Technology

Consumer robotics firm Sphero, best known for making remote-controlled BB-8 and R2-D2 toys for Disney, announced today that it’s spun off a new company catering to the robotic needs of first responders, law enforcement, and military clients. Exactly what the new outfit, named Company Six (CO6), is building isn’t clear, but Sphero says it will be adapting technology developed within its former Public Safety Division. According to a press release, Company Six will be “applying the experience used to bring more than 4 million robots to market at Sphero” to create products that offer a “lightweight, yet highly advanced robotic solution that provides critical awareness for those we depend on the most, including police, fire, EMT, military, and others with dangerous jobs.” Sphero’s most recent p...

Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro keeps getting a little more affordable. B&H Photo is offering $300 off the cost for the base model, which brings it down to $2,100. Earlier this week, Best Buy was taking $200 off, so it worked out in your favor if you waited. In case you aren’t up to speed on what’s new in this model, Apple debuted its new Magic Keyboard with this, ditching the much-maligned butterfly switches for something far better. Aside from having a slightly larger screen than the previous 15-inch model, it also has improved thermals and better speakers. It’s tough to say how long this deal at B&H Photo will last or how long this will be the lowest price available. Given that Apple refreshed the 2020 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro (13-inch) models with the improved keyboard, among ot...

Lil Nas X’s “Panini,” NASA’s social media presence, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line, and John Krasinski’s Some Good News YouTube show are among the winners of this year’s Webby Awards. The annual awards show celebrates the wide variety of things that happen online, from websites and podcasts to design and data visualizations to video series and social media accounts, and they tend to touch on a big swath of what happened in the preceding year. This year’s winners, announced on Tuesday, were largely dominated by media and entertainment companies. National Geographic took away this year’s most awards, 15 total, with wins for its science podcasts, travel videos, and photos on social media, among other things. Google came in a close second, with 14 wins, for categories including best navigation an...

Microsoft surprised Windows users with a new package manager yesterday. It’s a command line tool that allows developers, power users, and really any Windows user to install their favorite apps from a simple command. If you’ve ever had to wipe a Windows machine clean or set up a new device, you’ll know the pain of having to reinstall apps, find download links, and get a PC ready again. Windows Package Manager aims to solve that, and it’s relatively simple to create a script to have your favorite apps installed from a command prompt. The Windows Store should be the central location for all Windows apps, but Microsoft’s initial Universal Windows Platform (UWP) push meant traditional and useful win32 desktop apps were never listed in the store. That’s changed in the years since Windows 10’s de...

Over the past few weeks, the occasional breathless news reports have warned that the novel coronavirus is mutating or that there are multiple strains of the virus circling around the globe. That sounds concerning. If the virus is changing, that could imply that it’s getting worse — but that’s not the case. Although it’s true that the virus is mutating, that doesn’t mean it’s getting more dangerous. When the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, its genome had a certain sequence of around 30,000 nucleotides, the building blocks of genetic material. A handful of those nucleotides changed as the virus spread from person to person because the mechanism the virus uses to make copies of itself sometimes makes mistakes. But those changes haven’t made the virus behave any differently, scientists sa...

The League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) is expanding to Friday nights and eliminating the Monday Night League (MNL) broadcast in the process. Earlier this year, developer Riot experimented with changing viewership behavior around its North American esports league by introducing games on Monday nights. But things didn’t quite go as planned. Riot says that viewership was down in the new time slot, but adds that it “learned a lot from the experience.” Because of this, when the LCS kicks off its spring season in June, it will look a little different. “We’re disappointed that Monday Night League didn’t work out as we hoped, but we’re excited for the shift to Friday, and being able to incorporate a lot of the lessons from Monday Night League into our broadcast this summer,” LCS commissio...

Micromobility rental company Tier is introducing new electric scooters which come with a helmet to protect their riders, the company announced today. 200 of the helmet-equipped scooters will be deployed to Paris and Berlin this month, followed by 5,000 more over the course of the summer. Tier says it’s the first e-scooter company to introduce integrated helmets like this. The helmets are foldable, and are stowed inside a lockable compartment attached below the scooter’s handlebars when not in use. The compartment is unlocked using the Tier app. Tier says the helmets comply with European safety standards, and that the company will check the helmets after every five rides. This check will include disinfecting the helmets as part of the company’s COVID-19 safety precautions. Getting scooter r...

A recurring theme of this column has been that we have no meaningful antitrust enforcement in the United States. But last year, lawmakers and federal agencies began to stir, with the Federal Trade Commission requesting information from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The potential action against Google, in particular, has been gathering momentum for some time. Fifty state attorneys general have opened an inquiry into the company, and in January they began collaborating with the Department of Justice. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic raised the prospect that any antitrust action could see a further delay. But on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a lawsuit may be arriving shortly. Here are Brent Kendall and John D. McKinnon: Both the Justice Department and a gr...

Vivo has started teasing its next flagship phone, the X50. A video posted to Weibo shows off the camera module, which includes a periscope telephoto, two normal-looking lenses, and one much larger module that is presumably for the primary camera. The lens rotates as the module is manipulated by a robotic gimbal, suggesting the key feature here is image stabilization. One of the big inclusions in Vivo’s Apex 2020 concept phone, which we weren’t able to see in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was “gimbal-like” stabilization on a 48-megapixel camera. Vivo said the design was inspired by chameleons’ eyes and is 200 percent more effective than typical OIS, allowing for longer nighttime exposures and smoother video. It looks like the X50 will be the first commercial deployment of this idea; ...

The head of NASA’s human exploration program, Doug Loverro, has resigned less than six months after assuming the position within the agency, according to a NASA memo. The drastic change in leadership comes just a week before NASA will launch its first astronauts from the US in nearly a decade, on top of SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft. This is the second time during the Trump administration that this role has been in turmoil. In July 2019, NASA demoted the original person in this position, William Gerstenmaier, who had been serving as the associate administrator for human exploration at NASA for nearly 15 years. Loverro took over the position in December after a long search by NASA, but now his tenure has been cut short. “Loverro hit the ground running this year and has made significan...

The SD Association, the group that sets the standards for memory cards, announced a new SD 8.0 specification for SD Express memory cards today that will allow the cards to transfer data at a rate of nearly four gigabytes per second, in large part thanks to utilizing PCIe 4.0 and NVMe interfaces commonly found in solid-state drives. That faster transfer rate could be useful as new technologies, like 8K video, create ever-larger files, which in turn require faster throughput if you want to transfer data in a timely manner. Specifically, the 8.0 specification allows for transfer speeds of up to 3,938 megabytes per second, according to an SD Association white paper. That’s a significant jump from the maximum transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second you’d find in cards built to the SD 7.0 an...

Google is rolling out the ability to use Google Fi via eSIM for existing customers of the cellular service on iOS, assuming their iPhone supports it (via 9to5Google). You’ll need the latest version of the Google Fi iOS app and an iPhone XR, XS, XS Max, 11 series, or 2020 SE, as those phones offer Dual SIM functionality. Google added eSIM support for new Google Fi customers last month. Although the release notes for yesterday’s Google Fi iOS update say that “you can now activate Fi via eSIM on select iPhone devices,” some Google Fi users on Reddit have had to uninstall their Google Fi app and follow the instructions on the Google Fi website to add a cellular plan to their iPhone to get eSIM to work. Google hasn’t replied to a request for comment about when eSIM for current Google Fi custome...