Technology news

GUEST: Just 10 years ago, the idea of leaving your home for a long trip meant you were paying for something you wouldn’t use. Your car would sit in the garage, your apartment or house would sit empty, and you’d still be responsible for utilities. On the off chance you had a friend or relative in town, they could crash at your place and at least use the space. Since then, technology has dramatically lowered the transaction costs for connecting with other people and exchanging informat

Electronic Arts’ E3 press conference today was light on announcements, but delivered a large chunk of multiplayer gameplay from its upcoming Star Wars title, Battlefront II. It will introduce a single-player storyline where its predecessor did not, but expect the game’s multiplayer to expand as well.The time around, players will be able to select characters spanning the entire franchise, from Episode I: The Phantom Menace to Episode VII: The Force Awakens. In the gameplay segment sho

The first of many E3 2017 press conferences has drawn to a tepid conclusion. Electronic Arts kicked off the year’s biggest week in gaming news with a handful of announcements on new games, as well as footage from the highly anticipated Star Wars: Battlefront II. Though it ended with a strange, lengthy multiplayer match and an ad for a mobile game.
The conference was light on announcements, but tried its best to make gameplay center stage. These are the five moments it really succeeded.
EA

Electronic Arts is making a commitment to inclusive gaming with a donation of $1 million to anti-bullying groups.
CEO Andrew Wilson announced today during the company’s EA Play event that the publisher will make a donation to United Nations HeForShe, PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Centerm, and Ditch the Label. EA also held an event where players could show their support for the groups last week.
The announcement comes at EA’s event ahead of next week’s Electron

I hope you like Star Wars and BioWare games.
Electronic Arts just kicked off a big week for the gaming industry with its media presentation leading up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles. E3 is one of the most important gatherings of the game industry, and it focuses a great deal on the blockbuster (or triple-A) publishing and development business, the biggest games in the nearly $100 billion annual market. And if you missed any of the big announcements, we’ve gat

FIFA is coming back to Nintendo’s platform, and publisher Electronic Arts confirmed onstage today during its Hollywood fan event that this offshoot of its flagship soccer series is getting one of its most popular features.
Ultimate Team will be among the modes available for FIFA 18 on the Nintendo Switch when it launches September 29. EA announced the news in advance of next week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show.
This is the EA Vancouver and EA Romania development studios&r

One of the most anticipated elements of Star Wars: Battlefront II is its single-player storyline, but judging from the latest trailer it may be the multiplayer mode that gets hardcore fans most excited. First shown here at E3 in Los Angeles, the new trailer demonstrates just how expansive it will be, pulling in characters, locations, and vehicles that cover the entire 40-year history of the saga. It even has those Phantom Menace battle droids. (Look, nothing’s perfect.)
The original Star W

Star Wars: Battlefront II is one of the most anticipated games of the year. And Electronic Arts figured out how to the shooter even more special by announcing at a Hollywood event today that it will give free content to fans, even after the game launches. EA demoed the first look at multiplayer on stage during the live event.
It’s all part of EA’s strategy shift to providing “live operations” for fans, rather than just launching a game at a single point in time and then m

Patrick Soderlund, the head of studios at Electronic Arts, announced the company has created a new game research division called Seed, or Search for Extraordinary Experiences.
He said EA is doing research on games for new technologies like Microsoft’s upcoming Scorpio video game console, which comes out this fall. The team is looking for new kinds of experiences that go beyond EA’s tentpole hits such as Madden, FIFA, and Battlefield. Soderlund said EA would reveal more projects under

EA and the creator behind Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Josef Fares, will release a new game called A Way Out that can only be played in split-screen. Fares, the game’s writer and director, announced the game on-stage today at EA’s E3 press conference.A Way Out is a story-driven, co-op prison break game that will feature exploration, driving, action, and more, Fares said on stage. “I wanted to make another game that pushed the boundaries on how to tell stories without compromis

EA and the creator behind Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Josef Fares, will release a new game called A Way Out that can only be played in split-screen. Fares, the game’s writer and director, announced the game on-stage today at EA’s E3 press conference.A Way Out is a story-driven, co-op prison break game that will feature exploration, driving, action, and more, Fares said on stage. “I wanted to make another game that pushed the boundaries on how to tell stories without compromis

Years ago, Casey Hudson, the executive producer on the original Mass Effect trilogy, founded a new team at BioWare Edmonton to begin work on an entirely new franchise. According to a recent report at Kotaku, the project was codenamed Dylan “because Hudson and team wanted to make the Bob Dylan of video games—one that would be referenced for years to come.”
Now we know the game’s official title: Anthem.
The game is rumored to be EA’s response to social-action game fra

