As the old adagio says, there’s an app for that. And starting today, there’s an app that will brew your espresso without requiring you to leave your chair. The coffee-in-a-pod company Nespresso has introduced Prodigio, which lets the especially lazy prepare coffee from a distance using the Nespresso app. The app, available for both Android and iOS, features a few notifications just for the Prodigio. It can tell you when the water tank is empty, when the tank needs descaling, and when you’re low on capsules. And yes, you can order capsules straight from your smartphone.

Siri, however witty her off-the-cuff remarks may be, is generally not very helpful. She often can’t understand what you’re asking her, can’t take dictation without making bizarre mistakes, and often gives the exact opposite of the information you’re after. But there’s a new voice-based assistant, called Hound, that actually might not drive you crazy, and may offer a glimpse of how we’ll control internet-connected devices in the future. SoundHound, the company behind the eponymous music-recognition app, has spent 10 years perfecting the technology that allows it to identify any piece of music. 

Many prophets of information technology (IT) believe that the next big movement in their field will be the “internet of things”. This, they hope, will connect objects hitherto beyond the reach of IT’s tendrils so that, for example, your sofa can buzz your phone to tell you that you have left your wallet behind, or your refrigerator can order your groceries without you having to make a shopping list. That, though, will mean putting chips in your sofa, your wallet and your fridge to enable them to talk to the rest of the world. And those chips will need power, …

An Australian team is building the foundations of the smart home of the future, with an alliance of the world's most powerful technology companies appointing local software developer Two Bulls to expand the AllJoyn internet of things framework. Originally developed by Qualcomm, the open source AllJoyn framework allows smart devices to discover each other and work together regardless of manufacturer. The AllJoyn framework is now overseen by the AllSeen Alliance — formed in 2013 and backed by dozens of technology heavyweights including Microsoft, Cisco, Sony, Sharp and LG.

To be perfectly frank, we have very mixed emotions about the video you’re about to watch. Is this how it begins? The robots trick us into letting our guard down by acting all cute and playful. Then the next thing you know, bam! Skynet becomes sentient and we’re battling real-life Terminators. OK, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Instead of panicking, let’s all just sit back, relax, and watch this adorable video of Google’s robot dog “Spot” playing with a real dog. Isn’t it cute? Aren’t they having so much fun together? Yup, this is exactly what the robots want…All joking aside, this video is …

McDonald's Sweden is launching a promotion that invites kids to turn Happy Meal boxes into virtual-reality viewers. Dubbed Happy Goggles, some 3,500 of them will be made available at 14 restaurants over the weekends of March 5 and March 12. The price is about $4.10.  The push is tied to the Swedish "Sportlov" recreational holiday, during which many families go skiing. With this in mind, McD's created a ski-themed VR game, "Slope Stars," for use with the oggles (though they work just as well with any mobile VR experience). The game can also be played in a less immersive fashion without …

The so-called “Internet of Things” — meaning the way every device can be connected to transmit data and media – is omnipresent and have changed our lives undeniably for the better, but with a few sacrifices. The obvious, and most pressing, is privacy concerns — if you use an Android phone, chances are every step of your movement over the past however-many months/years have already been recorded onto Google’s database. Don’t believe me? Click here, pick a date, and be amazed/creeped out at seeing your entire day’s route mapped. I can think of two more negative aspects to this Internet of Things thing:

You’ve seen the catchy TV ads…  ‘Hive is busy controlling your heating at home’. Well this weekend, the smart home heating service was a little too busy. Instead of allowing customers to monitor and maintain sensibly snug temperatures from their smartphones, it sent house temperatures soaring to highs of 32°C.  

Remember Chucky? The sinister toy with the soul of a serial killer who starred in six slasher films? That toy creeped us out as it tried to transfer its soul onto a human victim. But Chucky was so last century. This century's creepy toys pose a different sort of danger: transferring information about the kids who play with them to hackers. That's what happened in November, when someone broke into the customer accounts of VTech, which makes connected toys, games and tablets for young children. 

The most memorable scene in the 1986 movie, Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home involved a time-traveling Scotty trying to use a computer from the 1980s. He walks up to a Macintosh Plus and says: "Computer!" When the computer doesn't respond, it occurs to Dr. McCoy that, because this is a primitive computer from the past, perhaps it needs a close-up microphone. So he hands the mouse to Scotty, who tries his voice command into the mouse. The scene is as prescient as it is funny. What Star Trek always got right was that the user interface of the future was conversational.