Technology news

Amazon’s third-quarter earnings demonstrate that sales are way up, but that was to be expected. After all, this past quarter is the one when Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods, challenged cities to offer up tax breaks and gifts in hopes of winning a bid to the company’s second headquarters, and also launched a slew of new Echo and Fire TV products. Amazon’s Prime Day, its second time throwing the big discounts holiday, was also bigger than ever in the quarter, stea

Facebook has teamed up with SeatGeek to make the ticket marketplace its primary distribution partner, according to VentureBeat. Now, if you want to buy tickets to an event on Facebook, you can purchase them without leaving the site, if those tickets are sold by SeatGeek.
The first company to test the new partnership is soccer team Sporting Kansas City. As shown below, if the SeatGeek ticketing option is clicked on, a pop-up will show what types of tickets are available. From there, you can selec

Facebook has teamed up with SeatGeek to make the ticket marketplace its primary distribution partner, according to VentureBeat. Now, if you want to buy tickets to an event on Facebook, you can purchase them without leaving the site, if those tickets are sold by SeatGeek.
The first company to test the new partnership is soccer team Sporting Kansas City. As shown below, if the SeatGeek ticketing option is clicked on, a pop-up will show what types of tickets are available. From there, you can selec

Today, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency — a move intended to expand access to treatment and loosen regulations to fight an ongoing epidemic of drug overdoses.
The declaration, however, doesn’t unlock significant new funding, and likely won’t be enough to solve an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. “My guess is that the states are going to feel like the resources that become available from today&rsq

Holding an apple under running water for a few seconds isn’t enough to get rid of the pesticides on its skin, new research says. Your best bet is to soak your fruit in a baking soda solution — for 12 to 15 minutes. And if you’re really concerned, of course, you can always peel your apples.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst tested a few different ways to wash chemical residue off of produce: the bleach solution that farmers dunk fruit in after harvest, a li

Despite a flurry of unsettling news reports and the resulting political fallout concerning Russian propaganda ads spread through Silicon Valley, it’s still very much business as usual at Alphabet’s Google unit. The parent company of Google and its many subsidiaries reported fiscal third quarter earnings today, coming in above analyst expectations in both sales and profit. It’s clear foreign government intervention has little to no effect on Google’s bottom line, even if i

Microsoft hit a new milestone in its cloud services business this quarter: it’s now able to project over $20 billion in annual revenue. While that may seem like a big but arbitrary milestone, it’s an important one for Microsoft. In 2015, a year after being named the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella said he wanted Microsoft to hit that target sometime in 2018 — a big jump up from the $6.3 billion business it was back then. Depending on how you’re counting (Microsoft&rsqu

If you’re in the market for a new iPad, today might be a good time to head over to Best Buy, which is currently offering up to $150 off both the 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch models of the iPad Pro.It’s a pretty straightforward deal: almost every model of both sizes of the tablet, regardless of color, storage capacity, or cellular data, are getting at least a $125 price cut, with means that the the 10.5-inch iPad Pro starts at $524.99, while the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $649.99.

Zipcar announced a new program today for urban dwellers who are willing to pay a monthly subscription for unlimited access to its vehicles during the work week. It’s a sign that the Avis Budget Group-owned company, in the face of new competition from legacy automakers, has aspirations to become the Netflix for cars.The new service offers a vehicle for unlimited and exclusive use from 5AM Monday through 7PM Friday, at monthly fees of $199 to $299 depending on the city, plus 45 cents a mile

What if you could use a charm bracelet or a water bottle as your secret password? Researchers at the Florida International University and Bloomberg created a camera-based remote authentication solution to help you do just that on any mobile device.
The solution is called Pixie. To use it, you first pick a secret physical object like a book or a paperweight and take photos of it with a mobile device, creating reference photos. Then, each time you want to use two-factor authentication, you just ho

The United Auto Workers filed a complaint today to the National Relations Board on behalf of hundreds of Tesla factory workers who were fired from the assembly plant last week. The UAW posted a copy of the complaint made against Tesla on its website, which alleges that pro-union workers were unfairly targeted.The UAW says the complaint was made on Wednesday to the Oakland offices of the National Relations Board. The union claims the recent culling of several hundred Tesla employees included many

