Technology

Hologram wife Azuma Hikari.

A hologram wife for Japan's legion of lonely hearts

It is being sold as salvation for Japan's lonely hearts. An attractive companion will send you text messages throughout the day to ask how you are, and welcome you home with a kind word in the evenings, the house warmed just as you like it. You can watch television together, and chat.

Uber explands its self-driving cars

One of Uber's test self-driving cars on the road in Pittsburgh.

Uber has begun trialling self-driving cars in San Francisco, a sign the ride-share company is staking its future on doing away with drivers altogether.

Amazon's physical grocery store has no checkouts

Amazon go

Amazon has revealed that it will open a brick-and-mortar grocery store called Amazon Go, an ambitious bid by the once online-only retailer to gobble up more of Americans' shopping dollars by taking the fight more directly to traditional supermarkets.

Google's Home is where the heart is

Google Home. Cute. Knows everything.

Google's latest gadget is an always on, always listening little speaker called Home. It's a cute design, a friendly little blob of a thing that looks like a half finished cartoon character. It's also not available in Australia, if you want one you'll need to have one shipped to you from the US.

Hate doing laundry? Meet the Laundroid

The laundry robot was inspired by sci-fi classic "A Space Odyssey", which brought technology to prehistoric humans, its ...

Hate doing laundry? This Laundroid doesn't only wash and dry garments, but also sort, fold and neatly arrange them. Now its Japanese inventor has won $71 million from investors including Panasonic, and is preparing to take the business public.

How the fastest growing companies reel you in

Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers: growth for growth's sake is not a winning strategy.

Sean Ellis is a one-man marketing phenomenon, yet marketing doesn't begin to describe how he built customer bases in the multimillions rapidly for companies like Dropbox, LogMeIn and Eventbrite. So he coined the term "growth hacker".

Uber 2.0: Autonomous and airborne

Flying cars, like this one designed by US company Terrafugia, are central to Uber's plans.

Flying commuters like George Jetson could be whizzing to work through the sky less than 10 years from now, according to ride-services provider Uber, which believes the future of transportation is literally looking up.