Davemichels

It was a good week for Sears.

On Thursday, its stock skyrocketed at least 20% on the news that it would start selling Kenmore appliances that can be controlled by Amazon's Alexa digital assistant on Amazon.com.

Sears, which has struggled to transform its image in recent years as it closes stores and flirts with bankruptcy, finally found the a formula to get investors excited about the brand again.

Let's be clear about what just happened: A troubled company's market cap rose tens of millions of dollars within minutes because it partnered with a tech giant building a digital assistant into everything from household appliances to cars.

The hype around digital assistants is real. But for now, it's just that. Hype. And it's arguably the more overrated than any other emerging technology.

What started as a convenient feature for controlling a smartphone hands-free now has the same expectations as a brand-new computing platform that could potentially replace it.

There's Siri. Alexa. Cortana. Google Assistant. Bixby. Every major tech company is working on its own digital assistant. On top of that, there are a slew of startups doing the same, hoping they can beat the big incumbents to the future.

Maybe we'll get there.

But for now, digital assistants have turned into a fragmented mess and they're all little more than a minor convenience, assuming they work at all. We've been promised a lot by AI and voice control, but the reality hasn't caught up to the expectation. Even worse, there's no way to choose an AI platform today because everything is still in flux and each system comes with its own caveats.

Want to use Alexa? Great! But it's really only useful on the Amazon Echo. You'll still need to use Siri on your iPhone or Google Assistant on your Android phone. Plus, while Amazon can brag about having the best third-party support with over 10,000 Alexa skills, most of them don't make sense with voice controls. (Try ordering an Uber on an Echo and you'll see what I mean. It'll test your patience.)

Want to use Siri? Fine. But you're stuck inside Apple's hardware ecosystem, and Siri is still far behind its competitors when it comes to supporting third-party services. For example, the upcoming Siri-powered HomePod won't let you control third-party music services like Spotify or Pandora with your voice.

What about Google Assistant? This is my favorite assistant of the bunch, mostly because Google is better than anyone at machine learning and tapping into the wealth of knowledge stored on the internet. But Google Assistant seems to be having trouble breaking out. It's only on a relatively small fraction of Android headsets and had a pitiful debut on the iPhone this summer, with fewer than 200,000 downloads. It can't be successful until it's used everywhere.

And Cortana? Microsoft's assistant technically exists a lot of places like the iPhone, Android, and a futuristic thermostat, but it's found little success outside of Windows 10.  

Finally, there's Samsung's new assistant Bixby, which launched on the Galaxy S8 this week after months of delays. As I wrote earlier, it's a half-baked flop. Bixby is pretty good for controlling Samsung's own apps for stuff like texting and setting reminders, but it's mediocre at best when it comes to other tasks. It can't even tell you sports scores, for example.

Hopefully that paints a picture for you about the current state of digital assistants: It's a fragmented system of competitors trying to muscle their service onto every device with mixed results. None of them, even the best like Google Assistant, are smart enough to live up to their promise. There isn't a single one that meets the expectations the industry has dumped on them, and choosing one of them now will just result in headaches down the road.

We're so early in AI and voice control that it's impossible to predict a winner now.

But there is one thing I can predict: Most of these efforts will fail, and we'll eventually see a consolidation of these services into just one or two key players living inside all our gadgets. This is the concept called "ambient computing," where AI is constantly working in the background or responding to your voice commands. It'll be especially useful in the car, the home, or other times you can't stare at your phone.

That's years, if not a decade or more, away from today.

My best advice now is to be smart. Buying into one of these platforms now is a gamble that the one you choose will still be around in the future. It may be fun to control your lights and music with the Amazon Echo now, but there's no guarantee Alexa can maintain its lead. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even admitted we're in the very, very early days of AI.

Until we get there, everything you're seeing is mostly hype.

SEE ALSO: Samsung released a half-baked assistant for the Galaxy S8

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NOW WATCH: Apple finally unveiled its Siri-powered version of Google Home and Amazon Echo — here's everything you need to know

In preparation for next year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, electronics giant LG is trialling new robots in the country’s largest airport. From today, Seoul’s Incheon International Airport will be home to two of LG’s latest prototype bots: the Airport Guide Robot and the Airport Cleaning Robot.

The bots were first unveiled at CES earlier this year, and both do exactly what their names suggest. The Guide Robot will roam the terminals, ready to provide travelers with directions and information about boarding times. It speaks four languages — Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese — and users can even get it to scan their boarding pass to be escorted to their correct departure gate. Although, if this bot is anything like other service...

