Technology news

Google parent company Alphabet reported first quarter earnings for 2018 today, beating Wall Street estimates on sales and profit thanks in large part to its mammoth search advertising machine that continues to grow year after year. But one interesting highlight from the earnings announcement was just how much money the company’s smart home company Nest earns in revenue and reports in losses.Because Nest was rolled back into Google proper earlier this year, Alphabet recast its quarterly ea

Target wants to make your next shopping trip worth the drive, so it's adding hundreds of charging stations for electric vehicles to its parking lots across the country.
SEE ALSO: There's a glaring weakness in electric vehicles. (It's range anxiety.)
The big-box retailer announced Monday an expanded EV charging program, offering Tesla, ChargePoint, and Electrify America charging stations for battery-powered cars that may need some extra juice while on the road. 
Target currently offers the c

The Trump voter is often portrayed in media and pop culture as a working-class white person, down on their luck and desperate for change. These voters were — and remain — willing to look past Trump's erratic and unorthodox behavior and "politically incorrect" commentary if his presidency brings better jobs. These voters, the narrative goes, are in pursuit of a noble life, even if the man they chose to be commander-in-chief is neither generous or honorable. 
But a new study, publ

The first video uploaded to YouTube is finally a teen.
Thirteen years ago on Monday — on April 23, 2005 — YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded this 18 second clip to the site just a few months after the domain was secured, and nothing's been the same since. 
SEE ALSO: Sit back, relax, and take a trip through these psychedelic videos
By the YouTube standards of today, it's a pretty dull video, but it does embody much of internet culture with a subtle dick joke. "So h

Everyone take a moment of silence please — the free and open internet is all but dead.
In December 2017 the FCC, under chairman Ajit Pai, voted to repeal net neutrality, signaling the end of the open internet as we know it.
The decision was controversial at the time, with everyone from Alyssa Milano to Reddit calling out the FCC in the lead-up to the vote, but the the vote was just the first step toward repeal. To enact the change, the FCC would have to officially list the ruling and

Asus has announced a new midrange phone aimed at the Indian market and priced to appeal over the likes of competitors like Samsung and a host of Chinese brands, namely Xiaomi, which recently launched the popular Redmi Note 5 Pro.The company says it chose features and specs for its new ZenFone Max Pro M1 based on results from a survey of over 2,000 Indian customers, according to Engadget. We’ve reached out to Asus for more information about what that survey entailed.
The ZenFone Max Pro M1

Twitch’sBits, a virtual good that allows fans to cheer on their favorite streamers, have been one of the ways Twitch creators could make money from their channels while also recognizing and rewarding their top fans. Today, the game streaming site is expanding the power of those Bits by allowing them to now be used with Twitch’s Extensions.
Extensions, launched in August 2017, let streamers customize their channel with add-ons like polls, leaderboards, tickers, game history and more.

Making your way to Australia's Christmas Island to witness its annual red crab migration isn't the easiest of trips, but now there's an easier way to see it happen: Just catch a glimpse on Google's Street View.
The pictures were collected by Alasdair Grigg from Parks, Australia, using Google's Street View Trekker 360 late last year. (Red crab migration generally starts at the beginning of October or November.) The images reveal some of the approximately 40 to 50 million crabs that make their way

Earlier this month — and before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress — the company announced a series of changes to how it would handle political advertisements running on its platform in the future. It had said that people who wanted to buy a political ad — including ads about political “issues” — would have to reveal their identities and location and be verified before the ads could run. Information about the advertiser would also disp

Chariot,the commuter shuttle provider owned by Ford, has received a private transit program permit to operate more safely and, ideally, have less of an impact on public transit in San Francisco.
As part of the program, Chariot cannot make stops in crosswalks, traffic lanes and Muni stops. Instead, Chariot must load and unload passengers in legal curb spaces, which includes white passenger loading zones and yellow commercial loading zones.
To be clear, this program is different from the SFMTA&rsq

A Midwestern university wants to recruit the nation’s best Fortniteplayers for its varsity esports team, and it’s throwing out the dough to bring on some quality talent.
Ashland University in Ohio will embrace the feverishly popular battle royale title into its competitive esports program, which it will officially launch this fall. Fortnite will join the team’s current competitive-title teams League of Legends, Overwatch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Rocket League. Inte

One YouTuber and game mod maker by the name of Kaze Emanuar, a notable Nintendo ROM hacker, has created something truly special: a mashup of two of Nintendo’s most beloved classics, Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game, which was released last month, was featured today in a lengthy profile of Emanuar on Engadget. The article highlights the time and effort the mod maker put into his custom Mario-Zelda fusion. Essentially, Emanuar rebuilt all of Ocarina of Time

