Technology news

By adding a cryptocurrency exchange, a web version and stock option trading, Robinhoodhas managed to quadruple its valuation in a year, according to a source familiar with a new round the startup is raising. Robinhood is closing in on around $350 million in Series D funding led by Russian firm DST Global, the source says. That’s just 11 months after Robinhood confirmed TechCrunch’s scoop that the zero-fee stock trading app had raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion val

Theoretical physics isn’t the easiest field in science to translate into laymen’s terms. Until recently it’s solely been the domain of geniuses like the late Stephen Hawking and fictional characters such as The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper. As companies like Google, IBM, and Intel work to build quantum computer systems that offer supremacy over binary computers, it’s a good time to learn some basic terms and concepts. We’ve got you covered fam. Quantum co

Lyft is testing monthly subscription plans for high-frequency users, a sign that the company is shifting toward a Netflix or Spotify model for transportation.The terms of the subscription models seem to vary, but appear targeted at users who spend up to $450 on ride-hailing a month. One all-access pass offered up to 30 standard Lyft rides for $199 a month, another was priced at $300, and another at $399 for 60 rides. Individual rides up to $15 were covered under the all-access pass. It wasn&rsq

Morel is a company known for creating hi-fi speakers for cars and your home, but the company has a new project on Kickstarter that’s an interesting solution for travelers — a Bluetooth speaker that can be used alone or inside a specially-designed suitcase.
The product is comprised of two separate items that can work in tandem: a speaker called Nomadic and the suitcase companion called Speakase. The stereo speaker features two 6-inch by 4-inch woofers, two 22mm tweeters, and an open

A former Walmart director claims the company lied about results and online growth in order to, “win the e-commerce war at all costs,” according to a lawsuit. The news comes just a day after Walmart announced a big push to spread its online grocery delivery and online ordering services to the vast majority of its US stores in a bid to fend off rival big box stores, as well as Amazon.According to Bloomberg, Tri Huynh, a former director of business development for Walmart, raised conce

Seven million women (and men) love TheSkimm. 
With its daily newsletters designed to keep you in the loop on the latest news and pop culture, TheSkimm has developed a loyal following, and even recruits fans called “Skimm’bassadors” to help spread the word.
That word-of-mouth hype is helping and the startup has seen enough growth to warrant more funding. TheSkimm is announcing a $12 million round led by GV (Google Ventures), with participation from Spanx founder Sara B

Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key from Comedy Central’s Emmy Award-winning series Key and Peele will reunite for a new film from Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, called Wendell and Wild. The film will be distributed by Netflix, according to Deadline.Wendell and Wild is a stop-motion animated feature about two mischievous demon brothers, which will be voiced by Key and Peele. The film is Netflix’s second stop-motion animation acquisition to date, a

Logitech has been making speakers for ages. It’s also made gaming accessories for ages. Somewhere down the line, Logitech decided to combine these two talents to make a gaming speaker. RGB lights are, of course, included. The speakers, dubbed the G560, will retail for $199 when it launches in April. There are three pieces: a pair of stereo drivers and a chunky subwoofer. The speakers accept USB, 3.5mm, and Bluetooth sources, and can switch automatically between them. I was only

While Ford has spent much of the year talking about its plans for connected cars and cities, it’s back to talking about the trucks and SUVs it’s going to sell to consumers to pay for all that advanced technology. But Ford is striving to be known for its hybrid vehicles and steal thunder from every other company trying to get in the electric car game.
On Thursday, in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford’s head of global markets Jim Farley revealed the automaker’s product plans going

iPhone users in Iran discovered today that they’re no longer able to access the App Store, in what appears to be a total block of the country, according to Bleeping Computer. While Apple doesn’t sell phones or operate the App Store in Iran, Iranians could still import Apple products from another county and set them up to access portions of the App Store meant for other regions. It appears that now, Apple has closed that loophole, blocking any traffic coming from inside Iran from acc

