This year’s mascot of Tribeca Immersive was a creepy living doll that meandered around the room projecting light in people’s eyes. At the very least, it made the prospect of leaving actual reality for a virtual one a little more appealing. With its Immersive slate the Tribeca Film Festival, which closed Sunday in New York, …

Google introduced a Focus Mode feature for its Android mobile operating system on Tuesday, letting you temporarily shut off apps you find most distracting so your device automatically tunes them out when you want to concentrate.  It’s coming to devices using Android P and Q this fall.  “When I enter focus mode, I can select the apps that I find distracting,” …

The toy trucks were patched together out of used boxes and Band-Aids. They’re the objects I remember most from the Horgos refugee camp in Serbia. A boy, whose family had lived in the tents there for months already, crafted them so he and his brother would have something to play with. I’d visited the camp in 2016 to learn how …

YouTube has crossed into 2 billion logged-in viewers every month, a milestone that’s been just out of reach for at least a year, CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday. In February, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said YouTube was almost at 2 billion monthly logged-in users, after the company said it reached 1.8 billion monthly logged-in viewers a year ago.  Wojcicki also said viewers …

It’s that time of year in New York, when digital media companies put on “Newfronts,” splashy presentations for video advertisers. Usually, it’s a chance for services like Hulu and YouTube to impress marketers with their buzzy new shows and trot out their highest-wattage talent.  So for its Newfront, Verizon put its biggest star center stage: 5G. Verizon, which bought digital media …

Last week, I befriended a fuzzy pink alien that my robot sidekick and I nicknamed Pork Bun. We played fetch around a bonfire and munched on virtual marshmallows. Pork Bun was so charming that, when I had to choose between protecting Pork Bun or saving the human race from extinction, I tacitly left planet Earth to fend for itself to …

Spotify surpassed 100 million subscribers at the end of March, the music streaming service said Monday in its first-quarter report.  That keeps Spotify above its closest competitor, Apple Music; Apple CEO Tim Cook said in January that Apple Music hit 50 million subscribers at the end of last year.  As society worldwide has shifted to streaming as the most common way …

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones season 8. When the White Walker advanced toward me, locking his steely blue gaze on me as he stepped over the shards of an ice wall that had just crumbled between us, I dispatched him with Arya-like cunning.  I stabbed his chest with a dragonglass dagger — so, yes, it wasn’t Valyrian steel just like Arya’s. …

Twitter is widening its video partnerships to include programming from news mainstays Time and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a deal with Univision to expand Spanish-language video exclusive to the social network.  The announcements Monday were part of Twitter’s NewFront, an annual presentation to digital advertisers. Twitter’s ad-friendly pitch comes as debate continues about the responsiveness to hate …

Viacom is going to make its cable channels stream free… sort of.  The company — which runs cable networks BET, Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon — will debut free streaming channels based on those networks Wednesday on PlutoTV, the ad-supported free steaming app that Viacom bought earlier this year for $340 million. The announcement Monday was made in advance of …