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Tech News Today for February 27, 2017

Tech News for Monday February 27, 2017

Mobile World Congress started this weekend in Barcelona. As expected, there were no flagship phones from Samsung. Instead, the news was filled with stories of the new Blackberry with a physical keyboard and the Nokia 3310 that lets you play Snake. We also saw a tall and skinny LG G6 with an 18:9 screen aspect ratio that's designed to make it easier to see two documents side by side. Read more at cnet.com.

Now game streaming service Twitch will let viewers buy games straight from the stream. Streamers will get 5 percent of the profits of the sale of the game starting in the Spring of 2017. Amazon owns Twitch and Twitch is also part of Amazon Prime. Read more at bloomberg.com.

Other news coming out of Barcelona this week is that Masayoshi Son, an executive at Softbank says computers will exceed human intelligence in 30 years. Also, supersmart robots will outnumber humans and more than a trillion objects will be connected to the internet. Unclear if this speech was meant only to frighten us or to promote the fact that Softbank's semiconductor subsidiary ARM says it will be equipped to produce the trillions of chips needed to power our internet of everything. Read more at wsj.com.

Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Engineering, has left the company due to the fact that he did not inform his current employer that his former employer had been investigating sexual harrassment allegations against him. His previous employer, Google, deemed the allegation against him "credible." Singhal had only been at Uber for one month. The company claims to have done extensive background checks before hiring the Google Search SVP. Read more at recode.net.

Elon Musk announced today that SpaceX will fly two space tourists around the moon in 2018. The passengers will be the only people aboard the craft and SpaceX says they'll release the names of the passengers as soon as they pass certain health and fitness tests. They'll spend a week on the mission which will take place in the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule and a Falcon heavy rocket. The moon travelers say they are "Very Serious" about the trip. It's not like when a guy gives his girlfriend a puppy for Valentines day and she gives it back to the shelter the next month. Read more at money.cnn.com.

Jason Howell is out today, so Scott Johnson will be hosting the show with Megan Morrone. They're joined by Ashley Esqueda of CNET to talk about how IMAX plans to get more people into experiencing virtual reality. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and download it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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