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They begin in a similar way: Someone sneaks down a hallway, stealthily opens a door, quietly comes down stairs. Then everyone starts screaming and hugging and someone almost always cries. 
Over the past few days, people have been tweeting videos recorded as they surprise their loved ones who didn't expect them to be home for the holidays. The reveals have become so prevalent that Twitter made a moment to mark the trend. 
Watch a selection of the surprise videos below and let them warm

Shahin Farshchi Contributor Shahin Farshchi is a partner at Lux Capital.More posts by this contributorBuilding a great startup requires more than genius and a great invention Investing in frontier technology is (and isn’t) cleantech all over again
Many founders believe in the myth that the first steps of starting a business are the hardest: Attracting the first investment, the first hires, proving the technology, launching the first product and landing the first customer. Although those c

That most modern of dilemmas — not being able to employ the full algorithmic might of Snapchat lenses on your canine companion — has finally been resolved. 
That's right, as of Monday, the feature that you historically used to make yourself look like your dog can now be used to make your dog look like ... well, lots of weird stuff. Like, for example, that it has a butterfly on its nose. 
SEE ALSO: Bow down to Aurora, fluffy cat princess and IRL Snapchat filter
Importantly,

Twas the last trading day before Christmas, and on the trading floor,Most stocks were falling, and then falling some more,Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin all the banks had called,In hopes that full coffers were still in their vaults.
Bruising #stock selloff continues, as Treasury sec #Mnuchin tries to calm jittery #markets https://t.co/Ejcurl74nV via @WSJ
— Cameron McWhirter (@cammcwhirter) December 24, 2018The analysts were shaken by news of the call,which initially caused the stock mar

Hot damn 2018, we didn't think you could get any weirder. But oh man, were we ever wrong.
In what has to be one of the most bizarre PR moves of all time, disgraced actor Kevin Spacey released a three-minute YouTube video in which he appears to role play as Frank Underwood — his former part on House of Cards before he was unceremoniously removed from the production following numerous allegations of sexual misconduct — shortly after news broke that he was charged with felony sexual ass

Tech companies have always branded themselves as the good guys. But 2018 was the year that the long-held belief that Silicon Valley is on the right side of progress and all things good was called into question by a critical mass.
As startups grow bigger and richer, amassing more power and influence outside of the Valley, a reckoning has played out in government and business. Mission statements like “connecting the world” and “don’t be evil” no longer hold water.
A&n

As the late screenwriting legend William Goldman famously said; “nobody knows anything” so predictions – especially about technology – always run the risk of making people look silly in the not-so-distant-future. That said, I’m going to go out on a limb and say in the next few years we’re going to see more people becoming “Virtual Reality Refugees.” By which I mean immersive technologies will provide increasingly attractive alternatives for those

Malta,the renewable energy storage project born in Alphabet’s moonshot factory X, is now on its own and flush with $26 million from a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures .
Concord New Energy Group and Alfa Laval also invested in the round.
Project Malta launched last year in Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X) with an aim to build energy storage facilities that can support full-scale power grids. The independent company spun out of Alphabet is now c

Hundreds are dead, with more missing, following a tsunami that took the Indonesian coast by surprise on Dec. 22. 
But this was no typical tsunami. Rather, it was a volcanic tsunami, and understanding what that means may help explain why this particular manifestation of nature's power was so devastating. 
The tsunami that struck between the Sumatra and Java islands was triggered not by an earthquake — as is typically the case with tsunamis — but instead by an active volcano

When founder Bobby Farahi met Shaudi “Shoddy” Lynn, it was at a rave in L.A. Farahi has said he was immediately drawn to the fashion sense of Lynn, who was a DJ at the time; she, meanwhile, might have appreciated the business acumen of Farahi, who had already sold a broadcast monitoring service called Multivision to a rival company.
As Farahi told Inc. magazine several years ago, the couple, now married, decided to try their hand at business together, calling it Dolls Kill and sellin

North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has been tracking Santa’s progress around the globe every Christmas Eve for more than 60 years. Even a government shutdown won’t prevent NORAD from completing its once-a-year mission.
Now, General Motors is getting in on the annual tradition.
On December 24, owners of the company’s Chevrolet -branded vehicles, including the Traverse and Tahoe SUVs, Silverado truck and Cruze sedan, can push the OnStarbutton and get a real-time

