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For GoPro, things are looking up.   After a tumultuous couple of years — which saw the action-camera company enter and then leave the drone business, get squeezed harder by increasingly competitive smartphone cameras, and ride a steady wave of criticism of its product line — GoPro appears to have found its footing with the well-received Hero 7 Black camera and a return to profitability.   At the center of the company’s renewal is founder Nick Woodman. Woodman joined MashTalk to talk about what it’s been like to be CEO through such a roller-coaster time. After promising expeditions into media, drones, and 360 video didn’t work out as planned, he’s discarded unrealistic visions for tighter focus. The new GoPro may be less ambitious, but it’s much more confident about what it can offer: high-quality action cameras with a compelling mix of features, value, and usability. Follow MashTalk on Twitter.

Ten years ago, Indiegogo launched the modern era of crowdfunding by creating a place where anyone could pitch their idea, product, or creative endeavor to the entire world, asking for the funds to make it reality. Today there are no shortage of crowdfunding sites, and even though Indiegogo isn’t as large as rival Kickstarter, it’s still tremendously influential, offering entrepreneurs not just a funding platform, but also support beyond their campaigns, with tools to ease the transition from concept to launch.   Indiegogo has always had a more worldwide audience than its peers, and now current CEO David Mandelbrot wants to take things further with more outreach to inventors in China as he leads the venture-funded company to profitability. Mandelbrot joined Mashable’s MashTalk podcast to talk about how crowdfunding has evolved since in the past decade, how the company approaches quality control, and what he thinks of Indiegogo’s “anything goes” reputation. Follow @MashT

Want live TV over the internet? Today you have several options, including Hulu, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and more. It’s hard to remember, though, but there was a time when there were virtually no options for consumers who wanted to cut the cord. Sure, services like Netflix and Vudu provided plenty of titles via on demand, but current content was scattered across myriad websites and services, and it didn’t do a good job of replicating the TV experience.   Then Sling TV came along. Launched by satellite powerhouse Dish Network in January 2015, Sling TV wasn’t the first over-the-top (OTT) video service, but it was the first to get it right, both in terms of user experience and offerings. It made deals to package several popular TV channels live over the internet, including — crucially — ESPN. Since then it’s expanded in terms of both content and features, now offering dozens of channels, a cloud DVR, and even its own streaming box, the AirTV Player.   One of the

What does ‘time well spent’ mean for games like ‘Candy Crush?’   If you own a smartphone, chances are you know Candy Crush and maybe even the game’s latest incarnation, Candy Crush Friends Saga. What you may not know is the story behind the franchise: How an Italian entrepreneur put all his cash on the line as a co-founder of King, the company behind the game, in the early 2000s, with an idea of how to re-invent gaming for the online world.   That person is Riccardo Zacconi. He’s guided the company through the many phases online gaming (desktop, Facebook, mobile, and more), taking King public and eventually selling it to gaming giant Activision Blizzard in 2015. In this episode of MashTalk, Zacconi talks about that journey, his thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg, and what the future holds for mobile gaming now that people are starting to question all the time they’re spending on their devices playing games like, well, Candy Crush. Follow @MashTalk on Twitter.

In case you missed it, the robots are here.   No, not the apocalyptic hordes of artificially intelligent machines that some believe are destined to enslave or eradicate us (hello, Boston Dynamics!), but the everyday devices and companions that are rapidly becoming commonplace. After decades of lofty sci-fi-inspired promises, robots like iRobot's Roomba vacuums and the many iterations of the Sony Aibo robodog are slowly carving out their places in our domestic lives. Even Amazon's Alexa is arguably a disembodied robot.   A new entry into the field is Anki's Vector. Vector is a small tabletop robot with big features. First and foremost, unlike other "robots" like those from Sphero or even WowWee, Vector doesn't need a smartphone to control it. It's fully autonomous and loaded with sensors, enabling it to interact with and learn from its environment from the get-go.   Vector is another milestone for Anki, a company that's had one of the most interesting stories in tech. Unknown to the world befor