Ford announced a raft of new driver-assistance features today, promising to make automatic emergency braking and other safety technology standard on many of its vehicles. The automaker stopped short of trying to look as if it would compete with semi-autonomous systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, but it’s a sign that improved safety technology will be coming to many more vehicles in the near future.
Ford has rolled out a number of new driver-assistance features piecemeal over the years,

Two weeks ago, The Verge reported the existence of a six-year predictive policing collaboration between the New Orleans Police Department and Palantir Technologies, a data mining giant co-founded by Peter Thiel. The nature of the partnership, which used Palantir’s network-analysis software to identify potential aggressors and victims of violence, was unknown to the public and key members of the city council prior to publication of The Verge’s findings.Yesterday, outgoing New Orleans

Facebook now has an app that lets people in developing countries pay for Wi-Fi. The company has launched an Express Wi-Fi app in Google Play to go along with its distributed Wi-Fi network. It currently only works in Indonesia and Kenya.
The app provides users a way to buy data packs and find nearby hotspots more easily, as first spotted by TechCrunch. Previously, to access Express Wi-Fi, users would either have to open a mobile web browser or download an app from a local telecom company, which

Electronic Arts (EA) yesterday revealed its latest title: a custom game environment for deep learning networks to learn how to play video games. In the future the “computer” player in games won’t rely on basic scripts; it’ll react to you, and play against you, using the same information and controls a human player does. If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably played one of EA’s games. The list of hits in the company’s catalog contains some of the great

Starting today, Google is adding a “wheelchair accessible” routing option to Google Maps, as reported by Gizmodo. Tailored toward the use of public transit in metropolitan areas, when selected, the route that is presented will factor in the availability of wheelchair ramps and elevators on routes.
The feature is initially being rolled out in several cities that are major transit hubs, including London, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Boston, and Sydney. To access it, type your destina

Facebook Lite, a version of Facebook made for developing countries that is designed to run on 2G networks, is rolling out to more countries, including developed ones, according to Reuters. Like Messenger Lite, the thought is that people with older Android devices or slower internet connections would benefit from the stripped-down app.
Launched in 2015, Facebook Lite was first tested in Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe, but is now available in ove

Airbnb has added new filters to its platform to help people with disabilities more easily find accommodations.
The total of 21 new filters let people specify searches for step-free entry to rooms, wide entryways to fit a wheelchair through, elevators, showers that can accommodate wheelchairs, ramps, and more.
Previously, Airbnb users could only filter for wheelchair accessible listings, but not for any specific disability-friendly features inside a home. Airbnb writes today in a blog post that

Several stories this week have proclaimed that the DNA of former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly changed during his year living on the International Space Station. The stories say that 7 percent of his genes did not return back to normal when he came back to Earth. It makes it seem as if the space environment permanently altered his genetic code. The problem? That’s not true.
The mistake stems from an inaccurate interpretation of NASA’s ongoing Twins Study. When Scott went to space in 20

A Twitch streamer called Ninja broke viewing records last night with the help of someone you may have heard of: “God’s Plan” singer Drake. It was a delightful combination of Twitch’s trademark energy and Drake’s hype, and one which steamers everywhere should be imitating as soon as possible. Drake made his surprise debut on Ninja’s channel playing Fortnite‘s Battle Royale mode. Kim Dotcom also played, as did rapper Travis Scott and Steelers wi

One-year-old babies may not be able to speak, but they are able to think logically, according to new research that shows the earliest known foundation of our ability to reason.Legendary psychologist Jean Piaget believed that we didn’t have logical reasoning abilities until we were seven, but scientists scanned the eyes of 48 babies and found that they’re able to reason through the process of elimination. The research was published today in the journal Science.The type of reasoning i

When Burnout Paradise first launched in 2008, the development team had an idea of the kind of audience it would attract. Previous entries in the series were focused on arcade-style challenges, where players would attempt to crash cars with pinpoint precision. But for Paradise, the team moved in a slightly different direction, spreading out a huge range of challenges across a vast, open world. They expected players would really dig into the hardcore racing aspects, battling against each other in

