Technology news

TechCrunch has reported that Facebook is acquiring London-based startup, Bloomsbury AI, as part of its efforts to fight against fake news on the world’s largest social network. Bloomsbury’s product is an NLP engine that helps machines answer questions on information derived from documents. TechCrunch’s sources report that Facebook plans to use the firm’s team and technology in policing the platform, and combating the scourge of bullshit fake news stories that have prolif

Sony is raising the cost of its over-the-top, pay-TV service PlayStation Vue by $5 a month for all four tiers of customers, the company announced today in a blog post. Sony does not give a concrete explanation for the price increase, other than to attribute it to “rising business costs.” PlayStation Vue’s cheapest plan, called Access, will now cost $44.99, instead of $39.99, a month, while its most expensive Ultra package will now cost $84.99. Sony removed its cheapest Slim pa

Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.
The Osprey Momentum 32 impresses. I used it during a muddy week at Beaumont Scout Reservation and it performed flawlessly as a rugged, bike-ready backpack. It stood ta

Bad news for Samsung phone owners: some devices are randomly sending your camera roll photos to your contacts without permission. As first spotted by Gizmodo, users are complaining about the issue on Reddit and the company’s official forums. One user says his phone sent all his photos to his girlfriend. The messages are being sent through Samsung’s default texting app Samsung Messages. According to reports, the Messages app does not even show users that files have been sent; many ju

This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one.
Anthony Levandowski,the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned.
The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of

Welcome back to CTRL+T, the TechCrunch podcast that connects the tech to the human. This week we talked about the beta release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system and some of the issues we have with the Memoji feature. We also discussed the fact that Microsoft improved its facial recognition tech, making it easier to identify darker skin tones. Oh great.
Finally, Karla Monterrosoof Code2040joined us in the studio to drop some pretty hard truths about diversity in tech. The CEO o

Images of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 have leaked, giving us a first look at the new tablet, which is rumored for a release later this year. What appears to be official press renders have leaked from an anonymous source to Android Headlines, showing a lack of a home button and a larger display.The Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 appears to have thinner bezels, leaving space for a longer display that might have a different aspect ratio than the Tab S3’s 4:3. The Samsung logo on the top bezel

The recent string of quantum computing breakthroughs has optimism in the field at an all-time high. That quantum computers are imminent seems certain, but we shouldn’t expect IBM or Apple to start shipping the first generation of personal quantum computers (PQCs maybe?) anytime soon — or ever. Understanding what quantum computing means to the world is as much a matter of philosophical guesswork as mathematical certainty. Humans don’t have a firm grasp on how the universe works

Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the biggest reveals from the Westworld season 2 finale. Proceed at your own risk.
Westworld’s second season concluded with some major reveals, some high-profile deaths, and a list of unanswered questions. For a show that’s constructed around the ideas of perception and mystery, that’s to be expected. More so than any other show on television right now, Westworld uses narrative tricks and fragmented storytelling to keep as many plates spinn

If you block someone on Facebook,you probably want them to… you know, stay blocked. At least until you say otherwise.
Facebook has just disclosed that around 800,000 users were impacted by a bug that silently unblocked “some” people they had blocked.
The bug was live from May 29 until June 5, the company says.
Worth noting: The bug didn’t go so far as to make the would-be blocked individual your friend (even if they were your friend prior to the block), so anything an af

Around 370 light years away from Earth, a big, cloudy planet is in the middle of being born — and astronomers have snapped an incredibly detailed image of its birthing process. The picture is one of the most robust we have of a planet forming, and it could help us learn more about how worlds outside our Solar System came to be.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute, working with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, were able to capture a planet about a

On Friday, we featured 25 founders and VCs who are having a notable 2018 — and who happen to be women. Herewith, 25 more who deserve some kudos for getting it done in the first half of this year. This list, meant to highlight the growing number of women with interesting companies or starting venture firms to watch, could easily be several times longer, we’re gleefully aware. Please feel free to tweet us or nominate in our comments section other women who’ve reached a particular

Just a few days after The Verge seemed to all but confirm Microsoft’s folding phone-sized PC was a real, imminent product, another report suggests the project has been delayed – perhaps indefinitely. The party-pooping news comes via ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley, one of the most reliable writers on Microsoft. According to Foley, Microsoft execs recently decided that the software bits of Andromeda simply weren’t up to snuff. They were due to be included with the Redston

Norway-based company Opera Ltd. has filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. According to its F-1 document, the company plans to raise up to $115 million.
In 2017, Opera generated $128.9 million in operating revenue, which led to a net income of $6.1 million.
While many people are already familiar with the web browser Opera, the company itself has had a tumultuous history. Opera shareholders separated the company into two different entities — the browser maker and the adtech o