1aim, a German startup, is building a “ground up” AI platform for offices that combines physical security with artificial intelligence. From securing the actual locks in the doors, to optimizing conference room usage, the company intends to turn any building into the kind of place Marvel’s Tony Stark might work. Smart locks make a lot of sense once you wrap your head around the concept. With 1aim’s system, administrators can use a simple app interface to issue digital pa

Samsung's newest Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab A, appears to be targeted directly at families. That means it competes against Amazon's line of kid-friendly tablets, although Samsung's version is way more expensive. The Tab A features an eight-inch, 1280 x 800 display, a 5,000mAh battery, 32GB of built-in storage, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera. Here are the rest of the specs:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 processor
Android 7.1.1 Nougat
2GB of RAM
Up to 256GB

Preorders for the iPhone X open at 3:01AM ET (12:01AM PT) tonight at Apple, phone carriers, and other retailers. Demand is going to be high, and supply is said to be pretty low — at least if you’re hoping to get the phone on its November 3rd release date or soon after. If you’re not willing to wake up in the middle of the night, get your preorder in, and go back to sleep, you might not be able to walk into a store and buy an iPhone X until sometime in 2018.Choose which company

Spotify is pulling the plug on its original video efforts and heading back to the drawing board, according to a report today from Bloomberg. The company isn’t leaving video altogether; Spotify plans to reboot the initiative, marking just the latest shake-up in a meandering, and at times uncertain, gamble on original content. Current original video series won’t release new episodes, and unreleased shows currently in the works are being scrapped. Going forward, Spotify plans to work on

New security measures for all US-bound flights begin today, following the US Department of Homeland Security’s “first round” of enhanced electronics screenings back in July. According to CNBC, these new measures include passenger questioning and searching carry-on bags. The new rules affect all 2,100 flights that come to the US daily, including US carriers.There seems to be some confusion as airlines around the world gave various statements to CNBC about what the measures would

Google has added three new services that support Google Home voice commands with Chromecast devices: HBO Now, CBS All Access, and The CW.For HBO and CBS, you’ll need to first link those respective accounts in the Google Home app (The CW is free, so that should just work), after which you’ll be able to simply ask Google Home to control playback. Google’s smart assistant will even recognize specific shows on those networks, so you’ll be able to directly ask it to play, say,

Apple doesn’t change its homepage layout all that often, but for the rollout of the iPhone X, it’s shaking things up. The landing page of Apple’s website is now filled with a half-dozen animations showing off the tech inside the forthcoming iPhone. It looks like what you’d expect to find on the dedicated iPhone X page, whereas Apple usually uses its homepage to showcase a bunch of different products.
This in itself isn’t all that strange. If you’re visiting Ap

A couple months ago, my colleague Chaim Gartenberg wrote a fair and accurate review of the Asus ROG Zephyrus. It's an astonishingly thin, ultra-powerful laptop for gamers, and it almost utterly fails at being a laptop. "Basically useless away from a desk" was Chaim's ultimate verdict, and I agree.
Also, I love this laptop.
After Chaim finished his review, I asked if I could try it out. Before long, my MacBook Pro was collecting dust. I became a full-on Zephyrus convert and evangelist, with fond

Uber just added a new feature that allows riders to make up to three stops along their trip from within the app. Gone are the days when riders needed to verbalize their words using an antiquated form of communication called “speech” to tell a driver about multiple destinations. Now, riders can pick up friends or a bottle of booze on the way to a party by adding the stops in the app.
Here’s Uber with the step-by-step description for the new feature:
To use the feature, tap &ldqu

Saudi Arabia plans to invest $1 billion in Richard Branson’s private space venture Virgin Galactic, as well as its spinoff companies The Spaceship Company and Virgin Orbit. The country has the option of investing an additional $480 million in the future, too. The money will go toward Virgin’s space tourism program and help accelerate the development of the company’s new launch vehicle to send small satellites into orbit.
The deal is part of a new partnership announced today bet

