Technology

Bloomberg Looking to sell its customers on the latest and greatest smart-home technology, builder Lennar Corp. flirted with Siri. Now it’s decided to go steady with Alexa. Lennar’s model homes — equipped with video doorbells, Sonos speakers and Amazon.com Inc.’s voice-activated Echo (known by its wake-word, “Alexa”) — will double as Amazon Experience Centers, the tech giant said. The builder, ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. is adding a new tool to make its mobile app easier to use as the bank tries to keep Silicon Valley innovators from stealing more customers. “Pay with Wells Fargo” will be an option on the app’s home screen that lets customers select their most commonly used features, such as the peer-to-peer payment service Zelle, ...

Bloomberg NASA is working toward a future when humans will walk on the surface of Mars. But first it’s going to try flying a drone through the air. The Mars Helicopter, a small, self-flying aircraft designed specifically for the Red Planet, will be included in the space agency’s next rover mission in 2020 to beam back a birds-eye view of ...

Bloomberg The most talked-about, futuristic product from Google’s developer show isn’t even finished — but it’s already stoking heated debate. At its I/O conference, Alphabet Inc.’s Google previewed Duplex, an experimental service that lets its voice-based digital assistant book appointments on its own. It was part of a slate of features, such as automated writing in emails, where Google touted ...

Bloomberg Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched its more reusable rocket for the first time, a major step forward in reducing the cost of the closely held company’s missions. The Falcon 9 Block 5 carried Bangladesh’s first geostationary communications satellite towards orbit. It’s the latest major upgrade by SpaceX to its workhorse rocket and is built to handle at least 10 ...

Bloomberg A series of high-profile accidents involving self-driving cars are slowing the mad rush into the autonomous vehicles business, according to a report issued. The accidents, some of them fatal, have ignited a debate about how to regulate the safety of self-driving vehicles and tempered the public’s expectations, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said. They’ve also exposed the downside of rushing ...

Bloomberg Google is secretly building a social-gaming startup, part of its effort to create fledgling companies within the internet-search giant. The founder and co-owner of the new firm, called Arcade, is Michael Sayman, according to people familiar with the matter. Sayman is the 21-year-old wunderkind who started as a Facebook Inc. intern at age 17 and left that company for ...

Bloomberg Axon Enterprise Inc., the police technology company best known for its Taser stun guns, agreed to purchase its main competitor in the body camera industry, Vievu LLC. The combination of the two largest providers of the recording devices will create a dominant force in police surveillance. The companies declined to disclose financial details; Axon said it would discuss them ...

Bloomberg Twitter Inc. advised users to change their passwords after the company found a bug in its systems that exposed passwords in plain text internally. The company said it removed the non-encrypted passwords from its system, and is working to avoid such an issue happening again. An internal investigation “shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone” and there’s ...

Bloomberg After President Emmanuel Macron scrapped plans for a high-speed rail connection to Limoges, a city in central France, local entrepreneur Fabien Thibaut picked up his phone to call Elon Musk and talk about the Hyperloop — Musk’s idea for superfast trains zooming in tubes. “This kind of project is essential for a city like ours,” said Thibaut, one of ...