Ben Fox Rubin

Amazon Alexa’s new home: Your PC?

Now playing: Watch this: Amazon wants to put Alexa on your PC 1:28 Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant may be talking her way into yet another important place: PCs. Lenovo, the world’s biggest PC maker, has held talks with Amazon on potentially using Alexa in its computers and other devices, according to a Lenovo executive with …

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Corning wants to put its Gorilla Glass on your next smartwatch

Corning has developed a new form of its Gorilla Glass that’s both super tough and super scratch resistant. But this new display glass, called Gorilla Glass SR+, won’t be coming to Gorilla’s stronghold in phones: It’s coming to smartwatches. The first product announced that uses Gorilla Glass SR+ is the Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch, which was unveiled Wednesday, just after …

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Uber teams with Visa on Local Offers rewards program

Time to get more out of your Uber ride. Visa and Uber said Tuesday they have teamed up to create Uber Local Offers, a rewards program within the ride-hailing app. After you enroll in the program, you can start generating points for every dollar you spend using your Visa card at specific stores and restaurants. Every 100 points can be …

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AmazonFresh appears to fix ‘Buy It Again’ bug

AmazonFresh apparently squashed some of its bugs. A handful of problems with the online retailer’s grocery service, available in some US cities and London, could have unnecessarily cost customers a lot more money, CNET reported on Friday. Through its website’s “Buy It Again” feature, Amazon had been encouraging customers to repurchase items they bought using Fresh — but at inflated …

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Pokemon Go captures 55M mobile users in first month

Now playing: Watch this: Pokemon Go: The dream features we want to see in the… 4:10 Pokemon Go got really big, really fast. Want proof? Just ask ComScore. The researcher reported this week that Pokemon Go reached 55 million mobile users in the US this July, during the first full month the mobile game was available. Thanks to that huge …

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Your next iPhone might be able to protect itself from thieves

What if your iPhone could help actively protect itself, even after it’s been stolen? That potential idea was considered in a new patent application Apple filed Thursday with the US Patent & Trademark Office. According to the application, which AppleInsider wrote about, a future iPhone may — when triggered by the right circumstances — start documenting an alleged thief’s fingerprints …

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AmazonFresh customers: Beware of the $5 Snickers bar

Update, August 29: After this story ran on Friday, Amazon appears to have made a handful of fixes to bugs highlighted below. The company declined to comment for this story and didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday. In mid-June, Dave Jackson bought a Frito-Lay variety pack through AmazonFresh for $10.44. When he returned to the Amazon mobile app …

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Does Apple CEO Tim Cook deserve an A? (The 3:59, Ep. 99)

Tim Cook had some very big shoes to fill. Five years after taking over as Apple CEO from Steve Jobs, Cook has recreated the company’s culture by making it much more focused on social issues. But Apple under Cook hasn’t made as many big changes in its hardware, with Cook’s only new category of product being the Apple Watch. We …

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Facebook is shoving ads down your throat (The 3:59, Ep. 93)

Facebook is kicking up the battle over ad blockers. The social media juggernaut said it will circumvent ad-blocking technology designed to strip commercial messages from websites, helping it serve more ads and make more money. The millions of consumers who use ad blockers may not be too pleased. We also hit on Sling TV adding NFL content to its streaming …

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The iPhone 7 isn’t here yet, but we are already bored with it (The 3:59, Ep. 92)

We’re about a month away from Apple’s expected unveiling of its newest iPhone, so we used this episode to discuss many of the rumors circulating about new versions of the phone, Apple Watch and MacBook Pro. There are a few hardware tweaks expected for the iPhone 7, including Apple cutting out the headphone jack to make the phone slimmer and …

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