Microsoft has introduced its new tablet-but-actually-a-laptop. And while it might look pretty much the same as its already two-year-old brother the Surface Pro 4, the new device doesn’t disappoint. If anything, sticking to the design just shows that Microsoft doesn’t need to change yet – it already knew how the perfect Surface should look two years ago. And that hasn’t changed.
The biggest yearly gaming expo didn’t disappoint in 2017. We saw so many announcements at this year’s E3 that we really had a hard time picking the best ones. But a couple of days have passed, the dust has settled and we’ve finished our list of top E3 announcements of 2017:
Amazon continues expanding in the direction of offline retail. After recently opening up the first Amazon supermarket and its first book store, the ecommerce giant has now acquired the grocery chain Whole Foods with its 460 shops in the US, Canada and the UK.
Andy Rubin, one of Android’s co-founders, has unveiled an intriguing new high-end smartphone. The Essential Phone is new stab at making a successful modular phone, one which you can attach additional parts to. The beautifully-designed phone costing 699 USD will have it tough in a heavily saturated market.
Rumours that Apple is building a device to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google Home have been circulating for a while, but they have officially reached their peak. According to Forbes, Bloomberg and other reputable tech sources, Apple’s new device is not only real, but might also be unveiled as soon as this week.
As of 2018, ad blocking will be becoming an integrated version in one of the world’s most popular browsers, Google revealed. Chrome will be introducing a tool that blocks annoying or intrusive advertisements, the company says. The company is trying to sell it as a win-win for publishers and consumers alike – but is it really?
The world’s biggest drone company, DJI, unveiled what might be the world’s smallest commercial drone this week. It’s called the Spark and weighs half a pound (about 230 grams). It can also move by following the gestures of your hand. All of that for just 499 dollars – the Spark might be what pushes drones into the mainstream.
Amazon, the world’s virtual shopping centre for everything has been labelled as the “killer of bookstores” more than once in the past. Now, the company has opened one for itself. But just why is Amazon selling books offline in New York?
Car sharing and hailing services like Uber and Lyft have taken the world by storm. The vision of urban mobility where fewer people own a car and yet still get to drive one from point A to point B is apparently very appealing in the US, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows. So appealing in fact, that some of those people are ditching their cars in favor of the services.
Ebb and flow, hype and disappointment – the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been switching between those two ever since it was first unleashed on the world. And it’s on the top again. By reaching a price of 2,000 dollars per coin for the first time, Bitcoin has broken yet another record – maybe this time it will last?
The FCC has voted against the current state of internet regulations from the Obama administration called net neutrality. The rules were put in place to essentially watch over and control cable and telecom companies as to not violate the principles of net neutrality.
Spotify is continuing its buying spree, adding a fourth company to its list of acquisitions for 2017 alone. The newest addition is called Niland and is a Machine-Learning Startup based in France. Spotify will be aiming to use Niland’s technology to bring its users better recommendations.
The lawsuit of Google’s self-driving car subsidiary, Waymo, and Uber are going to trial. Waymo is accusing its former employee Anthony Levandowski of stealing 14,000 confidential documents and taking them to his new employer, Uber.
Snapchat has been a publicly traded company for a little over two months now – but the first results are looking discouraging. The growth rate of Snapchat increased by less than expected and the slowdown worries investors. Additionally, the company reported a net loss of 2.2 billion US, largely due to costs for the IPO.
The ransom-ware “WannaCry”, already labelled as the world’s biggest cyber attack, gave us a glimpse of how vulnerable the always-connected world of the future is. As around 100 countries were targeted: hospitals in the UK, trains in Germany, FedEx in the US, phone companies in Portugal and Spain and many more were victims of blackmailers.
Google Docs was hit with a phishing attack the likes of we really haven’t seen before. It looked very very real, it spread quickly and was thankfully tackled by Google in just an hour according to the company. But it’s a good refresher of security and not trusting things even if they look genuine at first glance. Here’s what happened and what the red flags were...
Facebook has been growing significantly, both in terms of users (around 1.86 billion monthly actives) and new possibilities. Facebook Live, in particular, has brought the problem of disturbing content to a new level. Live streams are hard to control and predict – which is why Facebook has announced it’s hiring an addition 3,000 people to pay attention to sift through reports.
The Apple Watch has been ridiculed, labelled as a late appearance to an already crowded market and generally met with a lot of negative commentary. As is often the case with Apple, neither the company nor its consumers seem to care – the Apple Watch is now the number one wearable when it comes down to global shipments.
