Technology news

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every day I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this into somethi

It’s a shame that we haven’t been to the Moon in more than 40 years, because the photos and videos from those trips gave humans an incredible perspective on existence. The imagery that the Apollo 8 astronauts captured of the Earth “rising” over the Moon showed our planet for what it truly is: just a ball of rock and water that’s suspended in a void.
Now that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has announced that two tourists are paying his company for a new trip around the Moon, a

SpaceX announced today that it will be sending two (currently) anonymous citizens to orbit the Moon sometime in 2018. While there’s obviously many logistical, technical, and scientific questions that will undoubtedly be asked in the coming days about this venture, we’re going to try and answer perhaps the biggest one: why?
Going to the moon is really, really expensive
As JFK famously said in 1962, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because

One of gaming’s most recognizable executives is moving on to sports.
Electronic Arts chief operating officer Peter Moore is leaving the gaming publisher to take on the role of chief executive officer at the Liverpool Football Club in England. That organization made the announcement today on its official website. Moore will oversee the business operations of the Premier League soccer team, and he will report directly to the Fenway Sports Group that owns LFC. This will mark the end of his 10

Uber can’t make it a day without making headlines.
The big news today? Amit Singhal, the well-funded transportation company’s senior vice president of engineering, is out. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick asked Singhal to resign Monday morning, according to Recode.
Singhal is stepping down from his post after Uber execs were alerted about sexual harassment allegations that the engineer faced in his time at Google. Singhal worked as the vice president of search at Google for 15 years before r

SpaceX has plans to send two private citizens around the Moon, CEO Elon Musk announced today.It will be a private mission with two paying customers, not NASA astronauts, who approached the company. The passengers are “very serious” about the trip and have already paid a “significant deposit,” according to Musk. The trip around the Moon would take approximately one week: it would skim the surface of the Moon, go further out into deep space, and loop back to Earth — a

GUEST: Someone made a lot of new friends over the holidays. And by a lot, we’re talking about millions.
Her name is Alexa, and along with her acquaintances (perhaps frenemies?) Cortana and Siri, she’s about to become as much a part of the daily life of American households as Alfred the butler is at Wayne Manor. Except that Alfred, for all his talents, can’t tell Batman exactly what time the cable repairman will arrive this afternoon, or the current balance in his bank acco

I’ve never worked in an office with cubicles and other people, so I’ve never played hockey in the hallway with broomsticks and an old bagel before. But now one developer is mashing up office games, Overwatch, and virtual reality.
VR developer Zi Ye, who is working on Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty game at the Owlchemy Games studio, has remixed the VR employment puzzler Job Simulator with Blizzard’s team-based shooter Overwatch. The result is a virtual office version where yo

Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced plans today to send two unnamed private citizens around the moon “late next year.” The two passengers “have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission,” a SpaceX press release reads.
If SpaceX manages to rocket the two wealthy citizens around (note: not on) the moon in 2018, it will mark a significant step forward for space tourism and financing the future of interplanetary travel. SpaceX says privat

The owner of an aerial photography business was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine after a drone he was operating crashed into people during a 2015 parade and knocked one woman unconscious. Paul Skinner, 38, was found guilty of reckless endangerment by Judge Willie Gregory of the Seattle Municipal Court. Gregory acknowledged that the collision was accidental, not intentional, but felt a punishment was in order, as Skinner had “engaged in conduct that put people in danger of being

By now, most of us are familiar with Boston Dynamics’ work. They brought us the terrifying giraffe bot and Spot, the robot dog. The company’s great at bringing us nightmare fuel. Another new robot leaked earlier this month and now we’re getting an official look at what Boston Dynamics calls Handle. It’s 6.5-feet tall, travels at nine mph, and can jump up to four feet vertically. Its jumps are terrifying, although I can’t deny its hops impress me.Boston DynamicsBosto

Productivity app-maker Doist is trying to lure new customers over from the dark side by making it easier for Wunderlist users to jump ship.
You may recall that Microsoft snapped up Wunderlist’s parent company — Germany-based 6Wunderkinder — back in 2015. As is the case when any popular independent service is bought out by a corporate giant, Wunderlist’s community of users wondered whether Microsoft would ruin or kill off the app. At the time, some developers produced

Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that’s a subsidiary of X, a company under Alphabet right alongside Google, today shared a video showing off its latest Robot, called Handle.
It moves around on two tire-like wheels, one on its left side, one on its right, instead of using two legs to simulate walking like a bipedal robot such as Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot. Atlas has gotten lots of attention, especially because it starred in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
But Handle is fast and fun

GUEST: Mobile marketers can boost open rates of their push notifications 85 percent by including emojis, according to a report released today.
Standard push notifications are only opened 2.44 percent of the time, according to the study by Leanplum and App Annie. Push notifications that contain an emoji are opened at much higher rate: 4.51 percent. That helps mobile app publishers or marketers improve engagement with users and customers, and it’s a big step on the path to monetization.
Perh