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
It’s not fun to enter a movie-viewing experienc

For the most part, it’s been a good year for Nintendo. In March, the company successfully launched the Switch, a device that helped reinvigorate Nintendo following the disastrous Wii U. And 2017 has seen the release of some of the best-regarded games in Nintendo’s history starting with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and, soon, Super Mario Odyssey. This goes along with the release of the miniature SNES Classic, and further forays into mobile like Fire Emblem Heroes and next

Yann LeCun is one of AI’s most accomplished minds, so when he says that even recent advances in the field aren’t taking us closer to super-intelligent machines, you need to pay attention.
LeCun has been working in AI for decades, and is one of the co-creators of convolutional neural networks — a type of program that’s proved particularly adept at analyzing visual data, and powers everything from self-driving cars to facial recognition. Now, as head of Facebook’s AI

A decade ago, a five-second clip of a prairie dog went viral. “Dramatic Chipmunk,” as it was erroneously titled, captivated the internet — and dramatic zooms have featured in popular culture ever since. And while you’ve long been able to create one by using the manual zoom feature of your smartphone camera, Instagram has a new tool that will do it for you automatically.
Superzoom, which is rolling out today on Android and iOS, lets you create a Dramatic Chipmunk-style zoo

Eminem is back in the news in October 2017! It’s been a minute, as evidenced by the fact that the most recent Getty Image search results for our dude are from the 2015 premiere of the Jake Gyllenhaal film Southpaw.Now, we’re talking about him again because he rapped about Donald Trump at the BET Awards and became a meme for a second. Also, The Fader reported yesterday, his manager Paul Rosenberg posted a photo of a prescription drug billboard to Instagram. The drug — Revival &m

Nvidia has a new member in its gaming GPU lineup: the GTX 1070 Ti. Much like the 1080 Ti released earlier this year, it serves as an upgraded version of the existing GTX 1070 model.
Priced at $449, the 1070 Ti slots in right between the $349 1070, and the $499 1080, making it a solid choice if you’re looking for some extra power over the 1070, but not quite willing to shell out for the 1080. The $449 price does seem a little odd, given that it’s just $50 more to upgrade to the extrem

The Bloodhound Super Sonic Car conducted its first public test run today, rocketing 210 mph (340 km/h) down the runway at Newquay Airport in southwest England. The test was a prelude for the rocket-powered car’s ultimate, record-setting goal: 1,000 mph (1,610 km/h).But that test, planned for a dry lake bed in South Africa, won’t happen until at least 2020 — though the Bloodhound team said today’s dry run gave them confidence that the car could eventually achieve the goal.

The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, today boldly announced fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road in “no more than four years.” This may shock some, but there’s an ever-expanding list of companies in agreement. At this point, anyone who doesn’t see driverless cars as imminent is in denial. This is a pretty big deal because Nvidia, who you may know as the manufacturer of high-end graphics cards for computer gaming, is actually one of the biggest players in the sp

Ticketing platform SeatGeek has signed Facebook up as a distribution partner, allowing sports fans and gig-goers to buy tickets directly through the world’s biggest social network.
Though SeatGeek is better known as an aggregator and secondary ticketing marketplace for resellers, the company announced last year that it would begin to target rightsholders with a new primary ticketing platform. However, SeatGeek Open wasn’t pitched as a destination for buying and selling tickets; rathe

Instagram is adding another wacky effect to its Stories camera, and it might be my favorite one yet. Say hello to ‘Superzoom.’ It’s pretty much what it sounds like – you select an area to zoom into it in a video. It’s sure to be used for a plethora of melodramatic videos, and Instagram even includes music to add to the effect. In other words,  you basically get to do this: To give it a go just need to select Superzoom from the camera, and tap and hold to recor

Microsoft’s Courier hardware was a mysterious device that never made it to consumers, but left a big impression on fans who saw the leaked concept videos. Designed as a digital journal, the Microsoft Courier combined two screens to fold over like a book, with a stylus for taking notes. Microsoft appears to be working on a similar device that will fold over like a book and have an emphasis on digital ink. Windows Central reports that the Courier-like hardware could be released as early as n

