Donald Trump has blocked Singapore’s Broadcom from taking over American’ chipmaker Qualcomm. He says it’s for security reasons rather than a business matter. As well as manufacturing a huge range of semiconductors, processors and communications devices, Qualcomm has played a key role in the development of several mobile data standards. Broadcom operates in similar areas […]
A burger-flipping robot is on a break from work after it appeared to be too slow to meet demand. But ‘Flippy’ might not be to blame. The robot, made by Miso Robotics, was set to work at a Cali Burger restaurant in Pasadena. It uses image recognition to keep track of the burgers on a […]
Valve is getting back into game production after several years of concentrating on running Steam. But there’s no word on completing any trilogies. The first will be Artifact, a virtual card game themed around the Defense of the Ancients world. While promoting the game, Valve president Gabe Newell said “Artifact is the first of several […]
California is to consider a law that would give customers the right to get gadgets fixed by somebody other than the manufacturer. The Right to Repair Act would mean repair guides and any proprietary tools would have to be publicly available. While similar measures are already under consideration in 17 other states, California could be […]
Apple is to stop selling iTunes albums with added material such as liner notes and bonus tracks. It won’t add any new ‘LP’ submissions to the catalog after this month. The name was a nod to the experience of buying physical albums in the vinyl days when artwork and sleeve notes, including lyric sheets, was […]
Trevor Baylis, the inventor of the wind-up radio, has died aged 80. His invention not only helped fight HIV but is credited with inspiring engineers and technology experts to think about products for the developing world. After a professional life that included stuntwork and underwater escapology, he began his inventing career by producing modified household […]
There’ll soon be an Energizer smartphone and as you’d expect, the battery life is the selling point. It could offer a five day life on a single charge. How long a phone lasts is a combination of the battery capacity and the efficiency of the phone itself, and Energizer has certainly addressed the former. The […]
An AI bot appears to have destroyed Q*bert high scores by discovering and exploiting a bug. It’s the result of the unconventional method it took to learning the game. Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg were using isometric platform game Q*bert to try out different ways for the system to learn and master the game. […]