Technology news

If you manage multiple Facebook and/or Messenger accounts on an iOS device, good news: Account switching is finally rolling out. The feature was available on Android since February, and allows you to add multiple accounts to switch between. That’s great news for social media managers, small business owners, public personas, or family members who share a single device. The update makes the entire Facebook app family (FB, Messenger, Instagram) all capable of switching between multiple accou

Originally manufactured in the 1960s, the Peel P50 has appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's smallest production car. Recently, the Science Channel’s program How It’s Made went behind the scenes to learn how the car is manufactured.
Cars are built nowadays in highly sophisticated factories, utilizing robots and computers to turn the raw components into the finished product. For the smallest car in the world? It turns out that its assembly is a bit mo

Shea Serrano — New York Times best-selling author, newly-minted The Ringer staff writer, beloved Grantland alum, former high school teacher, and father to a YG backup trio he calls only Boy A, Boy B, and The Baby — is the easiest person in the world to get in touch with. For his nearly 90,000 Twitter followers, office hours are almost always open. He holds court daily on matters ranging from basketball to Taco Bell to Young Thug to parenting to the injustices of unpaid

The GOP's new mobile app, out now for iOS and Android, will support both live streaming and 360-degree video from the Republican National Convention taking place on July 18th. The app, called RNC 2016, will be used to live stream speeches at the convention, feature 360-degree video, and provide users with a map and schedule of the event. The RNC takes place at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, OH and marks the moment the Republican Party nominates its candidate for the upcoming preside

Mogees successfully crowdfunded its sensor for musicians that turns any object into an instrument. Now it’s back with a similar product called Mogees Play. The difference this time is that it wants its sensor to be accessible to kids and anyone else who wants to make music. Mogees Play plugs into a smartphone and pairs with three apps. The sensor attaches to any object and creates sounds out of its vibrations. So, for instance, you can tap on a wooden table to produce a different soun

GUEST: Facebook announced a pretty radical change to chatbots.
Instead of improving the A.I. or adding better natural language processing, the social networking giant has provided a way for chatbot developers to make things easier on users. At the same time, the Facebook Messenger platform update announced last Friday adds “quick replies” and other buttons to guide users to select the right option. In the end, it’s some hand-holding for both the bots and the users, as the world

As anyone who’s wasted hours reading about plot devices on TV Tropes can attest, breaking fiction into its constituent parts is strangely satisfying. Combine this feeling with the cultural curiosity and anxiety around creative machines, and you’ve got something delightfully addictive: a data mining program that can express Shakespearian tragedy in the form of a line graph.
The data is part of a larger series on happiness at Hedonometer. In this particular happiness-measurin

For anyone who attended the mega advertising festival called Cannes Lions in 2015, they will no doubt recall that Snapchat seemed to be literally everywhere. The red-hot mobile app had burst into the mainstream, and the advertising community couldn’t get enough of it.
I was one of those attendees, and I happened to catch a visibly jet-lagged Evan Spiegel during his keynote interview on the main stage as he explained the history and vision of the company he had founded.
So many things about

Chatible, a bot that randomly connects anonymous Facebook Messenger users, has surpassed 250,000 users since its debut three weeks ago, according to creator Zain Amro.
“I created Chatible because I felt there was an opportunity to connect people on the Messenger platform, and I was curious to see if it was even feasible,” he said. “I didn’t see many Facebook bots that connect people together, and I wanted to fill that void.”
More than than 1.1 million interactions h

The best thing that came out of the last generation of consoles wasn't actually a video game, it was Kinect. Microsoft shipped millions of units of this weird sensor, and then hardly anybody made games for it. But hackers and roboticists turned Kinect into a whole giant leap for machine vision.
Now it's time for another hacker-led breakthrough, and this time it's all about precision. The HTC Vive does positional tracking with two IR-blasting "Lighthouse" boxes, and an assortment of photodiodes o