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Mark Zuckerberg, heartland tourist and Facebook's CEO, is famous for wearing the same thing every day.

If you've seen a photo Zuckerberg from the past few years, you've most likely seen him wearing a grey shirt, blue hoodie, jeans, and Nikes. 

He has a closet full of grey t-shirts: 

Zuckerberg doesn't just wear any old plain grey Hanes t-shirt, though. His are special ordered from Brunello Cucinelli, and reportedly cost between $300 and $400. A few years ago, H&M rolled out a joke "Zuckerberg collection," but that's not on sale anymore.  

Klaus Buchroithner, CEO of Vresh Clothing, decided to study Zuckerberg's shirt closely, and make a replica of it, or as "as close to the original as possible" without being the same exact item — kind of like how Instagram rolls out new features.

Buchroithner looked at the fabric, the color, and even the length of the t-shirt while crafting the replica. 

Now the "Zuckerberg Shirt" is on sale for 40 euros, or about $46. They're made in Italy and all profits go to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic company funded by the Facebook fortune that sometimes invests in startups. 

Here are the "specs" for the "Zuckerberg Shirt:" 

Fabric 100% mercerized combed cotton, Made in Italy (extra soft)
Weight 180g per m² (20% more than industry standard)
Color zucker-grey tones, melange (sale e pepe)
Stitching double-stitched with PEGASUS EX3215-03 Serger

And here's the shirt as well as Buchroithner wearing his 40-Euro shirt:

SEE ALSO: Secrecy, bodyguards, and Trump: What it's like to have a surprise dinner with Mark Zuckerberg

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NOW WATCH: Here's how Google Maps knows when there is traffic

Yesterday, we reported that Verizon Wireless appeared to be throttling Netflix traffic, — and today, the company seems to have come clean. In a statement provided to Ars Technica and The Verge, Verizon implicitly admitted to capping the traffic, blaming the issue on a temporary video optimization test.

“We've been doing network testing over the past few days to optimize the performance of video applications on our network," a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. “The testing should be completed shortly. The customer video experience was not affected.”

This is a really weird statement, seemingly referring to something completely different from what customers actually experienced. What customers saw wasn’t optimization, but a clear cap,...

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 Following its longstanding tradition of reporting quarterly earnings for its fourth financial quarter of the year in July, Microsoft today announced non-GAAP revenue of $24.7 billion and GAAP earnings per share of $0.83 (and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.98) for the last three months. Operating income was $7.0 billion non-GAAP. Read More

Amazon’s Alexa assistant is now able to control an even wider range of home appliances. Smart appliances from Sears and its Kenmore brand are joining the list of hardware that can be used through voice commands to Amazon’s Echo lineup of speakers and other Alexa-enabled devices. GE and Whirlpool have already integrated similar support across their respective products, and now “the full line of Kenmore smart appliances” — air conditioners, refrigerators, and more — can be controlled with a new Alexa skill, Kenmore Smart.

Owners of connected Kenmore products can say commands like "Alexa, tell Kenmore Smart to set my air conditioner to 70 degrees" to make adjustments without having to walk over and do it the old fashioned way: with...

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In a note to clients earlier this week, Deutsche Bank trimmed its price target for Amazon from $1,150 down to $1,135, on fears that the company's $12 billion Amazon Web Services cloud-computing business faces challenges ahead.

Amazon Web Services pioneered what the tech industry calls "public cloud": Customers rent functionally unlimited supercomputing power from Amazon's own super-efficient data centers on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's sometimes cheaper, and often more flexible, than maintaining servers of your own. 

Generally speaking, Deutsche Bank remains bullish on the future prospects for AWS. Companies of all shapes and sizes are either starting their businesses on Amazon Web Services, or moving some (or all) of their existing infrastructure up to Amazon's cloud. 

The problem, writes Deutsche, is that their conversations with Amazon's network of partners and specialists indicates that migration of existing businesses to the cloud is happening at a slower rate than originally anticipated. When Amazon reports earnings on July 27, it's expecting AWS to show 39% growth, versus its original projection of 40%.

The reason for Deutsche's skepticism comes from a visit to an AWS Summit conference in London, where analysts heard its "first-ever downtick from partners around the pace of large European enterprise cloud migrations." When Deutsche checked with its contacts in the United States, it heard the same was happening domestically. 

Deutsche wants to be clear that it's still projecting a bright sunny future for the public cloud in general, and AWS in particular. Still, with Amazon Web Services such a cornerstone of the bigger Amazon picture, this little blip could lead to bigger problems down the road, should the trend continue. 