Everyone knows Apple will unveil new iPhones in the fall, and the consensus is there will be three models: a successor to the iPhone X, a large-screen version of that phone, and a new model that looks kind of like the iPhone X, but doesn’t have quite all the same features so Apple can sell it at a lower price. With three iPhones coming, the big question becomes... what is Apple going to call these babies? Apple really screwed itself by debuting the iPhone 8 alongside the iPhone “ten” — now anything called the “iPhone 9” sounds like an old model, and the “X” label makes it difficult to just jump to 11 (which would make the “9” sound even older). So what options does Apple have? Host Pete Pachal dissects them all with Mashable’s Raymond Wong and Michelle Yan. Tell us your vote by hitting us up on Twitter at @mashtalk.

Emoji have conquered the world, no doubt, but what happens after the conquest?   The answer: Things change. Emoji are constantly evolving, not only with new symbols that arrive on our smartphone keyboards year after year, but also the symbols themselves. A couple of years ago, your standard emoji keyboard usually has a gun on it, but today that symbol has been almost universally replaced with a water pistol.   The gun’s transformation may be the most dramatic of changes, but emoji are changing in subtler ways too. Apple recently announced a new set of emoji coming in iOS 12, and it includes a eye-like symbol, the nazar amulet, that’s very popular in Turkey and other parts of the world but not the U.S. With the emoji keyboard now pretty much filled out with “universal” symbols, expect more niche or regional characters to appear.   There’s also the question: what to do about unpopular emoji? Some emoji, like "crying with tears of joy," are everywhere, but others don

We all know YouTube. YouTube is the biggest video platform on the planet, with about 400 hours of video uploaded to the service every second.   But YouTube, of all the current content "platforms," is arguably the most fragmented. There's no newsfeed, so there's no central place where everyone -- or seemingly everyone -- is gathering. As a result, communities form on their own, typically around channels or personalities, and they tend to be pretty insular.   One of these communities formed around someone named Teal Swan. Swan is what you might call a "spiritual healer" or at least someone who believes herself to be that. But it turns out she has some very controversial thoughts on many topics, including suicide, and a lot of people think her teachings are potentially damaging — and may have contributed to the suicide of someone who followed her closely.   That's exactly what Jennings Brown, a senior reporter at Gizmodo, investigated in The Gateway, a six-part podcast that explores the wor

When Google wowed the tech world with its demo of Duplex -- the tech that allows its digital Assistant make phone calls to perform mundane tasks like booking haircuts or making restaurant reservations -- Microsoft's Cortana chief was impressed, but not worried.   "The technologist in me had no choice but to feel impressed," Javier Soltero, Microsoft corporate vice president of Cortana, said in this episode of Mashable's MashTalk podcast. "The idea that a computer can generate a voice with the right processes, right inflection, all of the right things to mimic humans, is amazing to see in practice, but not entirely surprising."   But Soltero didn't immediately think, "We need to do something similar with Cortana so we can catch up to what they're doing." In fact, the Google Duplex demo emphasized just how different the two companies' approaches to voice technology are.   Whereas Google is clearly putting consumer-friendly features that automate mundane tasks front and center, Microsoft is l

For a while there, it seemed like "Uber for X" was the only pitch that mattered.   To many, the rapid rise of Uber wasn't just a major tech success story -- it signaled a wholesale change that was coming to how people thought of work. Traditional jobs, the thinking went, would soon become less and less common, with predictable, inefficient employment getting replaced by the flexibility of independent contract work. The "gig economy" was underway, and it was unstoppable.   Except that it stopped. In her new book, Gigged, reporter Sarah Kessler chronicles the ascent and decline of the gig economy, starting in the early 2010s, when it seemed every service -- from grocery shopping to cleaning offices -- could be "app-ified" to be done by easily scalable contract work, to the death of many of those services a few years later, when their models proved unsustainable.   Kessler, a former Mashable startups reporter, visited the MashTalk podcast to talk about the gig economy, and its failure.   O

