Technology news

Sandra Lee, M.D., known to her fans as Dr. Pimple Popper, has a new venture on the horizon: A line of skincare products for all the zit-prone folks out there.
The internet-famous dermatologist announced the line's launch in a post to — where else — her enormously popular Instagram account.
SEE ALSO: NSFL: Salivary stones are even more disgusting than popping pimples
It still feels so surreal to finally have the SLMD products in my hands! ✨I'm so proud of the SLMD Skincare line

Sure, Patrick Stewart is adorable and anyone would be lucky enough to call him a friend. But a delighted Patrick Stewart greeting his new furry companion? That's whole new levels of endearing. 
The actor teamed up with American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and Wags and Walks to adopt Ginger, a pitbull, and shared the sweetest video of their first interaction. 
SEE ALSO: Patrick Stewart hints that Professor X could be appearing in 'Deadpool'Thanks to @ASPCA a

Since its inception, Amazon.com has only be available in English. But that’s now about to change: CNET reports that Amazon is adding a Spanish language option that should be appearing to customers in the near future.
“We will continue to roll out the shopping experience over the coming weeks,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNET. “More and more customers should expect to see the option to shop Amazon.com in Spanish soon.”
Making the site more accessible to a huge audie

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 this week 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 in

Introduced with the 2017 model, the Honda CR-V has an interesting feature related to driver attention. It could help sleepy drivers, but even more, it could help drivers who check their phones too often and make sure they are paying attention.
Known as the Driver Attention Monitor, the CR-V shows a small display with a coffee cup icon. There are four levels. If all bars are filled, you are fully attentive. The car knows when you are moving erratically in a lane, which is a sure sign of being sle

Amazon clearly has ambitions in the high end of the game business. Today, it announced that Command & Conquer veteran Louis Castle has become the head of Amazon Game Studios in Seattle. It has also hired high-profile developers such as John Smedley, Rich Hilleman, and others as well.
And the company is using its Twitch gameplay livestreaming division and its Amazon Web Services as the foundation of its relationships with game companies. It has also recruited high-profile developers such as L

Google has launched Chrome 57 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Among the additions is CSS Grid Layout, API improvements, and other new features for developers. You can update to the latest version now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
Chrome is arguably more than a browser: With over 1 billion users, it’s a major platform that web developers have to consider. In fact, with Chrome’s regular additions and changes, developers

Just before Christmas, a friend’s Facebook Like proved useful for once: it led me to a four-player board game about warring dragons. I purchased a copy of Dragoon immediately.
Lay Waste Games, the company behind Dragoon, crowdfunded the game in 2015, pulling in just under 10 times their initial goal. The game has since been pretty popular online and at gaming conventions, and this week, the company launched its second Kickstarter, which funded in just under two hours this morning. It&rsquo

Plex launched Plex Cloud — a new feature for the company’s media streaming solution that allowed users to store content in a cloud account instead of a local computer or a NAS system — in beta last September. And now, Plex is finally opening up the feature to all of its Plex Pass subscribers.It’s not necessarily a cheaper way to get access to all your movies, music, and TV shows on all your devices — you’ll have to pay the $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year fe

My time with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (read the review) is mostly about trying to do something and then freaking out when I realize it’s possible. Like … if an enemy has the body of a horse, I could probably ride it, right?
That idea that I could mount a lynel, a creature with the head of a lion, the torso of a man and legs of a horse one, in the overworld of Breath of the Wild, didn’t occur to me until I was in the middle of fighting one. And this was

Microsoft has made a bad habit of introducing ads here and there throughout Windows, and now people are starting to notice them showing up in another spot: inside File Explorer.
People have reported seeing notifications to sign up for OneDrive — Microsoft’s cloud storage service — at the top of the Quick Access screen that comes up when you open a new File Explorer window.
Microsoft can reach a ton of people this way
Someone on Reddit reported seeing a prompt to sign into OneDr

Google has finally given a price and release date for the Jamboard, the 55-inch touchscreen display it wants businesses to buy and use as a hybrid whiteboard / conferencing system. That price is pretty high at $4,999 plus a $600 annual fee, but still much cheaper than Microsoft’s similar Surface Hub system. It’s designed for whiteboarding and teleconferencing, and it’s as good a system for doing anything else that I’ve tried.
It also finally has units out in the wild for

Any time someone brings up the Bechdel Test in an open internet forum, you can count the seconds until someone complains that actually, it isn’t a reliable indicator of a film’s quality. Never mind that no one — including cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who accidentally created the test in a 1985 comic strip — claims a Bechdel-test pass proves a given film is feminist, well-written, or even entertaining. The test itself is just a conversation piece because it’s such a lo

EXCLUSIVE: While perhaps best known for his role as an investor on the hit show Shark Tank, Robert Herjavec doesn’t always, well, swim with sharks. VentureBeat caught up with him at the Google Garage in Silicon Valley, where he mixed it up with a room full of schoolkids eagerly pitching him their inventions. Instead of seeking investment from sharks like Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban, the kids were participating in Frito-Lay’s Dreamvention contest.
Born in Croatia, the 54

