Arts and Culture's Virtual Survival Story: The Show Must Go On
The arts have seen a shift in the last year away from in-person gatherings, but that doesn't mean that performances, showings, and other creative activities have stopped. Rather, they've been transformed, becoming increasingly virtual and digital. We spoke with experts in the arts, design, and marketing to see how these fields have changed and might continue to evolve.
Investors have $20 billion to acquire businesses. Is yours one of them?
Our Technology M&A: 2021 Outlook gives owners, founders and entrepreneurs insight into why e-commerce is dominating technology acquisitions, what this means for multiples, when investors are looking to allocate capital and more.
Tech Think Tank Calls for $40B Reverse Auction to Boost Rural Broadband
Nearly one-in-five rural Americans don't have broadband Internet access, but that could change with the use of carefully targeted subsidies through a process known as a reverse auction.
Advance Strategies to Eliminate E-Commerce Chargebacks
Half of consumers who originally planned to return to their pre-pandemic in-store shopping routines once coronavirus is under control now plan to stick with online shopping. That shift in preferences means that e-commerce merchants must keep up with trending ways to market, sell, and prevent fraud. Let's look at a few of the most important developments and see where they're going.
Once the Big Tech Battler, Open Source Is Now Big Tech’s Battleground
A cadre of tech giants have created the Rust Foundation. This is neither the first nor largest contribution to an open-source project by private tech vendors. Still, the creation of this new body marks another noteworthy instance in which proprietary software companies took the initiative to found and steward a nonprofit project. It's not groundbreaking, but it doesn't happen every day.
New Threat Report Finds Email Prime Vehicle for Malware
Malicious online actors used email as their prime vehicle for delivering malware to their victims in the last quarter of 2020. The HP-Bromium Threat Insights Report found that 88 percent of malware was delivered by email into its targets' inboxes, many times evading measures at email gateways to filter out the infected correspondence.
Nvidia + Arm and the Challenges of Building a New Type of Tech Company
Nvidia is in the process of working through regulatory approvals to buy Arm from SoftBank -- a technology holding company with mixed success husbanding its acquisitions. Let's explore this acquisition, the most significant regulatory hurdles the effort needs to overcome, and what might result once the two firms are one. We'll close with the product of the week: Nvidia's GeForce Now.
Young Adults, Seniors 75+ Most Susceptible to Cyber Fraud
The most vulnerable cybercrime victims are young adults and adults over 75, according to the latest research revealed in the LexisNexis Risk Solutions biannual Cybercrime Report.
New Social Platform Seeks to Swell Ranks With Talk
A new social media platform called Swell is based on voice messaging. According to its developers, Swell is the first social platform to focus exclusively on asynchronous audio conversations, where audio clips up to five minutes in length can be...
New Customer Experience Needs and Commerce Trends for 2021
Commerce analysts do not see consumers shedding their newfound buying options in the wake of a post-pandemic marketplace. Concerns for health safety, social distancing, and remote working will remain priorities for many shoppers.
Rise of Open Source: Pandemic, Economy, Efficiency, Trust
Those familiar with open source know that it works and comes with many benefits. A testament to the rising adoption of open source is the recent moves by software giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle into the open-source community.
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Women in Tech: 20 Trailblazers Share Their Journeys
Successful women in the tech trenches share their insights and tackle subjects ranging from how to search out a strong mentor to how to be one -- from how to advance in a large company to how to start your own firm.
This book is an excellent guide for students considering STEM courses, graduates pondering job choices, and career changers at any stage in life. It's also a useful tool for school and career counselors, recruiters, and HR pros eager to diversify their workplaces.
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Sony's slow march to making 360 Reality Audio mainstream has picked up the pace. Well, a little. After two years of showcasing the technology at trade shows (and putting it into non-Sony speakers), the company is finally ready to unveil pricing and availability for a pair of speakers, having laid out all of the specs back in January. The SRS-RA3000 is $300, while the more robust SRS-RA5000 is $700, with both speakers set to ship on March 29th.