There are few things in this world more difficult than launching a successful startup. It takes talent, know-how, money and a hell of a lot of good timing and luck. And even with all of those magical components in place, the odds may still be against you.
At TechCrunch, we take pride in covering the best and brightest of the startup world. But while covering the startup world is one of the most exciting and fulfilling parts of our job, death is a part of any life cycle. Sadly, not all startups t

Ranking the gags and meta-jokes in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a Sisyphean task, but there is one undeniably good goof for Christmas: the holiday record teased in the film. Which is, it turns out, 100 percent real and available online right now.
Peter Parker drops a mention of this ill-fated album in the film’s opening, and viewers who stick around during the credits get to experience “Spidey-Bells” (sung by Chris Pine) for themselves. The full EP, A Very Spidey Chris

Captiv8, a company offering tools for brands to manage influencer marketing campaigns, has released its 2018 Fraud Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report. The goal is to give marketers the data they need to spot fake followers — and thus, to separate the influencers with a real following from those who only offer the illusion of engagement.
The report argues that that this a problem with a real financial impact (it’s something that Instagram is working to crack down on), with $2.1 bil

Netflix released several holiday specials this year for its exclusive shows like Neo Yokio and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but it’s Aggretsuko that packs the sharpest punch. The 22-minute special offers excellent advice on how to capture the perfect Instagram moment while also skewering users’ worst tendencies.Aggretsuko follows its eponymous heroine through the pains of modern life, including bad bosses, flaky friends, and general existential angst. We Wish You a Metal Christma

Technology is responsible for literally thousands of new words that have been added to our daily lexicon in the last decade. Words like selfie, TL:DR, bingeable, and Bitcoin have all been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary this year. All these words started somewhere before being included in the dictionary. Usually, new words are invented in a Shakespearean fashion to best describe something that currently there is no word for. If people start using the newly created word, it might one day

Yael Grauer ContributorShare on Twitter Yael Grauer is an independent tech journalist and investigative reporter based in Phoenix. She’s written for The Intercept, Ars Technica, Breaker, Motherboard, WIRED, Slate and more.After the driver of a speeding bus ran over and killed two college students in Dhaka in July, student protesters took to the streets. They forced the ordinarily disorganized local traffic to drive in strict lanes and stopped vehicles to inspect license and registration p

It’s that time of year again. What always amazes me is how much tacky crap people will tolerate for the holidays. Creepy music, vulgar light decorations, gross food… the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great stuff too. Take holiday movies for example, there are some absolute classics. But there’s also a lot of really really terrible films which for some reason we lower our standards for. Maybe it’s the spiked eggnog, or maybe it’s ca

Chinese phone maker Xiaomi introduced a new phone — the Mi Play —today, and with it, a new notch. The device features a circular camera notch that’s not a hole-punch design, like we’ve seen on Samsung and Huawei devices, but instead is center-aligned and obvious. It’s a “water droplet” notch that’s very much a notch, even if it’s round. On back, the phone features dual, rear-facing cameras that are vertically-aligned, like Apple’s iPho

Ah, the yule log! 
A time-honored American tradition, the yule log first began in 1966, when local New York news station WPIX had a 90 minute-long slot it needed to fill on Christmas eve, according to Quartz. 
The station's president suggested filling the time with footage of a burning log with holiday music looming in the background, as a kind of Christmas card to WPIX's viewers. Since then, there have been several iterations of this popular program, many of which can now be found on

The first step in conducting online propaganda efforts and misinformation campaigns is almost always a fake social media profile. Phony profiles for nonexistent people worm their way into the social networks of real people, where they can spread their falsehoods. But neither social media companies nor technological innovations offer reliable ways to identify and remove social media profiles that don’t represent actual authentic people. It might sound positive that over six months in late

HQ Words, the new Wheel of Fortune-style game from HQ, launched out of beta last night with a debut round hosted by the company’s CEO Rus Yusupov, reports TechCrunch. Unlike the company’s first game, which has players answer 10 multiple-choice questions to win a share of the prize money, HQ Words tasks them with guessing popular phrases one letter at a time.The launch of HQ Words comes at a crucial time for the company, which in recent months has been faced with declining player num

