Mike Murphy

Without much fanfare, beyond a few choice tweets, Twitter quietly launched its first live-streamed event today, broadcasting the proceedings at the Wimbledon tennis tournament on the company’s website and mobile apps. And after all the chest-thumping around the launch of Moments, the curated daily news section of its service, and the ability to add stickers to tweets, this could well end up being the most important new thing Twitter has unveiled in a while.

DJI, the largest consumer drone manufacturer in the world, announced July 5 that it was releasing a new version of the software that controls its drones, which will allow operators to fly in areas that the company’s software previously did not. DJI said in a release that this could aid those who want to use its drones for inspecting businesses or properties that fall inside the US Federal Aviation Administration’s restricted airspace zones.

Amazon’s Echo, a wireless speaker and the physical housing for the company’s virtual assistant Alexa, has never really been able to tap into the largest resource that Amazon has at its disposal: stuff to buy. Up until today, Echo owners have only been able to ask Alexa to reorder select items they’ve already purchased online, or more Echoes. But now, Amazon is allowing Alexa to help order just about any item from Amazon’s catalogue that can be shipped as part of the company’s Prime membership service. Given that Amazon is primarily an online retailer, and secondarily a web-hosting company—and in a (distant) third, a consumer electronics company—it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for Alexa to learn this skill.

Snapchat, the ethereal messaging app valued at about $20 billion, went down for about 45 minutes a little before 12pm ET today, according to internet traffic monitors. As with many other social networks and internet services, users have taken to Twitter to voice their frustrations with the popular app being down. Many are concerned that their streaks—the little number that Snapchat puts next to friends that have snapped back and forth with each other—are going to be broken.

Last year was the year of the hoverboard—the self-balancing boards that in no way hovered really blew up, both literally and figuratively. As they became the gadget fad that every pop star, celebrity and suburban child latched onto, they also started causing a stir with authorities around the world, as many of the shoddily made knock-off boards caused fires and explosions around the world. They were banned on airlines, transit systems, and city roads.

YouTube has gotten very good at figuring out when people upload copyrighted material to the video-streaming site, and taking things down. Its program, Content ID, matches videos from the site against a database of video uploaded by content owners. If there’s a match, YouTube will move to take that video down. But what if you upload a video in a video?

Sitting below one of the most famous parks in the world is a half-mile train tunnel built by the city of New York forty years ago that you won’t find on any subway map. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes, it’s not.

Tesla Motors announced in a blog post today that it had been made aware that one of its Model S electric cars was involved in a fatal accident on May 7, while the car’s ”autopilot” function was enabled.

The robot revolution is coming, and people like Elon Musk and prominent scientists are concerned about what this could portend for humanity. They have suggested that we carefully think through what it would mean to live with artificial sentiences that could easily outstrip our own intelligences, and whether it’s really worth bringing them into the world to make our chat apps a little better.

Microsoft’s third CEO appears to be taking a leaf out of the playbook of its first. Today, publisher HarperCollins announced that Satya Nadella is working on a book, due out in the fall of 2017, called Hit Refresh. 

“Please, no flash photography.”

Just over a year ago, Apple introduced its newest laptop, the wonderfully thin—but woefully underpowered—MacBook. It’s since been updated with a more powerful processor and more memory, but it’s still relatively underpowered, compared with Apple’s flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, and far more expensive than its MacBook Air line of computers. But Apple hasn’t updated either line of computers in over a year—the last updates to both happened after a press event in March 2015, and at this year’s March event, Apple glossed over the two machines. And some of Apple’s desktop computers, such as the Mac Pro and Mini, haven’t been updated, or mentioned, in years.

England, the country that invented soccer, was just dumped out of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament by Iceland, a tiny island nation in the north Atlantic ocean with a population about the size of the city of Cleveland. It comes just days after the UK voted to leave the European Union, sending the pound into a tailspin, erasing trillions from the stock market, and leading some to already regret their decision to vote for Brexit.

Soylent is a startup that makes a nutritional powder and drink that are supposed to be able to replace meals. As part of Silicon Valley’s desire to disrupt everything about modern life—whether it needs to be disrupted or not—Soylent has become a popular company for venture capitalists to back and Valley types to be seen with. The company’s newest drink, Soylent 2.0, was released last October, and costs $32 for 12 bottles. It has seen a marketing push of late, with advertisements appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and other internet properties that millennials and those that want to market to them tend to congregate.

Jim Brown, one of the all-time greatest players in American football, today settled with video games maker Electronic Arts (EA) to the tune of $600,000, after he alleged that the company used his likeness in its Madden NFL games series without his consent.

Earlier today, the UK voted to leave the European Union by a vote of roughly 52 to 48%. But as the global stock markets tumble and the pound hits its lowest value since the mid-1980s, some on the now more distant island are already regretting their vote to leave.

While it will likely take years for the UK to officially remove itself from the European Union, any Briton’s ability to freely live and work in any other EU country that comes with being a member of the EU will presumably be lost once the extrication is complete.

In 1994 the Sony PlayStation ushered us into the world of three-dimensional video gaming. It looked like a Lamborghini, angular and imposing and expensive—and it was a massive hit. Two years later, on June 23, the Nintendo 64 showed up, looking like a Volkswagen Beetle.

The last time Alphabet subsidiary Boston Dynamics released a creepy video of its latest robot creation, it caused so much consternation  that Google’s parent company put the unit up for sale.

It’s a good thing this isn’t how we all have to travel across the pond.

“License and registration please. Do you know how fast you were going back there?”

Apple apparently 🔫 down the prospect of a rifle emoji appearing in the next release of Unicode, according to a report from Buzzfeed on Friday (June 17). During a meeting in May, the Unicode Consortium—the group that oversees the coding standard for text on computers and includes representatives from many major tech companies—reportedly voted not to include a rifle in the next set of emoji that were lined up to be included in future pieces of software.

Apparently creating the world’s first working 3D-printed car wasn’t enough for Local Motors. The startup yesterday opened a new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, and along with it, a new range of miniature buses that can autonomously take passengers wherever they ask to go. And they’re also 3D-printed, of course.

If you’re wealthy enough to afford a Rolls-Royce, and a chauffeur to ferry you around in it, then the idea of self-driving cars wouldn’t seem that foreign a concept. But like every other car manufacturer, Rolls-Royce seems not to want to get left behind in the rush to build autonomous vehicles.