Alphabet,Google’s parent company, reported another pretty solid beat this afternoon for its first quarter as it more or less has continued to keep its business growing substantially — and is growing even faster than it was a year ago today.
Googlesaid its revenue grew 26% year-over-year to $31.16 billion in the first quarter this year. In the first quarter last year, Google said its revenue had grown 22% between Q1 of 2016 and Q1 of 2017. All this is a little convoluted, but the end

Sometime in the past few months, a lawyer in Chicago spent $8.21 on tacos from Chipotle after breaking up with her boyfriend. Around the same time, a woman in Minneapolis who works in human resources paid $7.48 for a shower curtain. And at some point, a digital strategist in Boston spent $58 on "ground chicken, kale, broccoli rabe, parsnips, chickpeas, steak tips, salsa, bell peppers, and a bag of honey-roasted chickpeas I keep in my desk to snack on." 
This information is all incredibly bo

There’s 80 times as much gold in one ton of cellphones as there is in a gold mine, says Federico Magalini, an expert on electronic waste. That means there’s enormous potential for recycling — and yet, most of us keep our old electronics at home.Lately, there’s been a lot of interest in old electronics. Last week, Apple debuted Daisy, a robot that disassembles old iPhones to recycle the materials inside. Reuters covered a South Korean factory that specializes in retrievin

Buckle your seatbelt, baby, because Fast & Furious is becoming a cartoon.
The Fast & Furious franchise is being turned into an animated series, Netflix announced on Monday, as a part of Netflix's deal with DreamWorks Animation. The new series focuses on the younger cousin of Dom (Vin Diesel) from the movie franchise and is aimed at a younger demographic.
SEE ALSO: The Rock finally explains his beef with Vin Diesel on 'Fate of the Furious'
Netflix did not announce a specific release date

If you're suddenly seeing a lot of #content and online freakouts about CW's Jane the Virgin, it's not just because of a shocking Season 4 finale – it's because Jane is and has been one of TV's best shows since its inception in 2014.
And the great news for you is that it's at your fingertips.
SEE ALSO: The 10 best TV shows of 2017 (returning)
First off, a quick recap: Jane Gloriana Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez) is 23 and waiting until marriage to have sex. When we meet her, she's dating dashi

An American equivalent to a royal baby was born today. 
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and his partner Lauren Hashian welcomed a baby girl into the world on Monday, and made the announcement via a very on brand (aka shirtless), long-winded Instagram post with a photo of Johnson holding his daughter.
SEE ALSO: Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson nailed the rap from 'Moana' on British TV
The newest family member, Tiana Gia Johnson, is The Rock's third daughter, and second with Hashian. Skin to skin. Ou

We've seen a man, a rocket, and so many other things go into space, so why not send some garlic bread as well?
YouTuber Tom Scott and a group of experts tied a loaf of garlic bread onto a weather balloon in attempt to launch it into space. Aside from sending it off, Scott wanted to test how the bread would taste once it's been on the edge of the atmosphere for over two hours. 
But, the reason for garlic bread specifically? Scott just said, "Because it's delicious." Who could disagree with t

Today is World Book Day, a day designated by UNESCO to celebrate reading, from books and authors to bookstores and libraries. To mark the occasion, we wanted to see what the larger group of Verge staffers have stacked on their nightstands, tucked away in their bags, or stored on their Kindles.
Here’s what some of the Verge staff are currently reading:Image: Del Rey / Penguin Random House
Tasha Robinson: I’m just diving into Only Human, the third book in Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis

When The Orphanage came out in 2007, screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez almost instantly became an important figure to watch in the horror world. Guillermo del Toro, known for supporting ambitious, young Spanish and Mexican genre filmmakers, produced The Orphanage, and its combination of heavy atmosphere, potent scares, and heartbreaking drama made it one of the most memorable horror movies of the past 15 years. It also began a collaboration between Sánchez and director J.A. Bayona th

The miracle of parenthood is a truly wonderful thing that can even be found in some of the more unexpected places.
SEE ALSO: Delightful Japanese mascot has its own special use for the baggage claim
For instance, for Twitter user @omophorion a child was found in the form of one water-filled nitrile glove with a drawn-on face.
"Behold," writes omophorion, on the video of the lovely boy being jiggled. "My son."behold
my son pic.twitter.com/fVFvATT9BX
— ✨Pouchrat✨ (@omophorion) A