A group of researchers at ETH Zurich have created an Ethereum smart contract scanner that will check your smart contracts for bugs, exploits or potential problems. The researchers, Dr. Petar Tsankov, Dr. Hubert Ritzdorf, Prof. Martin Vechev and Dr. Arthur Gervais, all have extensive experience in system security and they are working on improving the blockchain space one smart contract at a time. The team recently incorporated as a new company, ChainSecurity, and they are releasing products to he

Lyft,the rideshare giant that last week closed on $600 million in fresh funding, just announced the latest move in its ongoing chess match with its older and better-funded competitor Uber. It has acquired Motivate, the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, for undisclosed terms.
Motivate, which operates in New York as CitiBike; in Washington, D.C. as Capital Bikeshare; and in San Francisco as Ford GoBike, was reportedly on the cusp of selling to Lyft several weeks

In over 700 pages of responses sent to Congress over the weekend, Facebook acknowledged that it shared user data with 52 hardware and software companies, many of which were previously undisclosed.
The new list includes several large tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, and lists several Chinese companies like Huawei as being part of Facebook’s data integration partnerships. Last month, The New York Times reported that Facebook had been sharing data with device makers, but thi

Great news for all you Silicon Valley startup fans who have yet to score your ticket to the TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital on July 27: We’re releasing our third round of tickets today. Tickets are available on a strictly first-come, first-served basis, and the first two batches of tickets disappeared pretty darned quick. Don’t miss out on the party, people — buy your ticket today.
We truly love this event, which explains why we’ve been holding this pa

Facebook disclosed a bug this morning that affected about 800,000 users by unblocking at least one person on that user’s block list for around one week. Writing in a blog post, Erin Egan, the company’s chief privacy officer, said the bug was active between May 29th and June 5th. It did not re-establish friend connections between any of the affected users and the blocked individuals, Egan says, but it did allow those previously blocked users to see posts shared to a wider audience, l

Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin,is joining us at Disrupt SF. This is fantastic. The giant American technology and defense company has long been at the forefront of security, aerospace and defense technology, and Hewson has led the company since 2013.
There’s plenty to talk about. Lockheed Martin has proven itself by turning wild ideas into sellable products through various means. The company is increasingly building out its space flight and artificial intelligence divisions, a

Google has released the third beta of Android P, which is supposed to be a “near-final” look at the OS before it’s completed later this summer. Google engineering VP Dave Burke calls the latest beta an “early release candidate build” that “takes us very close to what you’ll see in the final version of Android P.”
It’s not clear that this beta includes any new features — Burke only lists bug fixes and optimizations. The bigger deal here

Looks like Instagram is on a feature-adding frenzy of late. The latest, spotted in a small test pool, allows users to (apparently) ask their followers questions and receive answers. The details: First spotted yesterday by Android Police, the feature appears to allow users to ask questions to their followers via Stories. Beyond that, there’s not much known about the feature. If the screenshots taken from various app users are any indication, the user asks a question and followers can

Huawei has patented a smartwatch that comes with a set of built-in Bluetooth earbuds, as spotted by LetsGoDigital. While we don’t know many details about the Huawei Watch 3, including a release date, the patent indicates that the company is considering different ways to store a pair of wireless earbuds inside a smartwatch.
The patent details a few ways the earbuds could be stored: through a capsule with a spring mechanism that opens and shuts with a snap, or magnetically attached and stor

Since Instagram’s algorithmic, out-of-order timeline is a mystery to all humankind, the company has rolled out a new feature that will let you know when you’ve scrolled through all new posts from the last 48 hours. When you come across it, you’ll see a big green checkmark and a message saying “you’re all caught up.” Beyond the line break will be posts that have been up for longer than two days mixed with more recent ones you’ve already seen and scrolled

There’s no lack of on-demand fresh meal services in Paris and its surrounding area. But what about the rest of France? FoodChérihas launched a new offering called Seazon to deliver fresh meals with no additives every week.
Seazon is a subscription service that delivers anywhere in France. You decide how many meals per week you want (4, 6, 8 or 10), and you decide what you like. You also can filter options if you’re vegetarian or vegan.
After that, you’ll start getting a

Lyft has acquired Motivate, the bike-sharing company that operates Citi Bike in New York City and Ford’s GoBike program in San Francisco. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though it was reported in June to be around $250 million.
Motivate, which Lyft says accounts for about 80 percent of bike-share trips in the US, also operates networks in Chicago; Boston; Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; Columbus; and Minneapolis. Lyft says it “will invest to establish bike offerings in our m

Spotify is testing an alternate version of the app called Spotify Lite that reduces the app’s size significantly, but at the expense of including many key features, as spotted by Android Police. The app is only available on Android in Brazil.
The regular Spotify app takes up about 100MB while Spotify Lite only takes up around 15MB. If rolled out, it will join the ranks of other companies toying with lite versions of their apps for emerging markets, like Instagram, Uber, and Google Search.