The company says its spatial audio technology — combined with 360 Reality Audio content from streaming services like Amazon Music HD — allows both of these speakers to beam music both horizontally and vertically. Sony believes this helps to create a soundscape unlike your existing audio setup. I briefly tested it out when it was first announced at CES 2019, and it's technically impressive — even for an audio dilettante.
The larger SRS-RA5000 packs in seven total drivers: three up-firing, three side-firing and a single subwoofer. Meanwhile, the SRS-RA3000 uses a full-range speaker and a diffuser to spread the sound around the room, combining two overlapping beam tweeters and a dual passive radiator. Sony decided to make the RA3000 humidity resistant, so you can take it into the kitchen or bathroom without worrying about damp air — it's the slightly more portable option.
Until now, Sony only offered 360 Reality Audio support on some headphone models. The total number of compatible tracks is still pretty lacking, too: 4,000 at last count. It's been a slow start for 360 Reality Audio, and now the real work begins.
Grab the latest updates to get your phone working properly again.
This afternoon, a number of Android users (including some Engadget editors) suddenly saw notifications pop up on their devices saying that apps had stopped running. Many of these apps suddenly can't be opened, and included important ones like Gmail, a number of banking apps and Google Pay.
Later in the evening Google confirmed the issue with WebView, and overnight it released an update to fix it. If you're still seeing crashes on your device, open the Play Store to make sure you have the latest update for System WebView and Google Chrome. Continue reading.
HAMR and MAMR will use lasers and microwaves to pack as much as 60TB into a drive.
Flash storage has become so cheap and ubiquitous that outside of backup systems and NAS, SSDs and flash memory now hold the data on most of our devices. Hard drive shipments peaked in 2015, and fewer are sold every year, but in terms of terabytes sold, hard drives are more important than ever. Chris Schodt takes Upscaled to the future of supercharged hard drives. Continue reading.
It's been almost a year and a half since Dyson launched its formaldehyde-busting Pure Cryptomic air purifiers, and now, the company is back with an upgrade. The new Dyson Purifier Formaldehyde models — Hot+Cool (HP09) and Cool (TP09) — look almost identical to their predecessors, and they even feature the same Cryptomelane catalytic filters which break formaldehyde down into water and carbon dioxide.
Dyson's latest devices are now able to specifically monitor this carcinogenic gas constantly released from the likes of furniture, carpets, paint and flooring. Dyson has avoided using gel-based formaldehyde sensors often found in competitors' devices, which dry up after about three years. Instead, the company developed a solid-state formaldehyde sensor which, much like the catalytic filters, allegedly lasts for the air purifiers' lifetime. Continue reading.
Discord, the chat/communications platform popular with gamers and many other groups, is going through a sales process that could fetch more than $10 billion. Bloomberg cites anonymous sources saying that Microsoft could be willing to buy the chat platform.
The report doesn't suggest that a deal is even close to completion, and at least one source claimed Discord is more likely to go public than sell. It could offer Microsoft a potent tool against Slack, even if the company already has its own Microsoft Teams tools. It's been almost a decade since Microsoft bought Yammer to enhance its enterprise social networking efforts and five years or so since it bought LinkedIn. Outside of Microsoft's usual business acquisitions, it could be a smart purchase. Continue reading.
The Wrangler Magneto looks like a regular gas-powered Wrangler Rubicon model, but it's powered by a battery and a highly unusual electric drivetrain that might appeal to off-road enthusiasts.
As Autoblog points out, in order to make electrification work in a regular Wrangler body, Jeep couldn't place the electric motors directly on the axles. Rather, it put the motor (an axial flux model) under the hood to power an upgraded Wrangler drivetrain including a two-speed transfer case and six-speed manual transmission.
They matched the electric motor and torque to the Wrangler's regular Pentastar V6 engine, so it delivers roughly the same 285 horsepower and 273 pound-feet of torque. However, the full torque comes in much more quickly, allowing for acceleration from 0 to 60 MPH in 6.8 seconds. Continue reading.