Amazon is expected to announce quarterly earnings on Thursday, July 27 after the bell. Wall Street is expecting earnings of $1.42 per share on $37.18 billion in revenue.

SEE ALSO: Here's what happens inside Amazon when one of its AWS hosting services goes down

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NOW WATCH: Turns out the Amazon Echo Dot makes an amazing car infotainment system

Most successful people credit reading, in some capacity, as a factor in their success.

A young Elon Musk read for 10 hours each day before growing up to become Tesla CEO. These days, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates reads a new book every week.

Here's how some of their peers incorporate reading into their own lives.

SEE ALSO: 11 books on science Bill Gates thinks everyone should read

Warren Buffett

The Berkshire Hathaway magnate reportedly spends five to six hours a day reading five different newspapers.

He also combs through 500 pages of financial documents and recommends prospective investors do the same.

"That's how knowledge works," he recently told an investment class at Columbia University. "It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."

Bill Gates

The former Microsoft CEO has attested to reading 50 books a year, or roughly one book a week.

Most of the books are non-fiction dealing with public health, disease, engineering, business, and science.

Every now and then he'll breeze through a novel (and sometimes in one sitting late into the night). But primarily the books serve Gates' interest in learning more about the world he inhabits.

Mark Zuckerberg

In 2015, the Facebook CEO vowed to read one book every other week "with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies," he wrote in a Facebook post.

"Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today," he wrote. "I'm looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Elon Musk just tweeted that his Boring Company tunnel project has received “verbal [government] approval” to build a hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

While we work to verify his claim, Musk is continuing to tweet more details about the project. The hyperloop, an ultrafast method of travel first developed by Musk in 2013, would only take 29 minutes to travel between New York City and DC, he claims. And it would feature “up to a dozen or more” access points via elevator in each city.

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 Google today announced that TCP BBR, a new congestion-control algorithm is now available to its Cloud Platform users. The general idea here is to improve on the existing congestion-control algorithms for internet traffic, which have been around since the 1980s and which typically only take packet loss into account (when networking buffers fill up, routers will discard any new packets). Read More

The service detects communication tones in conversations to indicate frustration, satisfaction, excitement, politeness, impoliteness, sadness and sympathy.

Atari has created something new. It's a "Speakerhat." The name's self-explanatory, but let's break it down anyway. Yes, it's a hat. Yes, it features built-in speakers. It's also got a microphone and pairs over Bluetooth for phone calls and playing music. It's rechargeable, although I'm not clear on what kind of port it has. Atari says eventually Speakerhat wearers can sync up with one another and listen to the same audio stream at the same time. Are you sold yet?

While it's being billed as a gadget of the future with lines like, "the intent [of Speakerhat] is to continuously improve on design and engineering, until the technology is completely invisible," I hope hats of the future don't look like this. It could blend in well among Hot...

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The idea for Amazon was born in 1994 in New York City, while Jeff Bezos was working in finance and realizing the internet was not something he could not let pass him by.

Bezos put together a list of things he thought he could sell online and picked books, According to "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," Brad Stone's 2013 book on the origins of the company. Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore in 1995.

In 2016, some 21 years later, Amazon hit $136 billion in sales. With its recent deal to buy Whole Foods, a top-tier cloud computing business, and a line of consumer electronics that includes its popular Echo smart speakers, Amazon has come a long way from its bookstore beginning. 

With help from the Wayback Machine, we took a look at how Amazon's homepage has evolved with the company. 

SEE ALSO: 15 fascinating facts you probably didn't know about Amazon

1995: Books and more books

Amazon officially opened for business on July 16, 1995 as an online book seller. With 1 million titles in its catalog, it advertised itself as "Earth's biggest bookstore."

The original homepage featured a "Spotlight!" section of the books "we" love. At the time that "we" was not the thousands of people Amazon employs today but Jeff Bezos, his wife MacKenzie, and seven early believers. 

The first sale and the packing slip

The first book Amazon sold was a copy of Douglas Hofstader's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought." It was purchased by Jon Wainwright, a computer scientist who had been invited to test a beta version of the e-commerce site, according to the Atlantic.

Wainwright ordered the book while he was at work over his office's T-1 connection, he said in a Quora post. The purchase still shows up in his order history.

1999: eCards and Auctions

By 1999 — a little more than four years after it launched its site — Amazon had broadened its offerings to include sales of videos and electronics. Because people other than your great aunt were still using e-Cards, Amazon offered them too. And its short-lived auction service live.