Following the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal and the more recent discovery of a Facebook app that had been leaking data on 120 million users, Facebook is today announcing a number of API changes aimed at better protecting user information. The changes will impact multiple developer-facing APIs, including those used to create social experiences on the site, as well as those for media partners, and more.
Some of the APIs are being shuttered for low adoption, while others will require

Is the price of Bitcoin the last thing you look up before you doze off at night and the first thing you check when you wake up in the morning? Do you always keep a CoinMarketCap tab open in your browser? Is it difficult to pay attention to conversations unless the topic is blockchain? I’ve got bad news for you: you might be suffering from a cryptocurrency addiction. The good thing is there are measures you can take to curb your unhealthy habit of cryptocurrency trading – or so say a

After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your precise measurements.
“Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional tailors from just two photos on your phone. Simply take a front photo and a side photo and upload to our cloud and you will receive a push notification within minut

Teslahit a key milestone in the second quarter, managing to hit a 5,000-per-week production target for its important Model 3 electric vehicle. Remarkably, about 20 percent of the 5,031 Model 3 vehicles made in the past seven days were produced on the company’s GA4, a hastily built general assembly line housed under a massive tent at its Fremont, Calif. factory.
News that Tesla hit the 5,000-per-week target came out Sunday as the last Model 3 rolled off the assembly line and employees celeb

Or Arbel doesn’t like spending too much time on design. His startup Yo only let you send your friends the word “Yo” after all. That messaging app made waves with its minimalism, but quickly petered out. Now Arbel is back with a new company called Anima that could let app designers build more complex products in less time.
Anima makes a set of plug-ins for popular interface design platform Sketch. Auto-Layout creates responsive designs. Launchpad exports Sketch designs to HTML.

Suse, one of the longest-running commercial Linux distributors and, these days, a major player in the open-source infrastructure and management space, has been through a few ownership changes in recent years. Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, which itself had acquired Novell, the then-owner of Suse, in 2010. Today, Micro Focusannounced that Suse is changing owners yet again, as private equity firm and venture capital fund EQT is acquiring Suse.
While the exac

Xfinity Mobile is set to place limitations on the maximum video quality and hotspot speeds that customers can get when using cellular data. In case you’re not familiar, Xfinity Mobile is Comcast’s MVNO that’s available exclusively to the company’s home internet customers and runs on the Verizon network. In an email to customers, Comcast said that video quality will soon be restricted to 480p.The company claims this change is meant to help its subscribers “conserve

Coinbase’s cryptocurrency custody service is officially open for business, the company announced on its blog today. The service will be offered through its subsidiary, Coinbase Custody. Coinbase already acts as a custodian for the customers of its cryptocurrency exchange desk Coinbase PRO (formerly, GDAX). But the new service will cater specifically to institutional investors. “Coinbase Custody is a combination of Coinbase’s battle-tested cold storage for crypto assets, a

Instagramis turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught Up – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed, which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that notice will only be posts that iOS and Android users have already seen or that were posted more than 48 hours ago. This will help Instagram’s

BuildDirect, the Vancouver, BC.-based online home improvement store, went through a tough transition in recent months. In late October 2017, the company’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Booth stepped back from his job days before the company filed for the Canadian equivalent of bankruptcy protection. It then installed former Amazon executive Dan Park, who had joined the company only a few weeks before, as its new CEO. Under Park, BuildDirect successfully restructured its debt and balance sheet an

I couldn’t name a single character in Fortnite. I’m not able to tell you anything about the lore or the plot, or even really explain where the game takes place. Yet somehow Epic’s multiplayer shooter has produced the most arresting video game narrative I’ve experienced in some time — and it’s only getting stronger as Fortnite evolves.
This weekend provided the most powerful example of Fortnite’s storytelling potential yet. At exactly 1:30PM ET on Saturd

Spotifyis the latest tech company to join the ‘Lite’ app party after a data-friendly version of its music streaming app surfaced for Android devices.
‘Spotify Lite’ — which was first spotted by the eagle eyes at Android Police — is designed to take up less space on smartphones and to consume less data, too. That’s particularly important for cheaper smartphones, which tend to have less memory, and people who use metered mobile data. In that respect,