A generation of people can tell how old they are by how many Madden video games they’ve seen in their lives, and that annual tradition won’t stop in 2017.
EA detailed Madden NFL 18: LongShot, FIFA 18, and NBA Live 18 during a media presentation prior to this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles. Once again, these new sports games will update the rosters, improve the visuals (built on the same engine as DICE’s Battlefield games), and refine the gam

Electronic Arts and BioWare have reportedly put the Mass Effect series on hold, and that has the renowned developer preparing something new.
BioWare revealed its project Dylan during EA’s media presentation before the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles. The game is now called Anthem, and it will take the stage in a major way at Microsoft’s conference on Sunday because it is taking advantage of the Project Scorpio’s beefed up graphical capabilities.
EA confir

Last year, the Need for Speed series took some time off to discover itself. Apparently it spent most of the break binging the Fast and Furious films on loop. The similarities to the blockbuster franchise were evident in the first teaser, but the extended gameplay demo is somehow less subtle.
I’m not complaining. Despite its early fascination with full-motion video, the Need for Speed series has struggle to stick a decent story. Fast and the Furious built a name for itself on lovable melodr

Electronic Arts has once again shared its stage during its media presentation prior to the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles with a smaller studio with a unique new game.
Hazelight, a new studio from the creators of Xbox 360 indie hit Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, finally revealed A Way Out in a gameplay preview. It is a co-op game where you have to play splitscreen so you can see your partner at all times. Hazelight boss Josef Fares took the stage to show off his new g

We already knew about the latest Need For Speed before Electronic Arts kicked off its media presentation in Los Angeles today as part of the gaming industry’s major gathering for the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow, but now we know even more.
Need for Speed: Payback is the latest open-world racer from developer Ghost Games, which produced the rebooted Need for Speed in 2015. This new entry in the long-running racing series once again leans into a story mode, but this time EA and Gh

Microsoft is cutting its Xbox One S price by $50 tomorrow, just as the company unveils the final name and price for its next Project Scorpio console. The software giant announced the price drop on Twitter today, simply revealing that Xbox One S consoles and bundles will drop by $50 tomorrow. It’s not clear if this is a permanent price drop, as Microsoft has run a number of deals on the Xbox One S recently.
Microsoft dropped the price of its original Xbox One console last year to $299 ahead

Microsoft is cutting its Xbox One S price by $50 tomorrow, just as the company unveils the final name and price for its next Project Scorpio console. The software giant announced the price drop on Twitter today, simply revealing that Xbox One S consoles and bundles will drop by $50 tomorrow. It’s not clear if this is a permanent price drop, as Microsoft has run a number of deals on the Xbox One S recently.
While Microsoft's tweet is confusing and appears to indicate a $50 off the base mode

Electronic Arts gave us a first look at the next expansion pack for Battlefield 1, a Russian campaign dubbed In the Name of the Tsar. It’s part of EA’s attempt to hang on to its players year-round, keeping them engaged with the World War I game that has been one of its biggest hits in the history of the Battlefield series. And by keeping them engaged, EA hopes to keep its dedicated fans away from rival games like Call of Duty.
The pack is the “most extensive expansion pack in t

GUEST: Last year 40,000 people died in traffic crashes in the United States. That devastating figure hasn’t been distributed equally across all sectors of the population. Low-income areas were disproportionately affected by the traffic cash epidemic. How much so? Two times worse!  According to research conducted by Governing Magazine in 2014, high-income areas had 5 traffic crash fatalities per 100,000 people, while the proportion for low-income areas was 10.4.
The correlation between

GUEST: During the past few years, many have covered the remarkable and rapid road that Portugal, and particularly its capital, Lisbon, has travelled by reframing its financial and economic woes into an opportunity for the nation to reinvent itself as a global startup hub.
“The Portuguese scaleup ecosystem is growing twice as fast as the European average” reads the headline of the report released this week by the SEP Monitor, entitled “Portugal Rising.” Unsurprisingly, Lis

The perfect email app is a bit of a unicorn. Countless companies and startups have tried, and many have failed, to perfect the inbox experience and make peace with email and its soul-crushing inevitability in our modern digital lives. The goal is to make email feel manageable or, at the very least, to give you a pretty piece of mobile or desktop software you enjoy using. We may never achieve a sense of perfection when it comes to email, but many services come close.On desktop, there’s lots