Take note of the top three hottest books then:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

It was an unusual sight: Democrats and Republicans gently ribbing each other, giggling, and vowing to work closely together on legislation that is said to be vital to the health and safety of Americans. Of all the things that could bring both parties together in this era of rank partisanship, who would have thought it would be self-driving cars?

The convivial atmosphere in today’s hearing by the House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection, which was to mark-up a package of bills related to autonomous vehicles, was by design. After all, it was carefully cultivated by the big automakers and tech companies that are working furiously on autonomous driving technology. These companies want to ensure their interests are...

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Microsoft is partnering with Johnson Controls to build a thermostat. The software giant unveiled the new GLAS thermostat in a YouTube video today. It’s built by Johnson Controls, makers of the first electric room thermostat. It appears that GLAS will include a translucent touchscreen display that will allow owners to alter room temperatures, check energy usage and air quality, and see calendar information.

GLAS will run on Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT Core operating system, and will have Cortana voice services built into the thermostat. It’s one of the first thermostats to include Cortana integration, after Microsoft revealed its plans to bring its digital assistant to fridges, toasters, and thermostats. Microsoft notes that GLAS has...

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Walmart is developing facial recognition technology to detect frustrated or unhappy shoppers.

The technology uses video cameras at store checkout lines that monitor customers' facial expressions and movements to try and identify varying levels of dissatisfaction, according to a patent filing. 

If the system detects an unhappy customer, it will ping employees in other parts of the store and order them to report to a checkout register, in the hopes of alleviating shoppers' distress.

Walmart is hoping that the technology will enable stores to respond more efficiently to customer service issues before shoppers have a chance to complain. 

"It is easier to retain existing customers than acquire new ones through advertising," the patent filing reads. "Often, if customer service is inadequate, this fact will not appear in data available to management until many customers have been lost. With so much competition, a customer will often simply go elsewhere rather than take the time to make a complaints."

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the patent.

Walmart will not only use the data to address immediate staffing needs. It will also use the technology to analyze trends in shoppers' purchase behavior over time, according to the patent filing. 

To analyze purchasing behavior, the system links customers' facial expressions or "biometric data" as its called in the paten filing to their transaction data — meaning how much they are spending and what they are buying.

Walmart says this will help stores detect changes in a customers' purchase habits due to dissatisfaction. 

"Significant drops or complete absence of customers spending ... may be identified," according to the patent filing.

Walmart has previously tested facial reconition technology, but later abandoned the program because it was ineffective. In 2015, the company tested the technology in an unspecified number of stores to try and detect shoplifters and prevent theft. 

SEE ALSO: Chick-fil-A is rolling out 'family-style meals' with mac and cheese and baked beans — and KFC should be terrified

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NOW WATCH: We ate at Warren Buffett’s favorite Omaha steakhouse — and got a peek into his private dining room

 Google today announced the launch of Hire, a new service that helps businesses more effectively manage their internal recruiting process. Hire offers businesses a cohesive applicant tracking service that’s deeply integrated with G Suite to make it easier for businesses to communicate with their candidates and track their progress through the interview process. Earlier this year,… Read More

WhatsApp users in China are experiencing trouble using the app to send photos, videos, and sometimes even texts. Security analysts confirmed that it was the Chinese government’s doing, according to The New York Times. This partial block of the Facebook-owned messaging app could mean an eventual full ban of the app in China, or the ban could be lifted later on.

If WhatsApp gets permabanned, it would join a list of banned sites that only grows longer by the day. In the past few months, outrageous stories of censorship have continued to pour out of the communist country, including China forcing three major websites to stop streaming video and audio content and auditing sites as if they were someone’s red-flagged tax returns.

The 19th Party...

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Following last year’s hack, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has switched to encrypted messaging app Wickr for all internal communications, as reported by BuzzFeed.

Installed by the DCCC in June, Wickr provides end-to-end encryption for messaging, similar to WhatsApp and iMessage. The DCCC is the first party committee to use Wickr, although Republicans in the White House have adopted a similar app called Confide, according to a report earlier this year, raising records retention concerns.

Wickr gives users the option to automatically delete messages after a given period of time, an option that has proven useful to a number of groups. In one case last year, Uber used the app to communicate with the corporate research firm...

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Airlines are usually the ones at the receiving end of complaints, rants and trolls online.

But Delta seems to have the upper hand in its ongoing Twitter war with political commentator Ann Coulter.