Porsche Design has announced its new 2-in-1, called the Book One, today at Mobile World Congress and it sure reminds us of a Surface Book. The device runs Windows 10 Pro and includes a 5-megapixel camera with an infrared sensor for logging in through Windows Hello. Here’s the rest of the specs:
13.3-inch touch QHD display
Core i7 Intel processor
16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage
Two USB-C ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a USB-C port that supports ThunderBolt 3
Precision Touchpad and backlit

US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said Sunday that she would be reevaluating the Obama administration’s rules for self-driving cars and challenged the automotive and technology industries to better educate the public about the safety features of automated driving.Speaking at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Chao said she wanted to “issue a challenge to Silicon Valley, Detroit and all other auto industry hubs to step up and help educate a skeptical publ

GUEST: Human resources technology — leveraged by nearly every organization in some capacity — is changing rapidly, thanks to technological advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), semantic matching capabilities, and people analytics. As Josh Bersin noted in Deloitte’s recent Perspective report, the number of organizations using people data to predict business performance has increased by 29 percent from 2015 to 2016. The percentage of companies employing predictive mod

Amazon is reportedly working on a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that would allow for individual voice recognition, according to a report from Time. In other words, your Echo would theoretically be able to tell voices apart and figure out who is actually talking to it.
According to Time, the feature is internally known as “Voice ID” and has been in development since summer 2015. The report claims that Voice ID would allow certain commands to be locked to a specific voice &

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, today announced that it has acquired Pocket, the startup that develops an app for saving articles and other content. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The Pocket code will become a part of the Mozilla open-source project, Mozilla chief business and legal officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer wrote in a blog post.
“Pocket will join Mozilla’s product portfolio as a new product line alongside the Firefox web browsers with a focus on promo

Twitch has an audience of millions of gamers, and now developers can sell games to those people right through the livestreaming video site.
Amazon’s Twitch is getting ecommerce features that will enable developers and publishers to sell games and in-game content alongside live video of community broadcasters livestreaming the same game. This feature is rolling out this spring, and it will include revenue sharing for any channel that is a Twitch partner. Developers get 70 percent of th

NASCAR is changing how its races work. It used to be that cars would start on lap 1 and when the checkered flag waved, whoever was in first place would win and drivers got more points the better they finished. Now it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Races this year are being broken up into multiple parts, essentially creating three races in one. So instead of the Daytona 500, we get the Daytona 150, 150, and 200. The idea is to make the entire race more exciting. Since much of the best

Mozilla has acquired Pocket, a kind of DVR for the internet, for an undisclosed sum. The 9-year-old company, which makes tools for saving articles and videos to view them later, is Mozilla’s first acquisition. It represents a homecoming of sorts for Pocket, which began life as a Firefox extension before eventually expanding its team and building a suite of apps for every major platform. Pocket has been Firefox’s default read-it-later service since 2015.
Mozilla said Pocket, which it

Epic Games revealed its Battle Breakers tactical role-playing game for PC and mobile during the Google Play event today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Battle Breaks is a fantasy sci-fi cartoon adventure, and Epic made it with Unreal Engine 4’s design tools. It’s one of the new examples in Epic’s self-publishing strategy, and it is one of six games coming from Epic, said Donald Mustard, creative director at Epic Games in an interview with Game

Epic Games has undergone a shift in the past year or so, with a greater focus on smaller games that the company is self-publishing. Six of those games are in the works at the moment.
The Raleigh, N.C.-based company announced one of those games, Battle Breakers, today at Google’s developer day event at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Epic’s Donald Mustard told me about the strategy shift in an interview. Besides Battle Breakers, the coming titles include Spyjinx, Para

Anker is upgrading the PowerIQ fast charging technology used in its chargers and battery packs to a new, faster version, known as PowerIQ 2.0. The new charging chip allows Anker’s chargers to output up to 18W of power off a single chip. While previous Anker products could charge at that rate, they required two charging chips to do so.Smaller, thinner, lighter, and cheaper chargers
Anker notes that using a single PowerIQ 2.0 instead of multiple chips will also result in “smaller, thin

Last December, Uber’s self-driving cars hit the rain-slicked streets of San Francisco with much fanfare. It was meant to be a watershed moment — the upstart ride-hail company bringing autonomous driving to its city of origin, years before most experts predicted we’d begin to see self-driving cars en masse.
But it turned out to be a total flop. A week after Uber’s fleet of 16 luxury Volvo XC90 SUVs started picking up passengers, the program was brought to a grinding halt.

