Mae Anderson

Burger King pulled a pretty juicy marketing stunt last month that drew plenty of attention — not just to the Whopper, but also to the intrinsic vulnerabilities of a new type of voice-activated gadget. The fast food chain’s 15-second television ad targeted Google Home, a speaker that can answer questions and control other smart appliances. When an actor in the ad said “OK, Google” and asked a question about the Whopper, Google Home obediently began reading the burger’s ingredients in homes around the country — effectively extending the commercial for however long it took someone to shout “OK, Google,...

Look out, Corporate America. Customers armed with smartphones and video cameras are watching when you screw up. The viral video of a ticketed passenger dragged forcefully off a United flight is only the latest example of bad behavior exposed in the age of social media. In February, Uber came under fire after a driver posted video of CEO Travis Kalanick berating him. Earlier, a Comcast technician was shown in a video sleeping on a customer’s couch, and an audio recording chronicled one man’s herculean efforts to drop Comcast service; they are among the embarrassing customer complaints that ultimately forced...

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is announcing a new venture called Neuralink focused on linking brains to computers. The company plans to develop brain implants that can treat neural disorders — and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on a more even footing with possible future superintelligent computers, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing unnamed sources. Musk, a founder of both the electric-car company Tesla Motors and the private space-exploration firm SpaceX, has become an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence might one day pose to the human race. Continued growth in AI...

Usually people don’t notice the “cloud” — unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon’s huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage. Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s largest provider of internet-based computing services, suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern U.S. region starting about midday Tuesday. The result: unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps. While few services went down completely, thousands, if not tens of thousands of companies had trouble with functions ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data...

Procrastinators, rejoice. This year there are more apps and services than ever before to help last-minute shoppers. Apps like Curbside deliver orders directly to the trunk of your car, more retailers are offering incentives to buy online and pick up in store, and Amazon Prime Now and other same-day delivery services have vastly expanded this year. “In some sense, same-day delivery is going to become the new gift card,” said Daphne Carmeli, CEO of Deliv which works with retailers to offer same-day delivery. “It used to be ‘uh-oh, too late, here comes the gift card.’ Now you’ve got two hours before the...

On a trip to Maine with four friends, Alexander Culbertson racked up $1,300 on gas, hotel rooms, food and drinks. But instead of splitting all of the weekend’s activities evenly throughout the trip, one person paid for everything. Then, later they all split the final bill using Venmo, an app that lets users pay with a tap and a text-like message. “It would have been a nightmare for all of us to evenly split every transaction,” says Culbertson, 26, a Boston advertising executive. “If you say ‘I’ll grab beer and you grab the groceries,’ things usually don’t come out...

Music flooded into the streets around Austin’s convention center as South by Southwest’s music festival kicked off and the interactive portion wrapped up. The head of Google’s (X) division talked about testing driverless cars and delivery drones, gender bias in tech was a hot topic and event-goers checked out the latest products and companies on the trade show floor. Here are some highlights as South by Southwest Interactive draws to a close. GOOGLE X Some of Google’s most secretive projects like Google Glass and driverless cars have come out of its five-year-old (X) division, so attendees flooded in Tuesday to hear Astro Teller, head of the division, talk about how the most ambitious...

As a plane with a Grumpy Cat flag flew overhead, courtesy of Friskies, the Technorati flooded into panel discussions and happy hour spots at the annual tech festival South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on Sunday. Top tech influencers pondered immortality and mind cloning. FireChat, an app that lets smartphone users connect via mobile chat even without a cellular connection, was another hot topic. Here’s a look at the most notable trending topics Sunday at the tech jamboree. OFF-THE-GRID MOBILE CHAT No cell service? No problem. An app called FireChat uses phone signals such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to...