VB LIVE: The pressure to achieve ROI in mobile is greater than ever — and, at the same time, more complex than ever. Our panel of front-line veterans will be breaking down the essential steps and calculations necessary to demystify the process.
Register here for free.
ROI is the holy grail every app or game developer is after. But when it comes to mobile, many still struggle to measure the impact of their investment. That’s not exactly good news giv

Google is reportedly working on two Android Wear smartwatches, according to a new report from Android Police. Such a move would mark yet another expansion of Google-made hardware; the company already manufactures laptops (Chromebook Pixel), tablets (Pixel C), streaming devices (Chromecast), and will soon launch its own "intelligent" speaker (Google Home) to compete with Amazon's Echo.
The two smartwatches — one codenamed Angelfish, the other Swordfish — are said to place a heavy

Pokemon Go was just officially released in Australia and New Zealand and people are already turning their explorations into internet memes. Just search #PokemonGo on Twitter and you’ll find tons of tweets with Pokemon showing up near toilet seats – which make a lot of sense given that most of us are probably just trying this out while on the john. This is the future we made. #PokemonGO pic.twitter.com/Vw184XNy62 — Shin Megami TenseGay (@ultrabawl) July 6, 2016 @Pokem

Star Trek Online’s newest expansion launches today, and the massively multiplayer online gaming is hoping to use nostalgia to bring fans into its game world.
Agents of Yesterday celebrates the 50th anniversary of the franchise by adding ships, characters, and more from the Original Series era. Previously, Star Trek Online was set in a post-Voyager era, so it had more in common with that show, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine than the adventures of Kirk, Spock, and crew. This expans

If you live in the UK and are interested in purchasing a OnePlus 3, you should probably get on it before next week. Beginning July 11th, the OnePlus 3 will receive a price hike of £20, going from £309 to £329, thanks to the currency devaluation caused by Brexit. Accessories from OnePlus won't be affected by the price change, the company noted.
While this is isn't the first time price adjustments have been made due to currency fluctuations — in the past

GUEST: This has been the year of the chatbot. Siri opened up to developers recently. The Facebook Messenger bots arrived. The Slack App Store continues to evolve quickly with hundreds of bots.
Chatbots have been in many ways disappointing to me, but they are an important step in the evolution of conversational technology. So what comes next? I think we are at the dawn of the intelligent assistant. Advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and conversational interface

The National Basketball Association season is over, but y’all were ready from some ballin’ anyway.
NBA Live Mobile is already the top downloaded iOS app on both iPhone and iPad about 6 hours after going live, according to data provided to GamesBeat by app-market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. It launched this morning, and Sensor Tower shows the mobile basketball sim jumping from No. 28 on the charts to No. 1 over the last quarter of a day. Electronic Arts has found success in the $3

NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars’s Gale Crater since 2012, entered a precautionary safe mode over the 4th of July weekend. The rover experienced some kind of error on July 2nd, causing most of its activities to come to a halt. Right now, the vehicle is focused solely on staying alive and in good shape, though ground controllers have already established communication with the rover. Now, they are working on getting Curiosity back to full operations. Continue

A new report suggests Google is working on two smartwatches that may be Nexus devices for release after it debuts new Nexus phones. Like the Nexus phones, the watches are believed to be essentially the same internally, but with different screen sizes. Codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, it seems Google is leaning toward the round screen for Android Wear. Android Police describes the larger Angelfish as being very reminiscent of a Moto 360, but has “a smooth housing shape that curves where

Facebook today pulled the covers off its latest networking hardware initiative, this one focused on providing connectivity to people. It’s called OpenCellular, and Facebook intends to share the design specifications with other companies in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) it established earlier this year.
OpenCellular builds on the Terragraph and Aries hardware projects that Facebook introduced in April. OpenCellular is different because it’s a low-cost means for service providers to

Microsoft’s experimental project wing Garage has announced a new iOS app that turns physical collections into digital archives. The app, called Thinga.Me, is currently in an invite-only beta, with no set release date in sight.
The app revolves around digital shelves that showcase photos of each object in the user's collection. Thinga.Me automatically generates sticker-like cutouts of each object, giving collections a more tangible feel than a typical photo grid. "This simple act

