Technology

  San Francisco / AFP Vanishing message service Snapchat announced it will launch a line of video-catching sunglasses, a spin on Glass eyewear abandoned by Google more than a year ago. The California-based company, which also announced it is changing its name to Snap Inc., said in an online post that its Spectacles will be “available soon,” with media reports ...

  Emirates Business While smartphone cameras are still unable to compete with high-end DSLRs, the gap is closing. Despite their shortcomings, the flexibility of smartphones leaves them well-equipped to capture content that is off limits to traditional cameras. From 360 Virtual Reality-ready content and action photography to wide-angle shots, the ability of smartphones to interact with companion devices or smart ...

  AFP The huge Yahoo hack deals a fresh blow to the internet pioneer which has been struggling to reinvent itself, potentially impacting the pending sale aiming at giving it a new start. The hack in late 2014 affecting some 500 million users worldwide, disclosed this week, could further erode confidence in the online giant which has been on a ...

  Bloomberg Twitter Inc. is holding informal talks with several potential buyers after receiving interest from Salesforce.com Inc., people familiar with the situation said. Twitter’s board met several weeks ago after hearing from Salesforce, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public. Twitter then hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Allen & Co. to ...

Bloomberg Google’s cloud services will be used to test blockchain technologies for banks, an area where IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have been courting clients for the past year. Royal Bank of Scotland Group has employed Google servers in a trial of a new blockchain application for clearing and settlement, the consulting firm GFT said Friday in a statement. The company’s ...

  Bloomberg Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter. Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced ...

  Bloomberg As Tesla founder Elon Musk promises to change the world, starting with giant battery factory in the Nevada desert, investors from Toronto to Tokyo are quietly developing the next-generation technologies that may actually get him there. Batteries, especially the lithium-ion variety used in mobile phones and electric cars, are likely to dominate the $44 billion or more spent ...

  Bloomberg For the world’s top tech fund, Facebook Inc. is finally cheap enough to buy. DNB Nordic Technology, the best performing tech fund over the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, started buying Facebook shares in July. “For the first time, we think the stock doesn’t look that expensive in relation to the figures they deliver,” ...

  Bloomberg As it firms up plans to upend the auto industry, Apple Inc. is looking toward British carmaker McLaren and San Francisco-based startup Lit Motors for help. Both would give Apple some of the know-how needed to compete head to head against or forge a meaningful partnership with automakers. Yet the two companies exist on opposite ends of the ...

  Bloomberg A teardown of the latest generation iPhone 7 shows that in terms of material costs, the new handset is not a rip off. According to the customary IHS teardown that follows the launch of any digital object of desire, if the cost of the latest iPhone were based purely on its materials plus the labor required to put ...