More teams and more money are coming to World of Warcraft’s esports scene.
Blizzard today detailed the 2017 for World of Warcraft’s 2017 Arena season. Arena pits two teams of three players against each other. The top squads go on to compete at BlizzCon, Blizzard’s yearly fan event in November. The esports market is expected to be worth $696 million in revenues in 2017, according to market research firm SuperData.
Arena launched and brought World of Warcraft into the e

International Women’s Day has its roots in protest. A 1909 strike by the Women Garment Workers of New York against unsafe working conditions is considered to be the first ever women’s day. More than a century later, the day continues to bring attention to injustices facing women, in America and around the world, and has frequently sparked organized efforts in the fight for equality.
One of those recent efforts was yesterday’s general strike, known as A Day Without a Woman. Orga

Twitter’s latest attempt to make its platform less hostile is a “sensitive account” system whereby some users’ profiles are flagged as containing “potentially sensitive images or language.” The warning takes up the entire profile page, requiring users to click or tap a prompt to agree to view the profile.The idea, it seems, is to gate some users’ accounts behind this warning, either as a way mediate the behavior of users or as way to wall these accounts

GUEST: Planning to Netflix and chill this weekend? The movie you choose to watch may be heavily influenced by Netflix’s sophisticated algorithms. Similarly, decisions like where you choose to dine and what you choose to wear are increasingly facilitated by predictive technologies powered by deep learning.
Here are five ways that popular consumer tech companies Netflix, Yelp, Yahoo, StitchFix, and Google improve your online experience with artificial intelligence.
1. Netflix dynamically per

During a bizarre Facebook Live event held this afternoon, HBO announced that Game of Thrones’ seventh season will premiere on July 16th. The summer debut comes later than previous premieres thanks the producers wanting to accommodate the shooting schedule.
The song of ice and fire is nearing its end
Last season saw the series enter its final stretch, with Daenerys Targaryen on her way to Westeros, Cersei Lannister taking the Iron Throne, Arya Stark avenging her family, and Jon Snow being c

A few years ago, I drove a 2015 Volvo XC60 for a week. It was comfortable, stylish, and an all-around excellent SUV. About the only thing I didn’t like about it was the infotainment system, which had changed little from when the XC60 was first introduced at the end of the Bush administration.
It certainly got the job done and, considering that the interior of the XC60 hadn’t changed much for a few years, it was a testament to how good the car was when it was first designed.
A Volvo r

If you’re a fan of Cracked.com writer Chris Bucholz’s work on 2015’s Sorcerer King, you’re about to get a new campaign from him.
Stardock announced its 2.1 version update for Sorcerer King: Rivals today, and in addition to the standard bug squashing, quality-of-life improvements, and other tweaks that come with patches, the publisher will add a new story from Bucholz, who wrote the campaign that shipped with the turn-based strategy game expansion in 2016.
&ldquo

In 2012, Scottish artist Rachel Maclean made a 13-minute video inspired by a popular meme of the time. The project, titled LOLCATS, explores the evolution of cat worship by imagining a world in which a young cat obsessed with Britney Spears gets chased by cat cyborgs, flees to a sort of vaporwave cat heaven, and is eventually gutted by a maniacal cat surgeon. That isn’t exactly reminiscent of “I can has cheezburger,” but Maclean’s work is always a sidestep or two away fro

On Monday, The Verge revealed the name of the Aston Martin-Red Bull collaborative hypercar, the Valkyrie. Cool name, cool car.Now, our man at the Geneva Auto Show, Vlad Savov, has gotten up close and personal with this mythological machine, so we wanted to give you more pretty pictures. Because let’s be honest: neither you nor I will ever get to drive this thing. The Valkyrie is one of those cars that will remain forever out of reach except for a select few. No more than 150 of these vehic

To build hype for Game of Thrones’ seventh season, HBO launched a Facebook Live event to reveal the premiere date. That event involved watching a block of ice melt which concealed the premiere date. That is, of course, before the stream was taken down due to technical difficulties.
Let me be extra clear about this: fans and journalists came in by the tens of thousands to watch a block of ice melt for Game of Thrones.
Viewers were invited to type in FIRE to summon an offscreen flamethrower

The team at Hello Games built their dream game, and now they want to help struggling creators who are trying to do the same thing.
The indie studio behind the sci-fi game No Man’s Sky recently created Hello Labs, a new division of the company that provides funding to developers working on procedurally generated games. In short, procedural generation is a technique that randomizes particular elements of a game in the hopes of making it feel fresh and unique. For No Man’s Sky, that kin

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google announced the launch of Cloud Dataprep, a service that lets people clean up their data sets before pushing it into a service like Google’s BigQuery managed data warehousing service.
The software uses machine learning to suggest transformations, said Brian Stevens, vice president of cloud platforms at Google.
Stevens didn’t say it onstage, but the software is in fact an embedded version of startup Trifacta’s Wran

Airbnb announced today the close of an oversubscribed round of more than $1 billion.
In September 2016, the hospitality giant filed forms with the SEC to indicate it had raised $555,462,180, VentureBeat has learned. Today, the startup filed a form D with the SEC confirming an additional $447,849,885, a source close to the company told us. In total, Airbnb raised $1,003,312,065 in this newly closed round.
The San Francisco-based tech unicorn turned profitable in the secon

