MashTalk

For GoPro, things are looking up. After a tumultuous couple of years — which saw the action-camera company enter and then leave the drone business, get squeezed harder by increasingly competitive smartphone cameras, and ride a steady wave of criticism of its product line — GoPro appears to have found its footing with the well-received Hero 7 Black camera and a return to profitability. At the center of the company’s renewal is founder Nick Woodman. Woodman joined MashTalk to talk about what...

Ten years ago, Indiegogo launched the modern era of crowdfunding by creating a place where anyone could pitch their idea, product, or creative endeavor to the entire world, asking for the funds to make it reality. Today there are no shortage of crowdfunding sites, and even though Indiegogo isn’t as large as rival Kickstarter, it’s still tremendously influential, offering entrepreneurs not just a funding platform, but also support beyond their campaigns, with tools to ease the transition from...

Want live TV over the internet? Today you have several options, including Hulu, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and more. It’s hard to remember, though, but there was a time when there were virtually no options for consumers who wanted to cut the cord. Sure, services like Netflix and Vudu provided plenty of titles via on demand, but current content was scattered across myriad websites and services, and it didn’t do a good job of replicating the TV experience. Then Sling TV came along. Launched...

What does ‘time well spent’ mean for games like ‘Candy Crush?’ If you own a smartphone, chances are you know Candy Crush and maybe even the game’s latest incarnation, Candy Crush Friends Saga. What you may not know is the story behind the franchise: How an Italian entrepreneur put all his cash on the line as a co-founder of King, the company behind the game, in the early 2000s, with an idea of how to re-invent gaming for the online world. That person is Riccardo Zacconi. He’s guided the...

In case you missed it, the robots are here. No, not the apocalyptic hordes of artificially intelligent machines that some believe are destined to enslave or eradicate us (hello, Boston Dynamics!), but the everyday devices and companions that are rapidly becoming commonplace. After decades of lofty sci-fi-inspired promises, robots like iRobot's Roomba vacuums and the many iterations of the Sony Aibo robodog are slowly carving out their places in our domestic lives. Even Amazon's Alexa is...

Everyone knows Apple will unveil new iPhones in the fall, and the consensus is there will be three models: a successor to the iPhone X, a large-screen version of that phone, and a new model that looks kind of like the iPhone X, but doesn’t have quite all the same features so Apple can sell it at a lower price. With three iPhones coming, the big question becomes... what is Apple going to call these babies? Apple really screwed itself by debuting the iPhone 8 alongside the iPhone “ten” — now...

Emoji have conquered the world, no doubt, but what happens after the conquest? The answer: Things change. Emoji are constantly evolving, not only with new symbols that arrive on our smartphone keyboards year after year, but also the symbols themselves. A couple of years ago, your standard emoji keyboard usually has a gun on it, but today that symbol has been almost universally replaced with a water pistol. The gun’s transformation may be the most dramatic of changes, but emoji are changing...

We all know YouTube. YouTube is the biggest video platform on the planet, with about 400 hours of video uploaded to the service every second. But YouTube, of all the current content "platforms," is arguably the most fragmented. There's no newsfeed, so there's no central place where everyone -- or seemingly everyone -- is gathering. As a result, communities form on their own, typically around channels or personalities, and they tend to be pretty insular. One of these communities formed around...

When Google wowed the tech world with its demo of Duplex -- the tech that allows its digital Assistant make phone calls to perform mundane tasks like booking haircuts or making restaurant reservations -- Microsoft's Cortana chief was impressed, but not worried. "The technologist in me had no choice but to feel impressed," Javier Soltero, Microsoft corporate vice president of Cortana, said in this episode of Mashable's MashTalk podcast. "The idea that a computer can generate a voice with the...

For a while there, it seemed like "Uber for X" was the only pitch that mattered. To many, the rapid rise of Uber wasn't just a major tech success story -- it signaled a wholesale change that was coming to how people thought of work. Traditional jobs, the thinking went, would soon become less and less common, with predictable, inefficient employment getting replaced by the flexibility of independent contract work. The "gig economy" was underway, and it was unstoppable. Except that it stopped....