Facing criticism over Russian propaganda on its platform, Twitter today announced that it will ban two media outlets with ties to the Russian government from its ad system.
“We did not come to this decision lightly.”
The two outlets, RT and Sputnik, are widely believed to be aligned with Kremlin interests. Both came under increased scrutiny in a report, released by US intelligence agencies earlier this year, that detailed some Russian efforts to influence the US election.“We di

VB LIVE: Ad fraud isn’t becoming more prevalent — the fraudsters are just getting slicker. Join this VB Live event to learn how to make a game plan to define benchmarks, detect and manage fraud, and work with your partners to circle the wagons against the fraudsters.Register here for free.Approximately 2,300 apps are being launched across both of the app stores every single day. And approximately 2,000 of those are not actually legitimate apps at all; they’re just clones with a

Back in July, eBay announced new computer vision search tools that help you find items using photos. Today, the ecommerce giant revealed that it’s making those features publicly available for the first time.
By way of a quick recap, computer vision allows machines to process and analyze imagery on a pixel-by-pixel basis, rather than leaning on human-led categorization data, such as keywords and descriptions. A few months back, eBay gave an early glimpse of two new tools that rely

 As a former writer at VentureBeat, the state of media industry in the U.S. has always been important to me. Since the internet boom took momentum, even the world’s most established publications have been forced into a downturn, as they struggle to adapt to monetizing in the new digital landscape. For journalists this has meant less job security due to the constant threat of newsroom cuts and redundancies. It would be easy to assume after such a tough decade, when American and Europe

Waymo is bringing its fleet of self-driving cars to Detroit, a city steeped in car history. The Alphabet unit announced today that it would begin testing its autonomous vehicles in Michigan just in time for an icy winter. The goal would appear to be twofold: teach self-driving cars how to handle slippery, unplowed roads; and thumb their nose at the legacy automakers who are scrambling to keep up to Alphabet’s big head start in autonomy.Starting in November, Waymo’s self-driving cars

Apple’s CarPlay has slowly but surely clawed its way into the once locked-down infotainment systems of nearly 50 manufacturers, but this week it’s breaking totally new ground. That’s because Honda has unveiled the new 2018 version of the Gold Wing touring motorcycle: the first two-wheeler to feature CarPlay.This being a motorcycle, there are some key differences in how CarPlay works. The rider can see it on a 7-inch LCD screen that’s on the small dash between the handleba

The best that can be said about Twitter’s third quarter earnings is that it appears things are getting less bad for the struggling social media platform. The company is even optimistic that things may actually start to get better at some point in the not-too-distant future.
But that doesn’t mean Twitter doesn’t have a few pratfalls left in it. More on that in a second.
On Thursday, the company reported earnings that topped lowered expectations set by Wall Street analysts. Twitt

Earlier this year Google boasted its security AI has smartened up so much it no longer requires you to tick a box in its reCAPTCHA system to know you’re not a bot. But it appears the company might have celebrated a bit prematurely. A group of researchers from the University of Maryland have developed a new algorithm, called unCAPTCHA, that is capable of defeating the reCAPTCHA system with a mind-boggling success rate of 85 percent. The method exploits a vulnerability in the audio ver

The foldable phone is probably considered the next Holy Grail for tech companies. Rumors have swirled for years about a potential device, and numerous patents have also been filed. Now some new sketches of a Samsung phone that’s foldable have surfaced online. The patent drawings were submitted by Samsung Electronics to the Korean Intellectual Property Office earlier this week, as spotted by LetsGoDigital. The title of the patent filing roughly translates to “flexible electronic devic

Netflix is launching a Stranger Things after show called Beyond Stranger Things, The Hollywood Reporter reports. This will be the first time Netflix has hosted an after show on its own platform.
The show, hosted by actor Jim Rash, will feature an analysis of each episode and roundtable discussions with the cast and crew, including Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, David Harbour, Brett Gelman, and show creators Ross and Matt Duffer.Even more ‘Stranger Things’
The seven-episode after