Technology news

Apple Pay will be supported in CVS pharmacies and 7-Eleven stores nationwide, CEO Tim Cook announced on a call with investors this afternoon following the company’s positive third quarter earnings results.In addition to adding CVS and 7-Eleven as retail partners, Cook says Apple Pay handled more total transactions last quarter — more than 1 billion — than competitor Square and more mobile transactions than PayPal. The platform will also be launching in Germany later this year,

Microsoft is starting to test its new Your Phone app for Windows 10. The software maker first unveiled the app back at the company’s Build developer conference in May, and it’s designed to mirror content from a phone to a PC. Android phone users will be able to test Your Phone first, with the ability to drag and drop recent photos straight into Office apps and other Windows apps direct from a phone. Microsoft is also planning to add support for text message sync and notifications fr

Apple posted its third quarter earnings today with a revenue of $53.3 billion, surpassing its projection by $1 billion. It’s the strongest third quarter for the company ever, despite that it’s a quarter that tends to slow on iPhone sales as consumers prepare for new smartphone announcements in the fall. The average selling price of the iPhone was $724, which was above analyst estimates of $693.
Apple’s expected revenue for fiscal Q4 is $60 to $62 billion, a 16 to 19 percent gr

Google is working with publishers to make it easier to view data journalism in search results, as announced on its blog today. It’s one of the steps Google News Initiative is taking to make data journalism more visible, with the field quickly growing across media. Over half of all newsrooms now have dedicated data journalists, and this feature aims to pinpoint the most useful results from pages containing data tables.“Data journalism takes many forms, and it’s not always clear

Facebook is redesigning the navigation on its mobile app to prioritize the services you use most frequently.The navigation bar, which spans the bottom of the screen on the iOS app and the top on Android, previously showed every user in the same country the same five icons. For example, in the US, it was the News Feed, notifications, menu, Watch, and Marketplace. According to CNET, with this update, everyone will still see the News Feed, notification, and menu icons, but the other slots will be

LG’s Stylo 4 is one of the few phones you can get with a built-in stylus, and now the phone has arrived on Amazon as a Prime Exclusive, bringing the price down from $300 to $250.
The Stylo 4 has a large 6.2-inch display with a resolution just above 1080p, and it includes a slot on the bottom right corner of the phone for storing its stylus. When you pull the stylus out, you can immediately start writing on the screen of the phone — even when the screen is off — to start taking

Issues surrounding inclusivity and diversity make headlines often these days, but the attention isn’t exactly translating to real action. According to this year’s edition of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual study, Hollywood’s progress on representation has been more or less stagnant for a full decade across practically all marginalized groups. “As the reverberations of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements continue to resonate in the entertainment in

When MoviePass was first founded in 2011, it had a relatively simple business model: a subscription service for theatrically released movies, where members would pay a monthly fee in exchange for a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet of movies. The idea was to bring theaters on board with a profit-sharing system that would benefit both the theaters and the service. But theater chains were immediately resistant, and MoviePass’ experiments with various pricing tiers — some as much as $50 a

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been mum about the fare prices of its soon-to-be-launched commercial ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona. But according to Bloomberg, riders can expect prices to be about the same as the cost of taking an Uber.In interviewing members of Waymo’s “Early Rider” program, reporters from Bloomberg got to see a mock-up of the company’s still-underwraps ride-hailing app, complete with probable fare prices. And, uns

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has kept mum about how much it will eventually charge people to ride in its autonomous taxis. But according to Bloomberg, the self-driving company has begun testing out trip fares with its early riders as it moves closer to launching its commercial ride-hailing service in Phoenix.
In interviewing members of Waymo’s “Early Rider” program, reporters from Bloomberg got to see a mock-up of the company’s still-underwraps

A company called Twelve South knows the plight of the messy bag owner. Today, it launched a new product called AirSnap, which is a small, leather holder for your AirPods case. The idea is that you can snap it onto your bag and then never have to rummage through your stuff to find your earbuds. It’s available in black, teal, or brown for $29.99 through Amazon or the Twelve South website. The company says each one will “develop a unique patina over time, making each one personal.&rdqu

