Technology

  Bloomberg Nintendo Co. is making its biggest bet in years with Switch, a new console aimed at unifying the worlds of mobile and home gaming. To chart new territory with the gadget, the Kyoto-based company handed control of development to a team of three managers more experienced in software rather than hardware. In a departure from previous consoles, Switch ...

  Bloomberg Sony Corp. and Line Corp., Japan’s most popular messaging service, are considering joining forces to develop devices powered by artificial intelligence. The companies are exploring opportunities around digital personal assistant technology to co-create a new communication experience, Sony said in a statement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Sony unveiled concept earphones powered by Xperia Agent, a ...

  Bloomberg Huawei Technologies Co. and LG Electronics Inc. are angling to steal the show at this year’s Mobile World Congress, ushering in new smartphones that each hopes will fill a void created by the absence of a new handset from the usually dominant Samsung Electronics Co. A day before the industry’s biggest conference gets going in Barcelona, LG hosted ...

  Bloomberg H&R Block is out to wrest back market share from its online tax-prep rivals with such aggressive measures as free services and interest-free advances on refunds—oh, and plunking a supercomputing Jeopardy star down on the desks of its 70,000 tax preparers. For this tax season, H&R Block has put an additional computer screen on each preparer’s desk, facing ...

  Bloomberg Mobile World Congress, the premier wireless-technology conference in Barcelona, was supposed to be a coming out party for Google’s digital assistant. But at this year’s proceedings, artificially intelligent voice-based service struggled to be heard above the din of an army of rival assistants that will jostle for attention on smartphones. As the event kicked off, the search giant ...

  Bloomberg Auto insurance may be on the brink of an incursion from mobile-phone and technology companies. Telefonica SA’s O2 unit — one of the first mobile operators in Britain to offer car insurance — expanded its product line in February to include telematics boxes, which track people’s driving habits and can lead to cheaper premiums for youngsters. That’s stoking ...

  Emirates Business A new global study which includes data from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), ‘The Internet of Things: Today and Tomorrow’ published by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, reveals that IoT will soon be widespread as 85% of businesses globally plan to implement IoT by 2019, driven by a need for innovation and business efficiency. While the ...

  Bloomberg Forget email, Slack and the humble telephone. When workers at one Australian company want to talk to colleagues in China, they just turn their heads and look down the “wormhole”. Large screens at the end of each row of desks offer a digital window between offices in Melbourne and Xi’an—7,000 kilometers apart—at real-estate company REA Group Ltd. The ...

  Bloomberg Line Corp. outlined an ambitious artificial-intelligence strategy that promises to transform Japan’s most popular messaging service while pitting it against Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. The company is launching a suite of AI software tools to power an online digital assistant capable of conversing in Japanese and Korean, Line said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. ...

  NEW YORK / AP Twitter is adding more tools to curb abuse on its service as part of its ongoing effort to protect users from hate and harassment. Among other things, the service will attempt to identify offenders on its own, even if no one has reported them first. It is the second time in three weeks the company ...