WWDC. Apple's software show. "Dub-dub." Whatever you call Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, it's the event where we find out what cool new features are coming to the company's multiple platforms: iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It's also where we get to know what's on Apple's mind. The new software shows Apple's hand in ways its hardware doesn't: From new features to combat iPhone addiction to updates meant to prevent data companies from tracking you, Apple is playing both defense and...

Does Facebook know something about blockchain that we don't? Probably. If there's one thing we can all agree on about blockchain tech and cryptocurrency, it's that most people don't understand them. Facebook, which recently re-organized itself to make blockchain one of its major focuses, clearly has something up its sleeve with regard to crypto. But even if they revealed what it is, users would likely react with a head-scratch. The financial world is already a mystery to many. Add to that a...

It was possibly the most mind-blowing tech demo in years: During the opening keynote of the Google I/O developers conference, CEO Sundar Pichai showed the company’s AI-driven Assistant making a phone call to a business and carrying out a verbal conversation with the person who answered. What made the demo of the feature, called Duplex, so amazing was the Assistant’s command of natural language – saying “um,” “mm-hmm,” and “ah” at various times – was so masterful that it was apparent the...

If you're not paying for the service, are you the product? That's been Silicon Valley conventional wisdom for at least a decade, but the new focus on data privacy in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal has inspired the world to re-examine the maxim. It's pretty clear now that it's an oversimplification, and there's a strong case to be made that thinking this way is downright dangerous. That doesn't mean we let services like Facebook off the hook, but we should be cognizant...

If you own an iPhone, you should be concerned about GrayKey. That's the name for a new kind of device that's becoming increasingly popular with law enforcement agencies across the U.S., according to recent reports. It's popular because it unlocks iPhones protected with a passcode, even ones running Apple's most recent software, iOS 11. GrayKey is the product of Grayshift, a security company based in Atlanta that was co-founded by an ex-Apple security engineer. The device itself is a...

Mark Zuckerberg survived Congress. Now what? That's the big question now that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have put Zuckerberg and Facebook under the microscope. After 10+ hours of testimony, plenty of clueless questions, and multiple promises that Facebook's team would "follow up" with lawmakers, the public now has a chance to re-examine its fundamental relationship with Facebook, and judge whether or not "breach of trust" that Zuckerberg has admitted will lead to...

When Apple makes a move, it usually causes an earthquake. The chip industry definitely felt tremors upon the report that Apple would soon be turning away from Intel for the chips in its MacBooks. Or at least one MacBook. As early as 2020, we may see the first Mac to run on a chip designed and built by Apple -- either one of its "A" processors or something new altogether. Obviously, Intel shareholders weren't happy about the news (the stock still hasn't recovered four days later), but the big...

Is the future broken? Maybe not, but, by many measures, the present is. Over the past couple of years, the networks and devices that we've come to rely on for our information, consumption, and social interactions have been exposed to have toxic underbellies: Social networks have been twisted by fake news and filter bubbles, the constant ping of notifications on screens has shortened attention spans and created addictions, and it seems all the big tech companies are determined to erase every...

Snap is starting the year off strong. Its quarterly earnings blew past expectations, and while its redesign is angering some users, the change is expected to improve the app experience for everyone, with time. But life hasn't always been so great for Snapchat. CEO Evan Spiegel continues to be compared to Mark Zuckerberg and his tech giant Facebook, whose much larger products keep taking on Snapchat-esque features. Such a comparison isn't so crazy. Back in 2013, Facebook offered $1 billion to...

It's legend in the computer industry: In the mid '80s, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, the company he co-founded and went on to eventually lead to worldwide dominance, after a boardroom battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley. Over the years, the story got altered and adapted -- to the point where many assumed Jobs was fired, either by Sculley or Apple's board, which wasn't the case. Jobs did lose a boardroom showdown with Sculley (which actually played out over a week or so), one...