The US Food and Drug Administration has declared that it is cracking down on “vaginal rejuvenation” devices that use lasers to reshape the vagina. Though these have been approved for specific purposes, like treating cancer or removing genital warts, they are increasingly being used for purposes like dryness and menopause-related issues. There is no evidence that they work.
The FDA has already sent warning letters to seven companies hawking the treatment for unapproved purposes. In o

Facebook announced today that it’s identified and banned suspicious accounts that engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” some of which may be designed to influence the US midterm elections scheduled for November. News of the impending announcement was first reported by The New York Times. It is unclear which organization or country is behind the campaign, although the Times reports that Facebook officials who briefed lawmakers this week said Russia may be involved. As

Benjamin Joffe Contributor Benjamin Joffe is a partner at HAX.More posts by this contributor70 years of VC innovation 2017 crowdfunding guide
The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following, well-intentioned, and mostly delusional quote, “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO on Nasdaq.”
But a more likely scenario looks something like this.:
You invest a few years of hard work to build something of value. One day you receive an acq

Fans have been trying to recut Peter Jackson’s overstuffed trilogy of The Hobbit films for about as long as the third movie in the series (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s roughly 300-page novel) has been out on Blu-ray. The latest edit comes from an unlikely place — actor Topher Grace, who IndieWire reports has edited down Jackson’s trilogy into a single two-hour film.
Grace isn’t exactly a stranger to fan edits of films — in 2012, he famously trimmed down George L

At long last, Google is making it super easy for you to set music as your alarm sound in the Clock app. By way of a new update that’s starting to roll out today, users will be able to connect their Spotify accounts to the clock app and wake up to their favorite playlists and songs.
This new update will let Spotify Free and Premium users integrate the music streaming app into the alarm sounds section on Google Clock. There, they will be able to select between two tabs for picking alarm sou

Applying for an apartment rental is about to look a lot like submitting a job application online. As anyone who’s been through the hell of apartment hunting can attest, finding a home can be a grueling experience, and Zillow is looking to simplify it by centralizing the entire process. Starting today, Zillow is offering renters and landlords property management tools for apartment applications and rental payments online, as reported by MarketWatch.
Renters can pay $29 to submit an applica

July has not been good for MoviePass, the embattled all-you-can-watch movie ticket subscription service. The company ran out of money and shut down for a night last week. It’s compensated by shutting people out of popular movies like Mission: Impossible — Fallout. The company has claimed lately that technical difficulties are keeping users from getting movie tickets, though it’s unclear whether this is also a behind-the-scenes gambit to limit how much of its remaining money us

Huawei is introducing a new phone in its Honor Note series, and this model is coming with the line’s biggest screen yet: just a touch under seven inches. Back in an ancient smartphone era of, I guess, 2013 or like two years ago, that size was considered a tablet.
The Honor Note 10 isn’t the first phone to breach the 7-inch mark — it isn’t even the first phone from Huawei to do so — but it is another sign that phones aren’t going to stop growing, especially no

Facebook appears to be working on a talent show feature that would have users record themselves singing and then submitting their videos for critique. In the app’s code, researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted an interface that would let users choose a popular song and then record themselves singing it.
The feature might let users compete against each other in a talent show of sorts, and allow talent singers another platform to get discovered on. Wong notes on Twitter that the feature looks

Sony is taking the unusual step of launching new TV models in the middle of summer. The company announced updated OLED and LCD 4K HDR TVs back at CES, but it’s not quite done for this year. At an event today in New York City that had the tagline “a masterpiece unveiled,” Sony Electronics president and COO Mike Fasulo said the company’s new flagship sets— called the Master Series — are designed to preserve and showcase a creator’s intent “from lens