Amazon just inked a pact with Warner Bros. to become the exclusive streaming home for 33 of the studio's movies.Variety reports that titles like Space Jam and Ocean's Eleven have landed on the subscription service, while other films like The Matrix trilogy, Full Metal Jacket, and Training Day will join them over the course of the year.
The deal comes as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu all work to build out their exclusive libraries. Netflix, whose stable has shrunk compared to last year, recently 

Pokémon Go is still propagating around the world, starting first with official launches in Australia and New Zealand. But players are already spreading information far and wide about how the augmented reality mobile app works and, specifically, what its payment structure involves. Because Pokémon Go is a free-to-play app, it allows players to spend real money on in-game coins. Developer Niantic Labs stresses this is not a way to pay your way to the top, but

Razer now sponsors 20 different esports teams as it further pushes its effort to associate its products with top-level gaming.
Denial Esports, a pro club that competes in multiple games, announced a deal today that will immerse its players in Razer products. The squads will use Razer keyboards, mice, headsets, and mats while playing in tournaments for MOBAs League of Legends and Smite, two of the competitive gaming’s most popular online strategy titles. For events featuring Xbox One&r

Facebook has long been working to reduce the number of people who don’t have access to the internet, and have announced the creation of a new platform called OpenCellular.
The OpenCellular is an open source, "wireless access platform" designed to drive down the cost of setting up cellular networks in places where it has been traditionally difficult to do so. The system is designed to provide the tools to set up a complete network, from the physical equipment to the software that runs

If you’ve never watched Gordon Ramsay cook a steak on YouTube, I can’t recommend it highly enough; as long as you don’t have a sensitive vegetarian streak, it’s a soothing, revelatory experience. My video of choice is cut from Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course, a 2012 series in which Ramsay covers 100 basic recipes for novice home chefs. It’s just two and a half minutes, blessedly brief by YouTube standards, and it’s devoid of the aggressive energy

Mozilla today unveiled a new project called the Context Graph. In short, the company is looking to build “a better forward button” that helps you understand a topic, find alternative solutions to a problem, and in general allow browsers to offer useful information without demanding input.
Context Graph is a “recommender system for the web” that is supposed to help the company develop an understanding of browser activity at scale. By tapping into what and how people are br

Facebook is the latest company to embrace offline access in its quest to tackle patchy internet access with news that it’s planning a small-scale pilot to bring video downloads to India.
The social networking giant has been pushing further into the video realm in recent times, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to get more people online across India. While there are somewhere in region of 130 million people in India using Facebook, the country has a population of 1.25

Official Police Business is a weekly column and newsletter by reporter Matt Stroud about new developments in police technology, and the ways technology is changing law enforcement — think body cameras, cell-site simulators, surveillance systems, and electroshock weapons. Sign up to receive OPB in your email every Wednesday at officialpolicebusiness.com, or check for it here at The Verge.
In January, judges on a federal circuit court instructed police departments to treat Tasers similarly t

Apple has begun working on bringing Apple Pay to the Web via its Safari Technology Preview browser. Safari Technology Preview is different from the Safari browser you find on your Mac (or in the iPhone and iPad) in that it’s aimed at Web developers. It offers a bleeding edge look at incoming technologies; think of it like Chrome’s various channels (stable, beta and dev) only Apple chose to break its ‘dev’ channel out into a standalone app. We knew Apple Pay was on the wa

Light announced that it has secured $30 million in new funding to build a device that has the power of a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera and still easily fits into your pocket. This round was led by GV and will be used to expand Light’s supply chain and capacity, as well as to grow its team. The latest investment is being called an “opportunistic endeavor,” as the company didn’t necessarily need the funds.
Along with today’s news, Light shared that it