Gender discrimination may be a hot-button issue here in the U.S., but we don’t have a monopoly on the practice by a long shot. A new report from Human Rights Watch highlights widespread and blatant discrimination in Chinese job descriptions, despite its ostensibly being illegal there. In fact, the highest incidence rates were found in government jobs.
The report looked at 36,000 job descriptions posted in the last few years, including 2017 and 2018 listings for civil service and government

From late 1861 through early 1862, a megaflood of historic proportions put large parts of the state of California underwater. The state's Central Valley, which is now one of the most productive agricultural ares in the country, became a vast inland lake. The city of Sacramento, which sits at the intersection of the American and Sacramento rivers, flooded, and remained under water for months. 
According to one account, one-quarter of the state's 800,000 cattle drowned in the flooding, and on

Westworld is back and, by the looks of it, the Season 2 premiere is up to some old tricks again. 
Last season's big twist centered around the show taking place over multiple timelines experienced by Dolores, culminating in the reveal that The Man in Black is actually William and that Dolores killed Arnold before the park opened decades ago. 
It would appear that now, in Season 2, Bernard is at the center of a new multiple timeline puzzle.
Or at least that's what they want you to think.

Two new parents trying to leave the hospital with their newborn baby ended up with worldwide media attention. 
Will and Kate's third bundle of royal joy arrived on Monday, and the global press waited at the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital in London for a first glimpse of the newborn.
SEE ALSO: The third bundle of royal cuteness has finally arrived
But before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge made their official appearance at the wing's entrance, an unsuspecting couple just trying to leave

No matter how groundbreaking your startup idea is, you won't be able to get it off the ground if you don't possess the necessary technical and interpersonal skills. In an era where startups are a constant, having a strong work ethic and encyclopedic knowledge on the subject alone just won't cut it. Learning the necessary skills is a must.
SEE ALSO: Take online classes in cloud computing for just $19 and impress your boss
The Ultimate Startup Launch Lifetime Bundle is a set of five online courses

Martin Lewis, a well-known financial journalist and founder of consumer finance site MoneySavingExpert.com, filed a lawsuit against Facebook today through the UK’s High Court, accusing the tech giant of defamation. He claims that the platform published over 50 cryptocurrency ads that falsely used his face and name to promote cryptocurrency trading scams.
Lewis notes in a statement that the advertisements often promoted get-rich-quick schemes that were actually trading options with odds st

Robot vacuums are cool and all, but they're not exactly easy on the wallet. 
Nothing beats the power and reliability of Dyson, or at least that's what every wedding registry will tell you. And since cleaning the house is a perennial task, you should invest in one that can capture every speckle of dust in your home and won't conk out in just a few uses. 
The Dyson V6 Cordless Vacuum is an excellent choice — and it's on sale.
This lightweight, cordless vacuum normally retails for $

Spring may have barely sprung, but if early-stage companies want an exhibitor’s table in Startup Alley at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 you need to apply now. Our biggest, most ambitious Disrupt ever takes place on September 5-7 at our new venue, Moscone Center West. More than 1,200 exhibitors and sponsors will showcase the very latest technology products, platforms and services in Startup Alley. Applications are open for a limited time, and we’d hate for you to miss out.
If you want to

Capital Float, the fintech startup that says it is India’s largest online lender, announced today that it has raised $22 million in new funding from Amazon. At the end of last year, reports surfaced that Amazon was considering an investment in Capital Float as an extension of its $45 million Series C, which was announced last August. The Bangalore-based startup confirmed to TechCrunch that Amazon’s investment is indeed an extension of that round and brings the total equity it has rai

The scapegoat in Facebook's ongoing data privacy scandal is firing back at the social media giant.
Aleksandr Kogan, the relatively unknown scientist who was paid by Cambridge Analytica for data he harvested from more than 87 million Facebook users, is speaking out in a series of interviews, where he explains that he was not a rogue app developer as Facebook has frequently implied, and that the problem could be much bigger than most people realize.
SEE ALSO: How to find out if Cambridge Analytica

YouTube’s first video — an 18-second clip with over 48 million views, not a whole lot of action, and exactly one genital innuendo — was uploaded 13 years ago today. The now-teenage platform may have started as a dating site, but it’s since expanded its role to include everything from viral videos to a platform for influencers to screw up in front of the entire world. That’s wild, given how tame its first video is.
In this historical artifact, aptly titled “Me

Amazon is reportedly developing a domestic robot. We’re still pretty far away from the robot butler era, but this indicates the possible arrival of the “Alexa, get me a beer” stage, and we can’t wait. Sources familiar with the project told Bloomberg the company plans to develop a domestic robot: Codenamed “Vesta,” after the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, the project is overseen by Gregg Zehr, who runs Amazon’s Lab126 hardware research and