According to data crunched by social listening firm Brandwatch, Coulter’s online sentiment is 55.9% negative, whereas Delta’s sentiment is 52.3% positive.

The analysis is based on over 337,000 mentions of Coulter and over 410,000 mentions of Delta across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook over the past seven days.

This weekend, Coulter embarked on a multiday Twitter tirade, accusing Delta of giving away her seat on a flight on Saturday. According to Coulter, Delta gave away an extended-legroom economy-class seat, for which she paid $30, to another passenger.

The dispute quickly escalated and subsequently went viral on Twitter, after Delta responded on Sunday evening.

Delta criticized her for posting "slanderous comments and photos in social media” and Coulter responded by calling the airline "fascists."

According to Brandwatch, activity around the Delta brand increased by nearly 1,400%, while activity around Coulter rose by nearly 2,700% on social media between July 14 and 16.

Coulter has 1.6 million Twitter followers, while Delta has 1.3 million. The chart below shows how closely the two conversations are entwined. (It represents only 10% of the conversation)

In an age where airlines are frequently lambasted online for all things customer service-related and beyond, Coulter’s polarizing persona has actually turned the tide in Delta’s favor. Coulter didn’t help either, not just attacking Delta but also the other passenger that was given her seat. Coulter called her "dachshund-legged" and implied she's an immigrant when she tweeted, "Immigrants take American jobs (& seats on @Delta)."

Critics are not only embracing the airline’s response, but according to Brandwatch, Delta’s sentiment is actually more positive than the numbers indicate. This is because a lot of the conversations around the topic are overrun with sarcasm (which the algorithm cannot read) and are negative reactions to Coulter that mention Delta in the same breath.

Delta’s sentiment was as much as 80.3% positive on July 13, but its sentiment has taken a hit since Coulter's mentions have started to attach themselves around its conversation. Even though these mentions aren't directly guided towards Delta, its sentiment is going down as the algorithm can’t determine if people are discussing Coulter or the airline.

“Delta is somewhat of the victim in this,” said Kellan Terry, senior data analyst at Brandwatch.

Coulter's conversation, on the other hand, is quite negative regardless of the incident, because she is a polarizing regardless.

Among those that rallied behind Delta included actor Matt Doyle, who said "I was impressed with your service recently. Most pleasant flights I've had in while. Oh and @anncoulter is evil, but what else is new," in a tweet.

On the other end of the spectrum were supporters of Coulter who vowed to boycott Delta because of the incident.

"You screw a customer then scold her for not being polite about it? Never flying Delta again. Plenty of other airlines to choose from," tweeted one user.

 

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NOW WATCH: JPMorgan Chase explains why it pulled ads from YouTube and Megyn Kelly's show, and reveals a unique strategy it uses to combat fake news

Verily, the life sciences branch of Alphabet (Google's parent company), has started releasing millions of mosquitoes in California.

The team behind the project — made up of scientists from Verily, biotech company MosquitoMate, and Fresno County’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District — plans to set a million of the flying insects free each week for 20 weeks.

The mosquitoes are being released into two neighborhoods in Fresno, California as part of a field study for the Debug Project, an initiative that aims tor decimate certain mosquito populations.

The mosquitoes were raised by a robot that can produce a million mosquitoes a week. They're all male, so they won't bite anyone — only female mosquitoes bite humans.

The bugs have been specially raised to carry a bacteria called Wolbachia, which has an insidious effect on the reproductive process. Mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia can fly around normally and mate with females, but the eggs those females lay aren't able to hatch — unless the females are infected with the same strain of the bacteria as well.

Setting loose hoards of males carrying the bacteria, then, is like waging biological warfare on mosquitoes.

Wolbachia is common in nature, and scientists have known since 1967 that the bacteria can make certain mosquitoes and other insects sterile. Researchers working to fight mosquito-borne diseases have long been interested in using the bacteria to kill off local mosquito populations, but it wasn't until this year that they discovered how genes in the bacteria cause mosquitoes to produce nonviable eggs.

The ability to kill entire mosquito populations could significantly curb disease transmission. Mosquitoes carry diseases like yellow fever, malaria, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, among others. They're responsible for more than 800,000 human deaths a year, making them the most dangerous animal on the planet. And in a warming world, the range of some of these disease spreaders is expanding, making population control efforts more urgent than ever.

This Wolbachia approach is promising because it doesn't require genetically engineering or modifying the bugs — a strategy that has triggered opposition from people concerned about releasing modified genes into the wild. (Some researchers are also working on ways to modify Wolbachia or use its sterility genes, but that's not part of this particular effort.)

