Imagine you’re on a guided tour in Chartres cathedral in France along with tourists from Brazil, China, Russia and Germany — but none of you speaks French. For the last few decades, you’d each need your own tour guide. A new app from Microsoft aims to flatten this multilanguage barrier, though. The Microsoft Translator app, …

With a digital mapping service called What3words, residents of even the smallest, most rural village in the African nation of Ivory Coast now have an official address. The country’s postal system just adopted the startup’s technology, which assigns a three-word phrase to each 3-meter square on the map. For example, heaven.mallard.houseguests is a structure on the outskirts of Mberie. The …

When Adobe Systems launched Lightroom for phones and tablets, it was a pale reflection of the version for Windows and Mac. It’s been gradually improving, but an overhaul Thursday brings the mobile app much closer to the PC version of the photo editing and cataloging software. Adobe surveyed its customers to figure out what they’d like. The new editing interface …

Ever eager to keep you buying PCs, Microsoft and Intel are cooperating to bring virtual reality to the masses. Today’s more advanced virtual reality setups, like Facebook’s Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive, require a high-powered PC with enough graphics horsepower to generate a convincing artificial 3D game for you to play or world to explore. There’s progress to pare back …

The Google app is taking a new step away from its original purpose — search — toward giving you information the company thinks you might want. The app offers a search bar above a stack of “cards” that present information tailored for you, such as weather forecasts, news headlines and a map showing where Google thinks you parked your car. …

If you’ve heard of Mozilla, it’s probably because you’ve used its Firefox browser. Now the nonprofit wants to expand out of technology into politics. Mozilla is marshaling public support for political positions, like backing net neutrality, defending encryption and keeping government surveillance from getting out of hand, says Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla’s chief legal and business officer. The organization is funding …

Want your next laptop to get the performance boost that comes with storing data on an SSD? You’ll have to pay more for the privilege this holiday season and beyond. SSDs, or solid state drives, store data on flash memory chips the same way your phone does. The approach can speed up your PC significantly when booting your computer, launching …

After designing a Civil War computer game for an eighth-grade project, Sonia Uppal was intrigued by programming. But her school material was just too dry and boring for a kid to endure. “It was awful,” so she gave up computer science, she says. At a technology fair the next year, though, a chance encounter with a $35 computer called the …

Mozilla just escalated an arms race with advertisers, releasing a new browser for iPhone and iPad users called Firefox Focus that blocks ads from tracking your activities on the web. When you visit websites, many advertisers store text files on your PC or phone that are designed to show you ads you’re more likely to click on. For example, you …

There are no traditional USB ports. The keyboard is lame. The Touch Bar is a gimmick. There’s not enough memory. And worst of all, you have to buy a bunch of expensive dongles to match what your old laptop could do easily. Those are some of the complaints dogging Apple’s new high-end laptop, the MacBook Pro. The detractors have fair …