Rakuten is hosting a site-wide sale that ends later today at 11:59PM PT. The promotion knocks 15 percent off of any purchase with offer code SAVE15, allowing up to $50 to be knocked off of your final shopping cart cost.
We’ve successfully applied the coupon to expensive products, like the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, point-and-shoot cameras, video games, noise-canceling headphones, as well as some cheaper necessities, like printer cartridges. The coupon also appears to work with non-tech it

Sony has released a fresh trailer for its upcoming Venom movie, a cautionary tale about what happens when you fail to treat your parasites. Venom stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, the anti-hero to Riz Ahmed’s Dr. Carlton Drake, a sort of mad genius-slash-corporate villain trying to cheat nature and achieve self-guided human evolution via biological upgrades rather than technological ones.
This trailer is packed with footage of the curious relationship between Eddie and his new symbiote pal,

YouTube is making more original shows for international markets like Japan, France, India, Germany, and Mexico, an executive told Reuters last Friday. The move comes as YouTube looks for more paying subscribers in less saturated markets for its YouTube Premium service (formally known as YouTube Red).YouTube plans to make music documentaries, scripted shows, reality shows, and talk shows all produced in local languages, the platform’s global head of original programming Susanne Daniels sai

Google is building official notch support into Android P, but it’s laying down some ground rules first: two notches is the limit.
In a blog post for developers yesterday, Android UI product manager Megan Potoski wrote that Google is working with device partners “to mandate a few requirements” for app compatibility purposes. Among those are limits on notches.
The mandate says that Android P phones can’t have “more than two cutouts on a device.” Only one notch

Skyline AI founders Iri Amirav, Or Hiltch, Guy Zipori and Amir Leitersdorf
A mere four months after coming out of stealth mode with $3 million in seed funding, real estate investment startup Skyline AI announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, a returning investor, and TLV Partners, with participation from JLL Spark, a division of real estate investment management firm JLL. The strategic funding will allow Skyline AIto add more asset classes to i

Earlier this year, Intel released its eighth-generation NUC, an incredibly compact PC that still managed to pack enough power to run AAA and VR gaming titles at playable frame rates. But the downside to the NUC is largely its cost — for the price of the NUC, which could run more than $1,500 with the necessary RAM and storage you’d need, you can get a much more powerful traditional gaming PC.
Chuwi’s HiGame PC is a new compact PC that aims to pick up where Intel’s leaves

Lyft is raising the stakes in its mission to dominate all modes of transportation in major cities. Starting in August, the ride-hailing company will offer 100 residents of Chicago $550 each in credit to Lyft and several other mobility services if they ditch their personal vehicles for a month. It’s a bold, if slightly gimmicky, way to highlight the high costs associated with car ownership, while also promoting cheaper alternatives of getting around.To be sure, Lyft isn’t handing ove

For those of us unlucky enough to be forced to accommodate mother nature’s whims on a monthly basis, you know that — in addition to cramps, headaches and mood swings — it can be a challenge to find time in your schedule to buy the period products you need.
Desperate trips to the pharmacy when disaster hits can suffice, but the co-founders of the tampon subscription service Athena Club, Maria Markina and Allie Griswold, thought there had to be a better way to provide women the p

Rumors of a dual-SIM iPhone first emerged earlier this year, and now Apple’s own iOS 12 is backing up the reports. A new “iPhone X Plus” is rumored to include a 6.5-inch OLED display and dual-SIM support in certain regions. 9to5Mac reports that iOS 12 developer beta 5, released yesterday, includes references to dual-SIM support. The operating system even mentions a second physical SIM tray, meaning an iPhone with dual-SIM support might not be restricted to a single SIM tray an

Freshworks, a company that offers a variety of business software tools ranging from IT management to CRM for sales and customer support software, today announced that it has raised a $100 million funding round co-led by Sequoia and Accel Partners, with participation from CaptialG.
The company’s last funding round came in the form of a $55 million Series F round led by Sequoia in 2016. Today’s round brings the San Bruno-based company’s total funding to $250 million, at a va