This year’s Sundance Film Festival was awash in new movies, shorts and experiences made for augmented and virtual reality. For today’s podcast, digital media reporter Joan E. Solsman discusses her visit to the festival to see these new forms of storytelling take shape, such as a new 40-minute VR film called “Miyubi” about a toy …
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January, 2017
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25 January
Qualcomm CEO fires back at Apple: Bring it on
Bring it on, Apple — at least, that’s what Qualcomm’s top executives seemed to be saying Wednesday. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf and Derek Aberle, head of the wireless chipmakers’s licensing business, fired back at lawsuits filed over the past week by Apple in the US and China. Those suits, they said, are all about the money, an effort by Apple …
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25 January
WikiLeaks offers to save climate data from Trump
Got climate data? Worried the new US president might want to vaporize it? WikiLeaks says it’s ready to help. As scientists and others ponder the possibility of President Donald Trump’s administration removing climate data stored on US government websites, Julian Assange & Co. took to Twitter on Wednesday to offer WikiLeaks as an alternative spot for publication. “Do you have …
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25 January
AT&T CEO on President Trump: ‘I was impressed’
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is in a good mood thanks to President Donald Trump. Speaking on a conference call with analysts, Stephenson shared his impressions of the new president after meeting with him earlier this month. “I was impressed,” he said. “I was meeting with a CEO.” He went on to say that Trump was focused on reforming corporate taxes …
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24 January
This crazy camera could be a boon to VR filmmakers
If you’re trying to create immersive virtual-reality video today, you’ve got a problem: choosing between a camera that’s compact or a bulkier one that offers sharp imagery. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, though, have found a way to get the best of both worlds. It’s a camera called PMast. The camera is just a prototype today, …
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24 January
Mark Zuckerberg ‘reconsidering’ lawsuits against Hawaiians
Mark Zuckerberg is apparently having second thoughts about a series of lawsuits he has filed related to a recent land purchase in Hawaii. The Facebook CEO has been the target of widespread criticism after filing quiet title lawsuits in December against a few hundred people who own or once owned property inside 700 acres of beachfront land he purchased on …
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24 January
Starbucks addicts in Japan now have a more stylish way to pay
Tap-to-pay key fobs, those gadgets you dangle off a key chain and wave or tap over a payment device to debit from a linked account, are nothing new. But they’re usually ugly, functional-looking plastic thingamabobs. Not in Japan, though. Starbucks there teamed with clothing designer Beams to offer a leather-clad fob for fashion-first Starbuckians. This Starbucks card replacement isn’t cheap …
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24 January
Turn an old laptop into a Chromebook
Common scenario: You buy a new laptop, thinking you’ll sell, donate or hand down the old one… but it never happens. Maybe you don’t want to deal with the hassles of Craigslist or Ebay, not to mention wiping all your data, reinstalling Windows and so on. Whatever the case, now it’s just taking up space. But it doesn’t have to: …
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24 January
Apple’s iOS 10.3 beta hits with cricket scores, ‘Find My AirPods’
You’ll no longer have to fumble around to find your missing AirPods. Apple’s latest iOS 10 beta update, 10.3, lets you locate your new Apple wireless headphones using the “Find My iPhone” app, undoubtedly making a few of you feel very relieved. The app can play a sound on one or both AirPods to help you find them. There are …
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24 January
We know what killed the Note 7. Here’s how Samsung’s Galaxy S8 can rise from the ashes
Now that Samsung announced that two different battery problems caused its initially well-regarded Galaxy Note 7 to burst into literal flame, the company desperately needs a Phoenix phone — and the Galaxy S8 we expect to see in the coming months (but not at the usual Mobile World Congress show) will be Samsung’s first attempt to convince the world that …
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