Mozilla isn’t having much success when it comes to expanding the reach of its most famous product. The company ceased development and sales of Firefox OS smartphones just over a year ago, saying it would use technology from the open-source operating system to enter the Internet of Things space. Now, that effort has also died. The elimination of the IoT team will affect around 50 people. Some of them may be able to remain at the company, as Mozilla has opened new positions that employees from its connected devices initiative can apply for. The section’s senior vice president, Ari Jaaksi, is also leaving. He …

You can’t try this at home, even if you wanted to. Today’s premiere of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibit proved there are vivid opportunities for a third kind of virtual reality beyond tethered and mobile: VR installations. Outside the headset, custom art and physical effects set the scene before you enter, deepen the immersion while you’re enveloped in VR, and cement the memory after you emerge. This is the evolution of VR. Head-mounted TV screens gave way to motion tracking and the ability to walk around. Haptic controllers let us see and feel our hands. But now …

The company has launched an online hub to help them get started with creating “skills” (Amazon’s word for apps) for the Echo device family. The hub currently lists 20 agencies “with expertise in designing, developing and optimizing Alexa skills,” including Razorfish, Mobiquity, VaynerMedia and others. For brands wanting to build their own Alexa skills, the hub connects them to the Alexa Skills Kit and three other development frameworks. There’s also a section listing three voice analytics providers to help brands and marketers measure how people are interacting with Alexa skills. For Amazon, it’s a pitch to marketers to encourage them to join …

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report today, in which all the companies that are actively testing self-driving cars on public roads in the Golden State disclose the number of times that human drivers were forced to take control of their driverless vehicles. The biggest news to come out of this report is from Waymo, Google’s new self-driving car company, which reported a huge drop in disengagements in 2016 despite an almost equally huge increase in the number of miles driven. In other words, Waymo’s self-driving cars are failing at a much lower rate, even as …

How many robots touched your Amazon delivery before it was delivered to you? The e-commerce giant currently has around 45,000 robots in distribution centers across the country. But that number is about to get even higher. The retailer was just granted a patent for a robot that can pack orders, potentially speeding up the fulfillment process. One scenario detailed in the patent filing explains how a "human operator loads the tray with an inventory item," such as a coffee mug. Using suction, the item is grasped by a robotic arm and is "moved into the appropriate box from a group of …

Rebecca Minkoff is continuing on her tech-enabled journey as a fashion brand, this time introducing smart tags to her new handbag designs in order to offer consumers access to exclusive content and experiences. Ahead of her Fashion Week show taking place at The Grove in Los Angeles this weekend, 10 limited edition bags, dubbed the #AlwaysOn Midnighter style, will be available at an exclusive pop-up shop on site. Each one comes with a hangtag that unlocks a ticket to the spring/summer 2017 runway event when scanned. The initiative is in partnership with apparel branding solutions Avery Dennison’s Retail Branding and …

In what it describes as a first for the Nordics region, Norwegian firm Telia has launched a commercial narrowband Internet of Things service, allowing operators to offer communication to and from connected devices over their existing 4G/LTE mobile networks. Using narrowband for IoT, or NB-IoT, allows for more devices to be connected to mobile networks at a lower cost, ultimately enabling telcos to turn IoT into a basic service.

Sure watching boxing, basketball and tennis in VR are cool, but what about the biggest TV event of the year? Come Sunday, Fox Sports will fix that gap in its lineup by teaming with LiveLike to beam the Super Bowl into your Gear VR or Cardboard headset via the network's app. Or, you can ditch the headsets and use the 360-degree video with your mobile device. In addition to a half-dozen viewpoints to choose from within the virtual suite Fox will upload what it deems the 20 "most exciting" highlights in near realtime. A …

Daimler and Uber have announced a partnership that will see the automaker introduce its own self-driving cars for use on Uber’s ride sharing service. The team-up is the second alliance Uber has struck with a car maker in pursuit of its goal of delivering self-driving service to users, the first of which was struck with Volvo and resulted in the XC90 self-driving test car that serves as Uber’s latest prototype. This is different from Uber’s arrangement with Volvo, however, in that Daimler will own and operate its vehicles itself, while taking advantage of Uber’s technology and ride-sharing network services. Uber …

Fox is bringing the trademark “24” ticking-clock sound effect to Amazon’s voice-activated Echo devices, in a unique promo with the ecommerce giant ahead of the premiere of the franchise’s “24: Legacy” reboot. Beginning Monday, Jan. 30, Amazon Echo users will be able to select the action-drama franchise’s reverberating “plink-plink” audio mnemonic as a personalized alarm tone for Alexa. “24: Legacy” premieres Feb. 5 immediately after Super Bowl LI on Fox. On Super Bowl Sunday, “24: Legacy” and the Alexa alarm tie-in will be featured on Amazon’s homepage in the top-center rotating carousel. That also will promote the availability of the show for purchase on Amazon Video, as …