My aunt and uncle lived up the hill from Martins Ferry, Ohio, high above the river. My uncle ran a used car lot — Snezek’s — and so it was understood that they had a little bit of money and a bigger house than the rest of the family in the Valley.
We would drive there every year at Christmas; first the two and a half hours to Martins Ferry, a pit-stop at my grandmother’s, and then a drive up the woods that covered the winding upper roads like a dark cloud. These were fami

India’s B2B supply chain is slowly shifting into the digital era. Following a $23 million investment for Moglix, which helps bring business and manufacturing procurement online, LetsTransport, a startup that brings increased efficiency to logistics and business transportation, has raised $13.5 million for growth.
Founded in 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Pushkar Singh, Sudarshan Ravi and Ankit Parasher, Bangalore-based LetsTransporthas surface-level comparisons with Uber and oth

India’s B2B supply chain is slowly shifting into the digital era. Following a $23 million investment for Moglix, which helps bring business and manufacturing procurement online, LetsTransport, a startup that brings increased efficiency to logistics and business transportation, has raised $13.5 million for growth.
Founded in 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Pushkar Singh, Sudarshan Ravi and Ankit Parasher, Bangalore-based LetsTransporthas surface level comparisons with Uber and oth

WeChat,the Chinese messaging giant with more than 1 billion monthly active users around the world, just added a Snap-like ephemeral video feature as part of its biggest overhaul since 2014.
The revamp comes as Tencent, which owns stakes in Snap, sees increasing rivalry from up-and-comers like video app TikTok and news app Jinri Toutiao. WeChat has, over the years, morphed beyond a straight-up messenger to include many utility purposes. With more than 1 million lightweight apps up and runnin

Less than a week after mystery drones grounded flights at the U.K.’s second largest airport, wreaking havoc on as many as 140,000 people’s travel plans for the Christmas period, police have admitted that there may in fact not have been any drones at all.
Gatwick airport reopened on Friday after a one-day shutdown but it appears that investigators are no closer to knowing what actually took place.
The Guardian reports that police released and exonerated a couple who had

This Christmas, plenty of people will find DNA tests under the tree. 
They're easy to use — just send 23andMe, Ancestry, or one of their competitors your spit, and in exchange you're promised a detailed breakdown of your heritage. For a little extra cash, you can learn about your genetic health risks, too. 
23andMe and Ancestry are privately held companies that don't disclose sales numbers. But ads for them are all over the internet these days. Last year, Ancestry claimed it sold

What’s the best accompaniment to Christmas dinner? Red cabbage? Get out of here. Parsnips? Come on, now. Sprouts? That’s an argument for another day. 
The obvious correct answer is: 'pigs in blankets'. And I mean proper pigs in blankets which, in the UK, means a sausage wrapped in bacon — none of this pastry nonsense. 
SEE ALSO: Could the mince pie flat white be the British PSL? I bloody hope not
Whoever thought of taking a sausage and giving it a little pork jacket d

In August 2017, the controversy over Bitcoin’s scalability issues led to its blockchain being split for the first time in history, resulting in its first hard fork — Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Bitcoin Cash was a cryptocurrency with a purpose. Its proponents wanted a digital currency that would reduce high transaction fees associated with Bitcoin (BTC), making everyday use of cryptocurrencies viable. This was to be achieved by increasing the block size limits of Bitcoin’s blockchain f

As this particularly trying year mercifully draws to a close, we have only one thing to say to 2018: Thank you, next. 
To celebrate the conclusion of the year, we're rounding up the 10 best Mashable Shop deals on gadgets from 2018, all of which you can still snag for the next few days only. Plus, you can start your New Year off on a high note by entering the code NEWYEAR2019 at checkout to save an additional 19%.
Shop the deals below:1. TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones &mdash

Home security cameras used to be only for the rich and/or famous, but thanks to the democratization of technology and consumer demand, keeping your home safe by spying on it has become affordable for more and more people without Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, or yachts to speak of. 
But with so many options on the market, how do you decide which home security camera is right for you? You read this guide, that's how. We've dug through Amazon reviews and compared features to help you decide on a hom