From apps that diagnose irregular heart rhythms to phone cases that claim to measure blood pressure, there has been a wave of technology promising to use our everyday devices — smartphones and wearables — to fight heart disease. But why heart health, and how much can these gadgets really do?
Heart disease is the most common cause of death around the world, according to the World Health Organization, so of course companies want to work on a problem that could have a huge impact, and

The key word that has thus far been most strongly associated with blockchain technology is decentralization. And indeed, decentralization is the most novel and important feature of blockchains. However, there’s another blockchain buzzword that is going to become increasingly common in the next few years. That word is tokenization. What is tokenization and why is it important? As much as the cryptocurrency market has grown in recent years, it still pales in comparison to the markets of man

HTC is hard at work on its next flagship phone, the U12 Plus, and now we’ve gotten our first good look at what the phone will look like, courtesy of a leak from Evan Blass over at VentureBeat. It’s hard to tell from the pictures if this is the same phone as the rumored U12 prototype that HTC showed off at a 5G event in Taiwan or if this is a different model.The phone looks more or less like a major flagship smartphone in 2018 should — big, reduced bezel display, dual-camera sy

Spotifyexplained why it’s ditching the traditional IPO for a direct listing on the NYSE on April 3rd today during its Investor Day presentation. With no lockup period and no intermediary bankers, Spotify thinks it can go public without all the typical shenanigans.
Spotify described the rationale for using a direct listing with five points:List Without Selling Shares  – Spotify has plent of money with $1.3 billion in cash and securities, has no debt since it converted t

A few days ago, rumors started floating around that Google would rebrand Android Wear. While we expected that change would happen at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, it turns out the company had a faster timeline. As of today, Android Wear is now ‘Wear OS’. Though Google doesn’t say so explicitly, it’s heavily implied that part of the reason for the change is to attract more iPhone users. In a blog post today, the company says: As our technology an

Rihanna posted an Instagram Story today to denounce Snapchat after the platform showed an offensive ad featuring the artist to users. The ad was for a smartphone game called Would You Rather that appeared inside Snapchat over the weekend asking users if they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown.Many users caught the thinly veiled reference to the infamous 2009 incident when Chris Brown violently assaulted his then-girlfriend Rihanna. Brown choked, bit, and punched Rihanna and threaten

Blue Apron will start selling meal kits in stores in an attempt to bolster its lagging business, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Blue Apron was one of the first meal kit delivery companies on the market, but with increasing competition, it now seems to acknowledge that relying on a subscription-based model isn’t enough.
As of last month, Blue Apron had 750,000 subscribers, a hefty dip from its peak of over 1 million subscribers last year. Its stock has also plummeted, and it&rsquo

John Chen will remain BlackBerry’s chief executive through at least November 2023, the company announced today. BlackBerry credits Chen with reversing what once appeared to be doomed prospects by eliminating the company’s storied mobile hardware business and shifting its primary focus to “investments in cybersecurity and embedded software that today are delivering the vast majority of the company’s revenue and growth.”In today’s press release announcing his c

Massdrop has collaborated with Hasbro to create this delightful Scrabble keycap set that comes paired with an entry-level tenkeyless keyboard (a keyboard without a number pad) from WASD, as spotted by Gizmodo.
The custom keys come in classic Scrabble colors — beiges, a soft red and blue, and baby pink — and each one of the letters sports its Scrabble value. The keyboard also sports Cherry MX Brown switches, which give a tactile bump when pressed, so you can really be reminded of the

The US Treasury Department has instituted a new set of sanctions against five entities and 19 individuals tied to Russian hacking and influence operations. The sanctions target many of the same Internet Research Agency employees charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February, as well as various members of Russian intelligence. US persons and corporations are forbidden from doing business with anyone designated by the sanctions, cutting targets off from much of the world’s financial