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google is announcing several updates to Google Drive, its cloud-based file syncing and sharing service.
For one thing, Google is introducing a feature called Drive File Stream that will make your entire Drive show up on your Mac or Windows PC but not put it all on your computer’s hard drive, if you’re an end user in an organization that pays for the G Suite portfolio of cloud services. Drive File Stream is sort of like what

Google is now allowing third-party developers to integrate directly into Gmail with add-ons. Unlike the sort of Gmail utilities you may have used before (like Boomerang or Rapportive), add-ons will work directly in Gmail instead of through a Chrome extension. That will mean that they can work across Gmail on the web, in Android, and on iOS.
Google is launching this primarily as an enterprise feature for now. It’s working with Intuit, Salesforce, and Prosperworks already — so, for exa

Google’s Jamboard, a giant 4K digital whiteboard designed for workplace collaboration, is getting a price tag of $4,999 and a release date sometime this May. The details were revealed today as part of suite of new announcements from the Google Cloud Next conference. The Jamboard, which was first shown off back in October, is essentially Google’s direct response to Microsoft’s Surface Hub, which is also a 55-inch 4K touchscreen you can draw and write on.However, unlike the Jambo

Google is getting back into the team collaboration space to take on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, and Cisco Spark with a new service called Hangouts Chat. Available in a private beta, it blends private rooms for conversations and integrations not only with G Suite, but also third-party services. Hangouts Chat is a free service that comes as part of your G Suite subscription and is intended to help Google better appeal up-market at the enterprise.
Initially, there are 11 ava

If you know anything about Google’s messaging strategy in the last few years, you know that it’s been a bit of a mess. Allo, the consumer app, launched without the cross-platform features users expect. Text messaging on mobile is mired in inter-carrier warfare. And Hangouts has become a punchline.On two of those fronts, Google has been making progress. And today, in a bit of a surprise, Google has signaled that it finally decided Hangouts is supposed to be: a business communication t

Google Drive is growing up a little bit today. At its enterprise-focused Cloud Next conference, Google is announcing a set of changes that will make the product more palatable for businesses — and potentially more interesting for regular consumers as well.
The top of the new feature list starts with “Team Drives,” which amounts to a shared cloud folder that employees can put their files into. That’s something you can do now, but the permission and ownership structure on t

Louis Castle, a veteran game developer of games such as Command & Conquer, has taken a job as head of Amazon Game Studios in Seattle. He becomes a part of Amazon’s growing contingent of veterans game makers such as Rich Hilleman, the former chief creative director at Electronic Arts who joined Amazon Game Studios last summer.
Castle was most recently a game designer at Kixeye, a San Francisco maker of hardcore social mobile games, where he worked on War Commander: Rogue Assault.
A

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google is announcing updates to its Firebase portfolio of mobile-oriented cloud services.
First, Firebase is getting an integration with the Google Cloud Functions serverless event-driven computing service. Google unveiled Cloud Functions last year, following public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) launch of Lambda, but shortly before Microsoft unveiled Azure Functions.
Firebase’s customers were asking for a se

Hugging Face, a company named after the hugging face emoji, is bringing its AI bot from private to public beta today and is now available in the iOS App Store.
Hugging Face doesn’t want to sell products or connect you to services, cofounder Clément Delangue told VentureBeat in an interview.
It isn’t a productivity bot or SAAS or CRM. It has no plans to sell services, add events to your calendar, or control IoT devices.
Its entire purpose is to be fun.
&ldqu

Mission: ISS — a virtual reality collaboration between Oculus and three space agencies — is now available for free to Oculus Rift and Touch owners. The experience is a detailed recreation of the International Space Station where participants can do things like dock cargo capsules, conduct spacewalks, and “perform mission-critical tasks” just like real astronauts. It was designed by visual effects studio Magnopus in partnership with NASA, the European Space Agency, and the

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google announced the launch of a new discounting system for its Google Cloud Platform public cloud offering. Customers will be able to get a lower cost after committing to a particular volume.
That model is different from the reserved instances available from public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). And it’s in addition to the sustained-use discounts, per-minute pricing, and preemptible virtual machines (VMs) that Goo

The gaming industry can be a grueling one, known for pushing employees with long hours. But one company has plenty of happy workers.
Fortune released its list of the 100 best places to work in America, and Activision Blizzard was the only game company to make the cut. The publisher moved up from No. 77 last year to the No. 66 spot. Fortune compiles the list based on feedback from over 232,000 employees at companies with more than 1,000 workers.
Not only is the Los Angeles-based Activis

Tivoli launched its new Model One Digital speaker this week as a more tech-intensive counterpart to its Model One radio, which was first released in 2000. The new speaker pairs over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and streams from FM radio or various online services, like Spotify, Tidal, and Deezer. It can also sync with other Model One Digitals around a home or room.
Does this design look familiar to you?TivoliMaybe it reminds you of this speaker from Como Audio?Como AudioThe second speaker, the Solo, succe