vehicles to its product lineu…
A Chinese drone company has broken the Guinness World Record for most drones flown simultaneously in a 13-minute flight that involved 1,374 drones spread over a kilometer.
Chinese UAV firm EHang Egret clinched the record by 156 drones f…
LG's latest flagship phone seeks to stand out from rivals by offering a brighter display and a "boombox" facility meant to make separate speakers unnecessary.
The G7 ThinkQ's 6.1in (15.5cm) screen also features a notch reminiscent of th…
Apple has been accused of finding unnecessary faults with iPhones and thereby profiting from a battery replacement initiative.
When the US firm announced it had been slowing down iPhones in order to "preserve battery life" in December l…
At the 2013 annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, flashy organic light-emitting diode (OLED) televisions sporting credit card-thin screens were at the front and center of Samsung Electronics’ (005930.KS) new gadgets display.
…