Microsoft is introducing a new bug bounty reward for the “speculative execution” CPU vulnerabilities that were disclosed recently. The software giant is offering up to $250,000 for bugs that are similar to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. Microsoft’s bounty will run until the end of the year, and it’s clearly designed to discover additional flaws as researchers begin to look at these types of vulnerabilities in processor designs.
“Speculative execution is truly

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival.
It’s often better to go into films completely blind, without watching trailers, reading lead-up features, or engaging in the internet’s seemingly bottomless appetite for baseless speculation. Letting a movie exist on its own terms, rather than the terms anticipation and spoilers have set up for it, is u

Anker has a new line of wireless chargers that it’s calling the PowerWave series, via MobileScout. The new chargers are designed to work specifically with Apple’s iPhone X and iPhone 8 smartphones and charge at the Apple-specified 7.5-watt spec for faster wireless charging on iPhones. That said, the new chargers can also charge at up to 10 watts, should you have a phone (like Samsung’s Galaxy S9) that supports a faster wireless charging speed.The new PowerWave chargers bear a

Another massive financing round for an AI chip company is coming in today, this time for SambaNova Systems — a startup founded by a pair of Stanford professors and a longtime chip company executive — to build out the next generation of hardware to supercharge AI-centric operations.
SambaNova joins an already quite large class of startups looking to attack the problem of making AI operations much more efficient and faster by rethinking the actual substrate where the computations happe

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journ

It’s a tale as old as time. Inspired by a famous manga about basketball, a group of engineers from Toyota worked together in their free hours to build a robot capable of shooting perfect free throws. Eventually, after perfecting their mechanical creation, they challenged professional human players and beat them shot for shot.That’s the story reported by Japanese news agency Asahi Shimbun anyway, and the video evidence (above and below) certainly bears it out. Although, exactly what

Over the last several years, social media has become a critical and central way for businesses to communicate, and market to, their customers. Now, one of the startups that helped spearhead this trend has raised a round of growth funding to expand its horizons. Hootsuite, the Vacouver-based social media management company that counts some 16 million businesses as customers, said today that it has raised $50 million in growth capital — specifically through a credit financing agreement &mdas

Intel is revealing today that the company is introducing hardware protections against the Spectre CPU flaw that was discovered last year. While the Meltdown vulnerability will continue to be addressed through software updates, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich says the company has “redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning” that will protect against the Spectre variants. Intel’s next-generation Xeon processors (Cascade Lake) will inclu

Nest just announced a new $39 Temperature Sensor that works in tandem with the company’s smart thermostats to keep particular rooms in your home at the ideal temperature. The device is scheduled to ship in April, and there’s also a $99 three-pack available for preorder. To use it, you’ll need the latest-generation Nest Learning Thermostat or the Nest Thermostat E; the Temperature Sensor doesn’t work with first-get or second-gen Nest thermostats.Setting up the Temperature

Drover, a London-based startup that lets you take out a “car subscription” as an alternative to car ownership, has picked up £5.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by VC firms Cherry Ventures, Partech and BP Ventures (the venture arm of BP), and adds to an earlier £2 million ‘pre-seed’ investment from Version One, and Forward Partners.
Founded by Felix Leuschner (CEO) and Matt Varughese (CTO) in late 2015 and subsequently launched the following Januar

The latest trend in tech appears to be hating tech, whether that means breaking up with our phones, taking breaks from online news (if that’s what you call a “break”), or disavowing Facebook. Some of this tech backlash is deserved and long overdue. In just the span of a decade, some of us have become unhealthily attached to our products and services while the tech companies that make them profit off our so-called addictions. But some of this desire to rage against the blue lig

Microsoft shipped its first video game in 1981, appropriately named Microsoft Adventure. It was an MS-DOS game that booted directly from a floppy disk, and set the stage for Microsoft’s adventures in gaming. A lot has changed over the past 37 years, and when you think of Microsoft’s efforts in gaming these days you’ll immediately think of Xbox. It’s fair to say a lot is about to change over the next few decades too, and Microsoft is getting ready. Today, the software gia