Heptio is one of the more interesting companies in the container ecosystem. In part, that’s due to the simple fact that it was founded by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two of the three engineers behind the original Kubernetes project, but also because of the technology it’s developing and the large amount of funding it has raised to date.As the company announced today, it saw its revenue grow 140 percent from the last quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018. In addition, Heptiosa

On a recent Sunday, creative director Jason Debiak was having breakfast with his family in New Jersey, when something strange happened.“I was having an adorable breakfast with my family, my 2-year-old daughter and my wife,” he says. “Something came up [on my phone] and I usually try not to check my email, but I checked my email and it said, ‘You have 10 new matches on Match.com.’ I was like... what?”
Debiak’s long-forgotten — and, he assumed, long

CBS’ over-the-top streaming service, CBS All Access, is now available for the first time outside the U.S. The network today announced the service has arrived in Canada, ahead of a planned international expansion that will see the streaming service coming to more markets outside the U.S. in the future.
There are some differences between the U.S. version of the service and the one now live in Canada.
While in the U.S. subscribers can choose from either an ad-supported or a commercial-fr

Lightning Network — touted as the solution to Bitcoin’s scalability problem — seems to be growing leaps and bound in spite of still being in a nascent stage. Statistics show that the total number of active nodes on Lightning Network have crossed 2,000, with 5,801 open channels on the main network, while its total network capacity has ballooned past $150,000. We just passed 2,000 nodes with over 5,650 open channels on mainnet. The total network capacity is now $150,000 USD. The

Ryan Caldbeck Contributor Ryan Caldbeck is the founder and chief executive of the consumer and retail investment marketplace CircleUp.More posts by this contributorWhat Silicon Valley tech VCs get wrong about consumer investing We are on the verge of a consumer M&A avalanche
The world of consumer goods is changing. Consumer tastes are becoming more and more fragmented and big incumbents continue to lose market share to upstart brands. It’s often difficult for these incumbents to figur

The first thing to understand about media-sharing app Rapchat is that co-founder Seth Miller is not a rapper and his other co-founder, Pat Gibson, is. Together they created Rapchat, a service for making and sharing raps, and the conjunction of rapper and nerd seems to be really taking off.
Since we last looked at the app in 2016 (you can see Tito’s review below), a lot has changed. The team has raised $1.6 million in funding from investors out of Oakland and the Midwest. Their app, which i

The very first leaked image of the OnePlus 6 showed off the phone with what appeared to be a glass back, something we hadn’t seen since the the OnePlus X of old. But given it was so early in the game, we couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just a prototype variation. There’s no longer any doubt: OnePlus CEO Pete Lau today confirmed the next phone will come with a glass back. The CEO explained the change in a long philosophical post on the company’s forum – it basica

Careem,the ride-hailing company based in Dubai, revealed today it was the victim of a cyber breach.
Hackers accessed the names, email addresses, phone numbers and trip data of anyone who signed up for Careem prior to January 14. Careem said there’s no evidence the hackers accessed passwords or credit card information.
While the breach involved access to Careem’s data storage system for 14 million riders and 558,800 drivers (called captains), the company said it hasn’t seen any

The EU has launched an investigation into Apple’s acquisition of music identification service Shazam. It’s concerned that the deal could shrink consumer options for mobile music streaming services within the EEA (European Economic Area).
In February, multiple countries, including Austria, France, Iceland, and Spain, requested that the European Commission assess the acquisition to determine whether it’s allowed under a European Union merger law. The deal, according to the commi

The European Union has been eyeing Apple’s plans to buy Shazam for a while now. Back in February, it noted that the deal raised some preliminary competitive concerns. Today, the EU announced that it’s all in, launching an “in-depth” investigation into the deal.In a press release issued earlier today, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager notes, “The way people listen to music has changed significantly in recent years, with more and more Europeans using music streaming ser

A lot has been happening over the past few weeks: Mark Zuckerberg appeared before congress to testify about Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook was found to quietly move about 1.5 billion users out of the reach of the new GDPR law, and Alibaba was recently reported to have overtaken Amazon as the world’s number one e-commerce site. However, a very important piece of news hasn’t gotten much coverage from the media: today, April 23, net neutrality dies.

When Samsung rolled out its creepy AR Emoji, many assumed it was just the company’s answer to Apple’s Animoji. But Samsung was granted a patent last week that could indicate a whole other reason it rolled out the AR Emoji: to combat bandwidth issues with live video.
Back in 2013, Samsung foresaw that there would continue to be bandwidth issues with live video in the near future, and applied for a patent that would let users video chat with each other using 3D models of their faces,