Wolbachia doesn't infect humans and risk assessments of these tests have said that the potential for harm is negligible.

In the Fresno experiment — the largest one of its kind in the US so far — the Debug Project is targeting the Aedes aegypti mosquito, an aggressive invasive species that can transmit nasty diseases like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. 

The life cycle for these particular creatures is just over a week. As researchers flood the two areas with these infected male mosquitoes, the females living there will be less likely to find uninfected males to mate with, so each life cycle should lead to far fewer new mosquitoes. In the end, it may be possible to eliminate the bloodsuckers from certain areas completely.

If the trial is successful, it's likely that other related efforts will be carried out around the globe to target the mosquitoes that transmit malaria and other diseases. Similar tests have been carried out or are ongoing in Brazil, Vietnam, and Australia.

"[M]oving our work from the laboratory to the field is not only an important milestone for our group of biologists, engineers, and automation experts, but it’s also a critical step in bringing our long-term vision to reality," Verily scientist Jacob Crawford wrote in a blog post announcing the trial. "Field studies allow us to test our discoveries and technologies in challenging, real-world conditions and collect the necessary evidence to bring them to a broader scale."

SEE ALSO: An inside look at the labs where doctors intentionally infect people with malaria

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how much you need to exercise if you sit all day

The world was a very different place 10 years ago. 

A decade ago, you couldn't order an Uber on your phone. You couldn't surf the web on Google Chrome. You couldn't rent a place to stay on demand with Airbnb. 

Several incredible products and services have been invented in the last 10 years — some, in the last five or eight. Thanks to a tweet from Button cofounder Chris Maddern, we were inspired to look into some of the cool, convenient things the tech world has invented since 2008. 

Take a look. 

SEE ALSO: 17 helpful Google products and services you never knew existed

1. The iPad

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad eight years ago, he described it was "the best browsing experience you'll ever have." 

"It's unbelievably great. Way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone," Jobs said on stage in January 2010. 

The original iPad cost between $499 and $829. Since then, the device has gone through several iterations and several price points — most recently, Apple unveiled a new $329, 9.7-inch iPad. 

2. Google Chrome

Google unveiled its Chrome browser on September 1, 2008. 

"On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple," Google CEO Sundar Pichai (who was vice president of product management at the time) wrote on the official Google blog.

"Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast," Pichai wrote. "It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go."

3. Snapchat

Snapchat first launched on the App Store in the summer 2011 as a messaging app for sending disappearing photos. At the time, it was called Pictaboo, but it had the same now-famous ghost icon, Ghostface Chillah.

By September 2011, the name had changed to Snapchat and began to catch on with Los Angeles teens. 

Six years later, Snapchat is owned by a $15.8 billion public company, Snap Inc., and has expanded into partnerships with publishers, TV-like shows, hardware products, and augmented reality. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

In the market for a helium tank from an Apollo-era spacecraft? How about a bag to collect lunar soil samples? Or an authentic training checklist for launching to the moon?

Welcome to the spectacle that is Sotheby's first "Space Exploration" live auction, which is being hosted on eBay.

The event kicks off at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 20 — the 48th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It features 173 lots of space artifacts and memorabilia, which are collectively worth between an estimated $2.9 million and $5.3 million.

Some sellers hope to fetch a premium on rare toys and signed photographs from the Space Race, while others are hawking near-priceless artifacts that could fetch millions of dollars.

One lot that may garner $4 million alone: a dusty bag that Apollo 11 astronauts dumped the first samples of lunar soil, grit, and rocks into in 1969. (The bag was "lost" for decades until the US Marshals Service confiscated it during a raid and later auctioned off — for $995.)

NASA and other groups admonish the sale of such one-of-a-kind spaceflight objects. "This artifact, we believe, belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public," NASA said in a statement shortly after a court granted the buyer ownership of the bag.

That said, here are some of the more notable items in Sotheby's and eBay's live auction and how much they might sell for.

SEE ALSO: Lego just launched a giant Apollo Saturn V moon rocket set that comes with 1,969 pieces

DON'T MISS: Apollo astronaut: 'You go to heaven when you are born'

Apollo 11 Contingency Lunar Sample Return Bag

Used by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 to bring back the very first pieces of the moon ever collected — traces of which remain in the bag. The only such relic available for private ownership.

Estimate: $2 million - $4 million

Gemini G1c spacesuit thermal coverlayer

Thermal coverlayer for the Gemini G1C spacesuit, made for Gus Grissom by the David Clark Company, circa 1962.

