Facebook wants to help you build a really expensive camera. And once you do, the company says, it’ll be worth it. The social-networking giant is offering filmmakers instructions for how to build a camera designed to capture 360-degree video. The project is called Surround 360, and the camera will cost about $30,000 to make. That …
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April, 2016
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12 April
Bear chasing a snowboarder caught on video?
A video of an Australian woman snowboarding while singing Rihanna’s “Work” — with a bear in pursuit — has roused the doubters. In the video description, Kelly Murphy wrote: “OMG! I was going through my snowboarding videos and I found a bear chasing me!!! I nearly got eaten!!! This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!!” …
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11 April
Lyft says Ni Hao to Chinese riders
Hailing a ride in the US just got easier for visitors from China. Riders can now use China’s biggest ride-hailing app, Didi, to hail a Lyft car in the US. The rollout this week makes good on a partnership Lyft announced in September, which also includes Ola and Grab, ride-hailing apps that together cover countries from India to Indonesia. It’s …
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11 April
A nail in the coffin for Firefox? Mozilla struggles to redefine browser
A quiet announcement about a new Mozilla project sounded like a death knell for the Firefox browser. It wasn’t. But the project, called Tofino, reveals the technology challenges Mozilla faces more than a decade after Firefox’s debut. Hundreds of millions of people still use the browser, but its star is fading compared with Google’s Chrome. Mozilla released details about the …
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11 April
Facebook looks for more ways to gobble up our Internet time (The 3:59, Ep. 25)
Facebook’s big F8 developer conference kicks off Tuesday and a big focus of the event is expected to be bots. The social network hopes to get us to spend even more time in its Messenger app by baking in more chat bots, which are snippets of software that can perform simple tasks. These chat bots can already order an Uber …
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11 April
LEAKED: Rumored ‘Kindle Oasis’ shows off crazy
Now playing: Watch this: Amazon’s next Kindle already leaked? 1:05 It’s no secret that a new Kindle e-reader is expected to drop this week — CEO Jeff Bezos tweeted so himself — but it looks like we might have an unexpected and unofficial sneak peek on our hands. Leaked images from product listings on Amazon China (which have since been …
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11 April
Use Facebook Messenger to send and receive money
Remember when Facebook Messenger broke out of Facebook proper? A lot of users, including yours truly, were seriously irked. Why did we have to switch to entire different app just to chat with a Facebook friend? Turns out Facebook had bigger plans for Messenger, including voice calls, chat bots, chess games and — who knew? — mobile payments. It’s true: …
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11 April
Living without Google, and Twitter (and Facebook) is really, really hard
Well, I knew it would be hard to share stories of my on-the-road diary of seven cities in Asia once I crossed over from Hong Kong, which has an open Internet environment, into China, which is infamous for The Great Firewall that blocks a lot of services I take for granted, like Google, Facebook and Twitter. But I didn’t know …
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11 April
Apple Watch due for a sophomore slump
This year’s look for the Apple Watch will be pretty much the same as last year’s. Apple’s wearable won’t undergo a substantial refresh of its external design until 2017, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a Monday investors note snagged by blog site Apple Insider. A new version of the watch is coming in 2016, but it will sport mostly internal …
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11 April
Porn giant joins protest against North Carolina transgender law
North Carolina’s controversial new transgender law is facing even stiffer opposition. Popular porn website XHamster.com began turning away users based in North Carolina on Monday, joining protests against a state law that forces transgender public school and university students to use bathrooms according to their biological sex. Instead of the usual fare of risqué videos, photos and stories, users with …
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