WWDC. Apple's software show. "Dub-dub."   Whatever you call Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, it's the event where we find out what cool new features are coming to the company's multiple platforms: iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It's also where we get to know what's on Apple's mind.   The new software shows Apple's hand in ways its hardware doesn't: From new features to combat iPhone addiction to updates meant to prevent data companies from tracking you, Apple is playing both defense and offense in the ongoing backlash against big tech companies. It also quashed (but maybe not fully?) the rumor it was going to merge iOS with macOS, inadvertently giving us a GIF for the ages.   On this week's MashTalk podcast, we go beyond the keynote rhetoric and basket of feature updates to get at the big questions: What kind of experience will users get when this software is on their devices? How will that compare to the competition? And exactly what kind of company is Apple trying to be?   To he

Does Facebook know something about blockchain that we don't?   Probably. If there's one thing we can all agree on about blockchain tech and cryptocurrency, it's that most people don't understand them. Facebook, which recently re-organized itself to make blockchain one of its major focuses, clearly has something up its sleeve with regard to crypto. But even if they revealed what it is, users would likely react with a head-scratch.   The financial world is already a mystery to many. Add to that a layer of novel technology involving a digital "immutable ledger" that runs on a peer-to-peer network, decoupling the currency from any central authority, and even an interested person will start to resemble the Confused Lady meme.   To those folks, this week must have been especially troubling. It was Blockchain Week in New York City, headlined by CoinDesk's Consensus Conference. Besides the Lamborghinis on display and the bizarre crypto-inspired stunts, there was clear progress in bridging the world of

It was possibly the most mind-blowing tech demo in years: During the opening keynote of the Google I/O developers conference, CEO Sundar Pichai showed the company’s AI-driven Assistant making a phone call to a business and carrying out a verbal conversation with the person who answered.   What made the demo of the feature, called Duplex, so amazing was the Assistant’s command of natural language – saying “um,” “mm-hmm,” and “ah” at various times – was so masterful that it was apparent the person on the other end had no idea he or she was talking to a machine. It was a very specific situation, but Google Assistant had effectively passed the Turing test.   The demo instantly got the tech world’s collective mind a-blazing. Was the Assistant obliged to say it wasn’t a person? How off-track would the conversation have to go for the Assistant to mess up? What happens when an automated system picks up the phone? And maybe most impor

If you're not paying for the service, are you the product?   That's been Silicon Valley conventional wisdom for at least a decade, but the new focus on data privacy in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal has inspired the world to re-examine the maxim. It's pretty clear now that it's an oversimplification, and there's a strong case to be made that thinking this way is downright dangerous.   That doesn't mean we let services like Facebook off the hook, but we should be cognizant that there are other ways to monetize a free service outside of "profiling" users to optimize advertising.   One good example is Viber. Founded in 2010 as a mobile-first messaging service (then a novel idea), Viber now has about half a billion monthly active users worldwide. And it doesn't do advertising in the traditional way.   CEO Djamel Agaoua joined MashTalk to talk about the current conversation about user data, whether its users are "products," and how it squares a strict privacy-firs

If you own an iPhone, you should be concerned about GrayKey. That's the name for a new kind of device that's becoming increasingly popular with law enforcement agencies across the U.S., according to recent reports. It's popular because it unlocks iPhones protected with a passcode, even ones running Apple's most recent software, iOS 11.   GrayKey is the product of Grayshift, a security company based in Atlanta that was co-founded by an ex-Apple security engineer. The device itself is a nondescript black box with two Lightning cables sticking out. But once you connect a locked iPhone, it can somehow bypass Apple's built-in protections against repeatedly attempting to guess the phone's passcode -- effectively letting users "brute force" the code and get in after a certain amount of tries. A four-digit code becomes practically useless, and a six-digit code might take a few days to crack at the most.   Phone-cracking technology has been around since people started keeping sensitive information on phon