Estimate: $40,000 - $60,000

Apollo 13 flown flight plan, with drawings by astronauts (1 of 4)

A book that contains the entire Apollo 13 flight plan, including sketches and notations by astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.

Estimate: $30,000 - $40,000

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Recording phone calls on an iPhone can be a pain. You either have to pay for an app that probably only works through a custom dialer (or the phone app, which doesn’t help if you need to make a call through WhatsApp, Skype, or a different service), or you end up using a tape recorder or another phone to record the call over speaker. But PhotoFast is attempting to fix this problem with its Call Recorder adapter.

The Call Recorder plugs into the Lighting port on your iPhone and can record calls made on the device through services like Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, Viber, and WeChat. The device uses .m4a format for the recordings, and you can choose to save the files to your local storage or a microSD card.

For incoming calls,...

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Despite having spent years developing products designed to keep you consuming entertainment from the comfort of your own home, Samsung is now working to get you into movie theaters. 

The hardware giant today unveiled its first-ever Cinema LED Screen. The giant display measures in at a whopping 33.8 feet, and provides 4K resolution as well as "peak brightness levels nearly 10 times greater than that offered by standard projector technologies," according to a Samsung press release. 

Though it does not use a projector, this display is sure to please filmmakers and studios: It is "distortion-free" and offers a "nearly infinite contrast ratio," which will allow for deep blacks and extremely bright colors. 

Samsung also announced the Cinema LED Screen would be paired with a brand new, "state-of-the-art" sound system from JBL by Harman, to deliver an "unparalleled sight and sound experience the way the content creators intended." The screen will be bordered by huge speakers that will deliver a surround-sound experience with JBL's proprietary technology.

The 4K display was put through a series of rigorous tests prior to its commercial debut, having achieved full compliance with the Digital Cinema Initiatives theater technology standards. 

The display, dubbed the "Super S," is in action at the Lotte World Tower location of Lotte Cinemas in Korea. According to Screen Daily, its first films will be "Cars 3" and "Spider-Man: Homecoming."

SEE ALSO: Samsung just unveiled the widest computer monitor you can buy — here's how it looks in person

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With an eye towards faster AI integration, the research and incubation hub is taking on the more challenging issues standing in the way of product and service advances. 

Microsoft is expanding its partnership with BMW to enable Skype for Business in cars that use BMW’s iDrive system. BMW was one of the first car makers to enable Office 365 services in its cars, and this latest feature will let owners take Skype meetings in their cars through the built-in entertainment system.

The system will work by triggering notifications for meetings, allowing drivers to dial-in without having to enter the conference number details manually. BMW will also enable tighter integration with calendars, contacts, and to-do lists all from Microsoft’s Exchange service. BMW is planning to enable the Skype for Business feature in France, Germany, and the UK initially before it expanding it to other countries.

BMW also revealed...

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The Microsoft font Calibri is now a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s prime minister. Investigators noticed that documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, were typed up in the font Calibri. But the documents were dated from 2006 — and Calibri wasn’t widely available at that point, making a good case that they were forged.

The Express Tribune says that Pakistan’s court-appointed investigators sent the documents off to a lab for examination. The lab noticed the discrepancy, with one of its experts saying that since “Calibri was not commercially available before 31^st January 2007 ... neither of the originals of the certified declarations is correctly dated and happy...

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The PC industry just had its lowest single quarter of shipments since 2007, according to a new report from analyst firm Gartner. 

Worldwide shipments of PCs fell 4.3% in the second quarter compared with the same period in 2016. That marked the 11th straight quarter that shipments have declined in the industry. 

The reason for the latest drop, per Gartner: There's a shortage of components like memory and LCD screens that are driving up manufacturing costs. While some vendors just absorbed the higher costs, others hiked their PC prices, leading to lower overall demand. 

The story was even worse in the US. Here, overall PC shipments dropped 5.7%. Gartner chalked it up to weak demand, particularly in the education sector, where customers are switching to Chromebooks, which Gartner doesn't include in its PC shipment numbers. 

The slump in the US hit Asus hardest. The company saw its US shipments fall 40.7% last quarter when compared with the same period in 2016. 

But Apple and its Mac computer lineup took some lumps, too. Mac shipments declined 9.6% in the US over the same period. 

