Eric David
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Apple announces HomePod speaker, augmented reality support and more at WWDC
Apple Inc. kicked off its weeklong Worldwide Developer Conference today with some major announcements, including one entirely new product: the new HomePod smart speaker, Apple’s long-awaited answer to Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo and Google Inc.’s Home. Apple also announced expanded support for virtual and augmented reality, new machine learning tools, new versions of MacOS and iOS ...
Google Sheets now lets you build charts with machine learning
Google Sheets may not have the same clout with businesses as Microsoft Excel, but Google Inc.’s spreadsheet software may have one-upped Microsoft Corp. today with the introduction of charts powered by machine learning. Creating charts from spreadsheet data is relatively simple, but according to Google, creating a chart with the right data organized in the right ...
Password manager OneLogin compromised by data breach
OneLogin Inc., the provider of a single-sign-on password management service, announced today that it has suffered a data breach that may have put user information at risk. While OneLogin admitted the breach today, the company did not reveal to what extent its systems had been compromised. “Today we detected unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our ...
With new Skype, Microsoft is copying Snapchat too
Microsoft Corp. has just given Skype a major facelift, and the 13-year-old video chat app is starting to look an awful lot like Snapchat. The Skype app has been completely redesigned with a hipper, more colorful interface, and Microsoft has added a few features aimed at making Skype more like a social network than simply a ...
Amazon engineer lets Twitch play the stock market with his money
Most people would not want a bunch of random strangers playing around with their money on the stock market, but that is exactly what Mike Roberts is doing through Twitch, Amazon.com Inc.’s popular live streaming platform for gamers. Roberts is a Seattle-based software engineer at Amazon, and he decided to put up $50,000 of his own money ...
CrowdJustice raises $2M to let people crowdfund their legal battles
Legal battles can be incredibly expensive, which can make it difficult for the average Joe to take on governments or major corporations. U.K.-based startup CrowdJustice wants to fix that by allowing people to crowdfund their legal cases, and today the company announced that it has secured $2 million in seed funding to expand its platform. The funding ...
Uber fires self-driving car chief accused of stealing Google’s tech
Uber Technologies Inc. has fired its top self-driving car engineer, Anthony Levandowski, the former Google Inc. employee who is at the heart of the Waymo Inc. lawsuit that accuses Uber of using stolen technology. Waymo, which is the name of Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car division, claims that Levandowski stole thousands of confidential files when he left the company ...
Android creator Andy Rubin unveils Essential Phone, a ‘future-proof’ modular smartphone
After months of teasing, Android creator Andy Rubin has finally unveiled his new smartphone. Today, Rubin announced Essential Phone, a $699 modular smartphone aimed at fixing some of today’s technology problems for which Rubin feels partly responsible. “For all the good Android has done to help bring technology to nearly everyone it has also helped ...
Raspberry Pi Foundation merges with coding charity for kids
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, the United Kingdom charity organization behind the tiny Raspberry Pi computers, announced today that it will be merging with CoderDojo, a coding club for children between 7 and 17 years old. According to Raspberry Pi Foundation Chief Executive Philip Colligan, the goal behind the merger is to allow the two organizations to ...
Baidu’s text-to-speech AI can replicate hundreds of accents
Virtual assistants give our smart devices seemingly human personalities, but despite their efforts to sound like real people, programs such as Apple Inc.’s Siri and Microsoft Corp.’s Cortana still sometimes sound a little robotic. Chinese web giant Baidu Inc. aims to change that with Deep Voice, an artificial intelligence designed to convert text into believable ...