Mark Zuckerberg survived Congress. Now what?   That's the big question now that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have put Zuckerberg and Facebook under the microscope. After 10+ hours of testimony, plenty of clueless questions, and multiple promises that Facebook's team would "follow up" with lawmakers, the public now has a chance to re-examine its fundamental relationship with Facebook, and judge whether or not "breach of trust" that Zuckerberg has admitted will lead to fundamental change.   Zuckerberg has promised the company would atone for past sins through audits of former developers and changes in how it handles data. It's also addressing the accusation that it enabled Russian operatives to manipulate its network in an attempt to sway public opinion with better detection tools and much greater transparency in its advertisers -- a clear attempt to get ahead of new regulations, such as the Honest Ads Act, before they hit the social network like a speeding freight train.   One o

When Apple makes a move, it usually causes an earthquake.   The chip industry definitely felt tremors upon the report that Apple would soon be turning away from Intel for the chips in its MacBooks. Or at least one MacBook. As early as 2020, we may see the first Mac to run on a chip designed and built by Apple -- either one of its "A" processors or something new altogether.   Obviously, Intel shareholders weren't happy about the news (the stock still hasn't recovered four days later), but the big question is what this means for Apple and Mac users down the road: Will it be a single "hybrid" machine, a new line of Macs, or is Apple really looking to split entirely from Intel's chips, at least in the long term? And what will the first non-Intel Mac in over a decade look like?   We tackle those questions and more on the latest episode of our MashTalk podcast. CNET's senior reporter Shara Tibken joins host Pete Pachal and Mashable Tech Reporter Karissa Bell to evaluate whether the chipocalypse is r

Is the future broken?   Maybe not, but, by many measures, the present is. Over the past couple of years, the networks and devices that we've come to rely on for our information, consumption, and social interactions have been exposed to have toxic underbellies: Social networks have been twisted by fake news and filter bubbles, the constant ping of notifications on screens has shortened attention spans and created addictions, and it seems all the big tech companies are determined to erase every trace of privacy left in the world.   We know how we got here. In fact, most of the conversation in 2017 was about examining the problems and laying blame. Now the conversation have begun about repairing the damage and charting the best way forward.   One of the people leading that conversation is Andrew Keen. Keen is an author, and if you look at the titles of his previous books -- The Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, and The Internet Is Not the Answer -- you can tell he's been a tech naysayer since

Snap is starting the year off strong. Its quarterly earnings blew past expectations, and while its redesign is angering some users, the change is expected to improve the app experience for everyone, with time.   But life hasn't always been so great for Snapchat. CEO Evan Spiegel continues to be compared to Mark Zuckerberg and his tech giant Facebook, whose much larger products keep taking on Snapchat-esque features. Such a comparison isn't so crazy. Back in 2013, Facebook offered $1 billion to acquire Snapchat. Zuckerberg later upped the offer to $3 billion. And that's just one drama in a long saga of how Snapchat and Spiegel rose to fame.   For more details on the rise of Snapchat, we spoke with the guy who wrote the book — seriously — on this week's MashTalk. Billy Gallagher is the author of "How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story," which is out Feb. 13 and available on Amazon.   Gallagher has quite the personal knowledge of the whole "Snapchat Story." He attended

It's legend in the computer industry: In the mid '80s, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, the company he co-founded and went on to eventually lead to worldwide dominance, after a boardroom battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley.   Over the years, the story got altered and adapted -- to the point where many assumed Jobs was fired, either by Sculley or Apple's board, which wasn't the case. Jobs did lose a boardroom showdown with Sculley (which actually played out over a week or so), one where Jobs' plan of moving marketing dollars from the Apple II to the Macintosh Office was rejected by the board, which led to Jobs being stripped of his leadership of the Macintosh team and pushed him to leave the company.   In other words, Jobs ouster was tantamount to a firing, but not an actual firing.   Good information, but not as good as knowing Sculley's thoughts and reflections about the incident, some 30+ years on. But that's just what we got when we sat down to talk to the former Apple CEO fo