It looks like Overwatch‘s roster is about to get a little bigger.
The team-based shooter’s official Twitter account has released an image that shows off an interesting weapon: a sniper rifle that can heal. This is likely a reference to Sombra, a rumored character that players have found clues and hints of in the game and official videos. Overwatch has already been a big success for Blizzard, and introducing a new character will keep players engaged. It’s a t

Microsoft today showed off the latest creation from Microsoft Garage, its incubator for experimental apps. The Thinga.me app for iPhone will let users take pictures of their collections of physical belongings — like Batman figurines — and then create virtual representations of those collections, which, of course, you can share with others.
The app isn’t available in the App Store yet, but you can request access through a sign-up page.
And you can get a taste for the app’s

Earlier this year, Japan’s space agency suffered a major blow when its new X-ray astronomy satellite, known as Hitomi, broke apart in space just one month after the vehicle had launched. But before the spacecraft met its premature demise, it was able to squeeze in a bit of valuable science. By observing X-ray emissions coming from a cluster of galaxies 250 million light years away, Hitomi measured just how fast interstellar gases moved between the galaxies within the cluster. Continue read

Square Enix has a new light source in the darkness.
The Japanese publisher responsible for popular role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy has struck a deal with graphics-technology company Geomerics to include its Enlighten lighting engine in “multiple future” game release on consoles (where it is still investing heavily). Enlighten is capable of producing real-time light sources that can illuminate a scene and 3D objects dynamically. This is important to giving visuals a sense o

Verizon is today announcing a suite of new data plans for smartphones. The new plans increase the data allotment at each tier, but also come with higher price tags. In addition, Verizon is introducing a feature that lets customers carry their unused data to the next month’s billing cycle and a way for customers to choose throttled connection speeds instead of overages when they go over their limits. Both features are similar to those already offered by other carriers.
Verizon notes that th

ANALYSIS: Rarely does a major player enter the smartphone market anymore, and for good reason: It’s a cutthroat industry with habitually decreasing margins — not to mention the fact that the business has a history of laying waste to the ambitions of even the strongest competitors (see: Nokia, BlackBerry, and Microsoft, for a few examples).
So a report in British newspaper The Telegraph claiming that Google intends to release its own handset this year —

After a successful Indiegogo campaign, the Beddi alarm is available (and even on sale) for $100. It’s got 20-some features, including a white noise maker, multiple USB ports, an FM radio, mood lighting, and a Bluetooth speaker. It also can sync up with Philips Hue, Nest, LIFX, and WeMo. Beddi markets its product as the future of alarm clocks.
Don’t you want to wake up like this?BeddiWhile Beddi sounds like a good alarm option, I'm wondering who actually uses a physical alarm to wake

Snapchat is ditching its ephemeral nature — well, kind of. A new feature named ‘Memories’ will let you save “personal moments” forever for sharing beyond the stream. Memories will live just under the camera button. All you have to do is swipe upwards to view your saved pics and video. Searches for snaps or stories things like ‘Hawaii’ can be found instantly and shared Memories, too. The reason Snapchat created this new feature seems to be broader sharin

Today Snapchat announced it’s rolling out a new feature called Memories, which, according to Snapchat’s blog post, is “a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen.”
Here’s an absolutely insufferable video promoting the new feature.Although Memories won’t change how you watch (or save) other users’ snaps, it does appear to remove some of the ephemerality of the social network; it lets you relive (and re

Google’s Now on Tap service is adding translation to its ever-growing list of options. After the latest update, Android users will be able to translate any screen of foreign text — in both apps and web pages, including pages with multiple languages — into their native language. While it can seemingly translate from any language that Google Translate supports, it’s only supported on Marshmallow phones whose default language is set to English, French, Italian, German,

The police in Australia’s Northern Territory have a message for the surge of new Pokémon Go players: be careful, look both ways when crossing the street, and please don’t enter a police station while trying to catch a Sandshrew.
Released today, Pokémon Go is a mobile game that encourages players to use their smartphones' GPS and back-facing cameras to catch virtual pokémon in real world locations. According to a post on the Northern Territory Police, Fire and Eme