At WWDC this week, we learned about ways Apple plans to make Siri smarter, many of which have to do with your money. Starting with iOS 11, Siri will be able to help you complete money transfers, as well as helping you stay on top of your checking, savings, and credit card accounts.
“Users will now be able to transfer money from one account to another or search for account information,” said Sirikit engineer Sirisha Yerroju about changes coming to the public with the release of i

Adam West, who portrayed Batman in the 1966 television show and movie has died after a short battle with leukemia, according to Variety. He was 88 years old.William West Anderson was born in Washington in 1928, and was drafted into the US Army, where he worked for the American Forces Network. After being discharged, he settled in Hawaii, where he landed his first television roles, and later moved to Hollywood, California. There, he played in shows such as Sugarfoot, Lawman, Overland Trail, and o

Cholera is a dangerous and very infectious disease that can be spread through water, feces and, apparently, soft-shelled turtles. In a study published this week in the journal American Society for Microbiology, researchers dipped these turtles in glowing cholera bacteria to figure out if they spread the disease.Unfortunately, they do — which is bad news in China, where they’re considered a delicacy.First, the researchers injected the cholera bacteria, Vibrio cholerae, with genes that

Syfy released its trailer for the new season of Dark Matter last month, and now, it has released a trailer for the third season of its other pulpy space opera show, Killjoys.The show follows RAC (Reclamation Apprehension Coalition) agents Dutch, John, and D'avin as they track down warrants in a region of space known as The Quad. While they spend some of their time hunting their various targets, they also contend with a shadowy organization and its nefarious plans.cyborgs, green goo, and quippy o

GUEST: In her 2017 Internet Trends report, Mary Meeker reported that time spent using the Internet on mobile rose again in 2016 to 3.1 hours per day, up from 2.8 hours per day in 2015. Internet usage on PCs, in contrast, was flat at 2.2 hours per day. Meanwhile, Facebook and Google continue to be the top referrers to publishers, and increasingly consumers’ feeds are the main place media is discovered. With products like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages,

Father’s Day is quickly approaching — June 18th, to be exact — so this weekend is a great time to buy something nice for your dad if you haven’t already. We’ve gone through a large number of deals to select the five best ones for you or your father, including two exclusive to The Verge for a limited time.
Let’s not waste anymore time and get straight to the deals:Sonos Dads and Grads sale: As mentioned last week, get $50 off the two room music system (two Play

GUEST: The United States is a fantastic market for startups, with its huge single market, open-minded buyers, access to fantastic tech talent from the world’s greatest universities, and the holy grail of venture capital.
But many foreign startups think they have to start in the United States, which is wrong. Perhaps America is not even the ideal place to incubate your startup idea. Sound strange? Let’s go through some reasons to start your idea abroad first and then scale it her

EA is scheduled to formally show off a new look at Star Wars: Battlefront II later today, but we now have a close look at what the gameplay will look like, thanks to a leaked gameplay video that surfaced earlier this morning.The 12-minute video shows off Darth Maul, Rey, and Boba Fett in action in the Naboo palace and its surrounding streets from The Phantom Menace, running through hallways as they destroy droids and clone troopers.The footage is fast-paced, and really incredible to watch. There

The Mummy hits theaters this weekend, and it’s clear that it’s more than just a movie: it’s Universal Studios’ attempt to jumpstart a Marvel-style cinematic franchise that will bring together its various classic monster properties under the Dark Universe banner. It’s an ambitious goal, but there are already signs that it’s coming out of the gate on shaky feet. On the off chance that this effort flops, Universal has plenty of options to try again.
The cinematic

The first teaser trailer for Black Panther is finally here, and it looks incredible. If there was ever any doubt about how Black Panther, one of Marvel’s more enigmatic and under-appreciated superheroes, would fare on the big screen, this two-minute spot should put those fears to rest. There’s political intrigue, a sci-fi utopia, and plenty of action to look forward to, with a largely black cast put right on center stage.
But more than being just generally entertaining, this trailer

Wonder Woman begins on the paradisiacal island home of the Amazons, a mythical tribe of warrior women sent to Earth to protect humans from their basest impulses. When World War I spills onto the island’s shores, the film’s titular heroine, Diana (Gal Gadot), leaves its relative safety to help American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) deliver a German laboratory notebook to British intelligence. That notebook, stolen from a German chemist nicknamed Dr. Poison, contains the Germans’