It wasn't all bad news, though. HP saw its US shipments jump 6.5% in the second quarter, compared with the same period in 2016. Worldwide, HP's shipments grew 3.3 percent. The company, which became the top PC vendor in the second quarter, wresting the lead from Lenovo, has now shown growth in its global PC shipments for five straight quarters.

While Gartner doesn't include sales of Apple iPads or Google's low-cost Chromebook laptops in its PC shipment numbers — reasoning that they don't generally compete for the same users as the mainstream PC — the firm does say that Chromebooks are growing like crazy. In 2016, worldwide Chromebook shipments grew 38% from the prior year, far outpacing the 6% shrinkage of the overall global PC market, it says.

Gartner's figures for second quarter shipments are all preliminary and subject to revision after the PC makers publicly release their actual numbers. The research firm's preliminary estimates have occasionally differed significantly from the those reported by PC manufacturers.

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When kids learn about extinction in school, they're told about creatures that have disappeared from the planet, and those that are endangered.

But rarely are they told that we are currently witnessing a mass extinction event — an incredibly rare phenomenon in which the majority of species on the globe die off.

This has happened five times in the history of Earth so far. The one happening now will be the sixth.

According to a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, populations of animals all over the planet are declining so rapidly that the researchers say a process of "biological annihilation" is now ongoing.

"As much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations," the ecologists and biologists behind the study wrote.

It's not just species facing total collapse that we should worry about, they said — local population extinctions (when a species disappears from a specific region but not the whole planet) are a "prelude to species extinctions." In other words, declines in populations of animals that aren't yet categorized as endangered are indicators of a mass extinction. 

This trend is further evidence that the Earth "is already well into a sixth mass extinction episode," the authors of the study wrote.

Global population collapse

For this study, researchers looked at 27,600 vertebrate species — almost half of all the ones we know of — and found that more than 30% of them are in decline. Entire local populations of these animals are becoming extinct in certain areas, even though the overall numbers for many species haven't yet triggered alarms.

The extinction of local populations is reason for alarm, the authors wrote, because the disappearance of essential species from local ecosystems will cause cascading effects that ripple through the entire system. When larger populations of animals disappear, the smaller populations left behind are also much more vulnerable and closer to extinction, as Ed Yong pointed out in The Atlantic. 

For example, if forest elephants disappear from all but one national park in Africa, the ones that used to disperse seeds and create pathways for smaller animals and plant life in other parts of the continent would no longer facilitate those processes. And those changes the ecosystem could in turn wipe out plants that rely on elephants for seed dispersal, and the animals that consume those plants.

The collapse of local populations of pollinators like honeybees could have an even more devastating effect, since fruit-bearing plants rely on those pollinators. If those plants don't survive the bee population losses, that affects the many animals, including humans that rely on those plants for food. (The team behind the study didn't focus on insects, but note that the same population declines are happening to outside the realm of terrestrial vertebrates as well.)

"[B]y losing populations (and species) of vertebrates, we are losing intricate ecological networks involving animals, plants, and microorganisms," the authors wrote. "This suggests that, even if there was not ample sign that the crisis extends far beyond that group of animals, today’s planetary defaunation of vertebrates will itself promote cascading catastrophic effects on ecosystems, worsening the annihilation of nature."

The ongoing cause of this is, of course, humans.

As people have spread across the globe, we've built on top of animal habitats, spread invasive species, hunted populations down to nothing, fished more than 90% of large predators out of the sea, released toxic pollutants, and harvested entire forests.

Plus, since the start of the industrial age, human activity has been releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These have not been the biggest driver of species decline so far, but in the future they could push this mass extinction event into something that can't be reversed, as David Wallace Wells noted in a recent feature in New York Magazine:

"The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas."

Can the sixth extinction be stopped?

The authors behind the new study suggested their work shows how far along the sixth extinction already is. They said their seemingly "alarmist" language is essential in the face of such an alarming situation.

Experts who study mass extinctions agree about the gravity of the present moment. But some disagree that the extinction event is already underway.

Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin told Peter Brannen for a story in The Atlantic that if we were in the midst of such an event, it would be already too late to act. And the data doesn't indicate that's the case yet, though it does suggest we could be about to begin a mass extinction.

That distinction is purely academic for most of us, however, since experts like Erwin and the authors of this new study agree that the world's sixth mass extinction will proceed unchecked unless humans take immediate action. Curbing the trend will require both intensive local efforts to conserve species and habitats, and global efforts to prevent the climate from tipping too far into a danger zone.

As the authors of the study wrote:

"[W]e emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life."

SEE ALSO: Scientists are questioning the idea that the human lifespan has a limit

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