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates digital card game expansion with dinosaurs.
Blizzard announced today that the next expansion for its digital card game behemoth Hearthstone, Journey to Un’Goro, will release in April with 135 new cards. In 2016, Hearthstone earned $394.6 million earned in revenue, according to research firm SuperData. Expansions like this keep players engaged and give them new digital packs of cards to b

In 2016, nearly 300 million new users adopted Android devices from emerging markets such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia. That helped mobile games on Google Play get better traction, according to a post by Paul Bankhead, director of product management at Google Play.
And last year, more than 100 million new users were able to access locally relevant forms of payments (such as direct carrier billing or gift cards) helping more people globally access and buy their favorite apps and games on Google

T-Mobile just announced what I’d argue is the best thing the company has done since it put on a magenta jacket in 2013 and launched its “Uncarrier” brand: a mobile plan that offers unlimited high-speed access to the internet at a very good price. The promotion gives new and existing customers three unlimited data lines for $100 a month, which works out to roughly $33 per line. For all of the company’s gimmicks over the past four years, this move really stands out because

Survios is announcing today that its Raw Data virtual reality game is debuting on the Oculus Rift and Touch VR platform. And the Oculus players will be able to play together with HTC Vive VR headset owners in cross-platform matches.
Los Angeles-based Survios released Raw Data last year on the HTC Vive. It announced that the first-person VR shooter had generated more than $1 million in sales by September. VR is expected to generate $25 billion in revenues by 2021, according to tech advisor Digi-C

Gaming and the fabled power of the cloud has had a checkered history. Game-streaming service OnLive has come and gone, and Microsoft over-hyped the effect its Azure platform would have on Xbox One games, but that’s not stopping one company from using the cloud to unlock the power of its tools.
Improbable, the company that runs the cloud-based SpatialOS development platform for making enormous gaming worlds, is launching that service into open beta. At the Game Developer’s Conference

As Netflix approaches 100 million subscribers around the planet, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings addressed that certain use of his company’s name in popular slang:
“Some of the verb uses of Netflix are not from us,” he said, poking fun at the popular meme: “Netflix and chill.”
He made his remarks during a conversation on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Perhaps the most notable thing about Hastings’ appearance was the fact that he was there a

The world of men is about to get some more of that sweet nemesis-system action.
Warner Bros. announced today that it is launching Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor (read GamesBeat’s review), this summer for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The game will debut August 22, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is working with Microsoft to make this newest entry in The Lord of the Rings universe a part of the Xbox Play Anywhere program. That means you can bu

In its continuing efforts to attract more sign-ups, T-Mobile’s latest promotion offers an additional line for free for accounts with two or more lines. The offer works whether you want to add an extra phone line or a line for wearables or tablets.
The deal is available for current and new customers — the amount of data available to the free line will match up with whatever your current plan is for the other lines. If your plan does not have the same amount of data between devices, th

EXCLUSIVE: Customer success management company Totango today launched a Slack bot named Zoe. Available in the Slack App Directory, Zoe facilitates team collaboration and uses natural language understanding to answer employee questions about customer and company data.
The bot can answer questions about important customer metrics, like usage and adoption rates, payments made, subscriptions, activity likely to take place in the future, and so on.
Zoe also helps facilitate&n

Having to appear on stage at an international tech conference just days after being named in a major lawsuit couldn’t have been fun for Anthony Levandowski.
The cofounder of Otto, the self-driving truck startup, indeed looked a tad fatigued on stage today at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. After Otto was acquired last year by Uber, Levandowski was placed in charge of all of Uber’s self-driving vehicle efforts.
But last week, Alphabet’s Waymo unit filed a lawsuit

FCC chairman Ajit Pai said today that he doesn’t expect the commission to review AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner, clearing the way for the Justice Department to very likely approve the deal.
Pai has long been critical of the FCC putting conditions on mergers and even signaled in the past that he’d be okay with a mega-merger like the one proposed between Comcast and Time Warner Cable (which is a different company than Time Warner) in 2014, so today’s announcement isn&rs

Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead sparked an outrage. The gory season 7 premiere threw away beloved characters in the name of archvillain Negan and audiences followed suit: by the time the midseason finale rolled around, ratings had dropped 40 percent. Now the show has returned for the second half of the season. It’s an opportunity to chart a new course, to correct the mistakes it’s made, and convince viewers that the story of Rick Grimes is still worth following. The only ques

Keep your tedious smartphone upgrades and awkward tablets. Roborace unveiled its autonomous race car today and it’s pretty wild stuff.
The company brought its four-engine, AI-powered, self-driving electric race car to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today. Minds were blown.
The company has been doing much of the development work in public. Some basic specs: It’s a bit longer than a Forumula One race car and has four 300kW motors. It can reach speeds up to almost 220MPH. The c

Probably no cartoon series today needs and deserves a conclusion more than Samurai Jack. The series, from legendary animator and director Genndy Tartakovsky, ended its run on Cartoon Network back in 2004 with a painfully incomplete story and a legion of diehard fans. The protagonist — a virtuous medieval samurai thrown through time into the far future — was last seen protecting a baby and searching for its lost mother. Yet as the final credits rolled, Jack remained stuck in the futur

The most exciting part of a very dull Oscars ceremony last night was when the wrong movie was announced as the Best Picture winner. Presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty read out La La Land as the winner, but it turned out Beatty was holding the wrong award envelope — for Best Actress, which Emma Stone had won just prior.La La Land’s acceptance speeches had to be interrupted to remedy the error. “This is not a joke,” La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz said. “Mo