[ad_1] Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its … Read more
[ad_1] Gig work predates the internet. Besides traditional forms of self-employment, like plumbing, offers for ad-hoc services have long been found in the Yellow Pages and newspaper classified ads, and later Craigslist and Backpage which supplanted them. Low-cost broadband internet allowed for the proliferation of computer-based gig platforms like Mechanical Turk, Fiverr and Elance, which … Read more
[ad_1] In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on … Read more
[ad_1] I vividly remember Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone on January 9, 2007, a device he dubbed a touchscreen iPod, mobile phone and “internet communicator” all in one product. I immediately looked at my Motorola Razr with a burning sense of hatred. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty easy to say the iPhone … Read more
[ad_1] Nineteen years after Jawed Karim uploaded the very first YouTube video, the awkward, 19-second clip in front of San Diego Zoo’s elephant enclosure is memorable today only because of what it represents: the start of a multibillion-dollar juggernaut that defines so much of what it means to be an online creator. Today, YouTube is … Read more
[ad_1] Conversing with your computer has been a dream of futurists and technologists for decades. When you look at 2004’s state of the art, it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come. There are now billions of devices in our hands, and homes that listen to our queries and do their very best to answer … Read more
[ad_1] “When you think about the history of Bluetooth, and specifically about audio, you really have to go back to the mid-to-late ’90s.” Chuck Sabin is a Bluetooth expert. As a senior director at Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), he oversees market research and planning as well as business development. He’s also leading the charge … Read more
[ad_1] Just as Engadget was hitting publish on its first posts, I was putting a freshly minted English degree to use working at an indie bookshop in Los Angeles. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon had just reported its first profitable year after switching from selling books to selling “everything” four years before. (It still sold … Read more
[ad_1] The consumer electronics industry has changed radically over the past two decades. AR/VR devices have come and gone and come again, smartphones have grown from filling our pockets to dominating our lives, and the tendrils of connected services now touch everything we touch. Yet, for me, the most exciting to watch has been the … Read more
[ad_1] Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a story about the old bugaboo we used to call DRM. Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer’s bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM … Read more