Technology

  That new song you heard the other day might not really be new, according to a pair of programmer-musicians. Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin created an algorithm to generate every possible melody, and they copyrighted it. This isn’t a scheme to sue people, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. …

Wattpad, the online storytelling community that’s home to some 80 million monthly users, has successfully tapped into the power of crowdsourcing to help uncover the next potential hits for media companies, including Netflix, Hulu, NBCU, Sony Pictures Television and others worldwide. It even launched its own YA book line to …

  Sony has never been a major player in smartphones, but it makes enough money from other ventures to keep at it. In fact, it has a habit of releasing multiple flagship phones every year. Its latest is the Xperia 1 II, and it’s accompanied by a new mid-range device …

  Prominent analyst and Apple-watcher Ming-Chi Kuo has told investors that he believes the Cupertino-based company will launch a system based on its own silicon rather than any chip from Intel in 1H 2021. Such an SoC would use an ARM architectural license and presumably be closely derived from the …

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending …

  HTC has struggled to remain relevant in smartphones, but it’s still hanging on in virtual reality. While Oculus has seen massive success with the Quest, HTC is planning for the future with the Vive “Project Proton” concepts. The company showed off Project Proton alongside the updated Cosmos VR headset …

  Microsoft has started rolling the new Edge browser out to users, leaving the old EdgeHTML engine in the past. The new Edge uses a Chromium base just like Google Chrome, and that means it can run many existing Chrome extensions. Attempting to use Google’s Web Store could be a …

  Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders. The company declined to fully show off its app only a month ago during demos of its “TurnStyle” technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it appears the app is ready nonetheless. Quibi …

HBR Staff/mheim3011/Getty Images In 2012, facing growing competition from Apple and Google, Microsoft unveiled what it believed would be the next big thing: Windows 8. The team at Microsoft poured millions of dollars into R&D, creating countless innovative features, but ultimately the platform struggled to gain traction with customers. With …

When I looked into the user interface of Mojo Vision’s augmented reality contact lenses, I didn’t see anything at first except the real world in front of me. Only when I peeked over toward the periphery did a small yellow weather icon appear. When I examined it more closely, I …