Google wants to help you buy a BMW

A new app from BMW and Google lets you digitally customize a car.

Photo by Rainer Häckl, courtesy of Google

You could probably call it tech for the 1 percent: Google and BMW are teaming up to make it easier to shop for that new Beemer you've had your eye on.

The two companies unveiled on Wednesday a new app that helps you digitally customize and virtually walk around a new BMW, so you can feel out the customizations before you buy. The companies unveiled the app during the annual CES tech trade show in Las Vegas.

 

A fitness watch that holds all your music? Misfit Vapor wants to be that watch

Big, bright, round screen? Check. GPS? Check. Water resistant for swimming? Heart rate? Check, check. Misfit's newest fitness watch looks like it's going for all the features. But yet, after seeing it, I'm not even sure it'll exist in the form I saw.

Called Misfit Vapor, the round watch looks sharp and promises a mix of phone-connected and fully stand-alone functions. It also has Wi-Fi, and according to Misfit, it'll check email and even play music away from a phone.

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Misfit Vapor's weather report.

Scott Stein/CNET

But music playback is limited to MP3s, loaded via a computer over USB or Wi-Fi. The Vapor can't connect to a phone to transfer music because it can't hook into services like Google Play or Apple Music, and doesn't have its own on-phone app store. According to Misift, the goal is to head to streaming music services eventually: maybe Spotify, or Amazon Music. Even the MP3 function didn't work during my demo.

Razer Project Valerie is a gaming laptop with a triple-screen surprise

Every year at CES, Razer is a good for a couple of cool PC prototypes or concept pieces. The inventive tech company was once best known for its hard-core gaming accessories, like mice and keyboards, but has quickly become a leader in the laptop category with its Blade systems.

The newest laptop from Razer is a prototype called Project Valerie, and it's very different from the current Razer lineup, which goes for a slim minimalism. For example, the Blade Pro is a very portable gaming laptop, and the Blade Stealth is a very sharp-looking MacBook alternative.

Scientists search for aliens in galaxy sending weird radio signals

Our first contact from aliens probably won't be as simple as the 1997 movie "Contact," where Jodie Foster listens for otherworldly signals at the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.

However, there is a teeny, tiny chance it does start at the VLA.

Astronomer Casey Law hooked up 24 parallel CPUs to that same VLA to parse the gobs of data the radio telescope receives from space. Law is part of an international team that traced one of the mysterious phenomena known as "fast radio bursts" (FRBs) to its source for the first time ever.

 

This is what it was like to be at Intel's all-VR press conference

As I walked into a ballroom at the Mandalay Bay casino, I could immediately tell that this was going to be a different kind of CES tech-show presentation from Intel.

In front of each plush, black-leather chair in the audience, the chipmaker had placed a small table rigged with a high-powered laptop and an Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset. Workers directing the roughly 250 people there handed out barf bags as folks started sitting down and getting comfortable.