We live in a golden era of on-demand apps. Need a pizza? Have a slice delivered. Forget to go grocery shopping? Fill up your cabinets with Instacart. But these are downright pedestrian compared to a whole slew of Uberlike services for the luxury market that help you book things like your own personal butler or …

YouTube, the biggest video site on the planet, deals a lot in big numbers, so its latest milestone is no exception. Thursday, the Google-owned video service said it has automatically captioned 1 billion videos. Captions, subtitles on clips that transcribe dialogue and note other audio clues occurring on screen, are a technology that makes videos more accessible for those with …

Now playing: Watch this: Google is committed to Android Wear, says VP 1:16 With the launch of Android Wear 2.0 Google added support for its mobile payment platform, Android Pay. The only hiccup with the feature right now is the number of Android Wear watches with NFC support is, well, limited. So limited, that as of this writing, only the …

Wanna play a piano duet but nobody’s around? No worries. You still can, courtesy of Google’s new interactive experiment called A.I. Duet. Basically, you play a few notes and the computer plays other notes in response to your melody. What’s special about A.I. Duet is that it plays with you using machine learning, and not just as a machine that’s …

Village Roadshow has a big plan to stop piracy this year, and one of its goals could have a massive impact on you. The Aussie film distributor has announced plans to go after individual pirates this year, saying it will start “suing infringers” as part of an aggressive five-point anti-piracy program. But the company isn’t just going after internet users. …

HTC needs to make money, and that isn’t going to happen with low-end phones. That was the company’s message during an earnings call Wednesday, as reported by Phone Scoop. Instead, the ailing Taiwanese phonemaker will aim for midrange devices (like the HTC Bolt and U Play) and high-end phones, such as the glass HTC U Ultra. HTC said it would …

Hey Samsung, please tease us with the Galaxy S8! Samsung has confirmed to us that it won’t be releasing the Galaxy S8 at its conference on February 26 at this month’s Mobile World Congress show (MWC). But it could still give us an official launch date as a consolation prize, according to Phone Arena, citing The Korean Economic Daily (translated …

With Japan’s track record of natural disasters, the country is understandably always on the lookout for ways to better prepare itself. Japan is now looking to the skies, working to develop drones to help out in the case of an earthquake or other trouble. The country last week trialled special drones mounted with speaker systems that can direct citizens to …

Netflix has given the go-ahead for teachers to screen the Oscar-nominated documentary “13th” in schools. The powerful film is named after US Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, and examines the American prison system. Directed by Ava DuVernay, the film is distributed exclusively by Netflix and is in the running for best documentary at this month’s Academy Awards. Watch these …

HTC will soon launch a new virtual reality toy you can use on the go. The device will be compatible with HTC’s new flagship phone, the U Ultra. But HTC says it won’t be just a simple headset like Samsung‘s Gear VR. VR, which puts headset wearers into a computer-generated digital world, has swept across the tech industry over the …