Technology news

Martina Lauchengco ContributorShare on Twitter Martina spent over 20 years as a marketing and product executive building and crafting strategies for market-defining software like Microsoft Office and Netscape Navigator. As anoperating partner at Costanoa Ventures, she sits on multiple boards and advises companies on all things go-to-market. She also teaches at the UC Berkeley graduate school of engineering.Jim Wilson ContributorShare on Twitter Jim is a seasoned sales executive with over 25 yea

Fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors are all well and good, but if you want to track activity inside the body, the solutions aren’t nearly as convenient. Iota Biosciences wants to change that with millimeter-wide sensors that can live more or less permanently in your body and transmit wirelessly what they detect, and a $15 million Series A should put them well on their way.
The team emerged from research at UC Berkeley, where co-founders Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz were working on

Earlier today, when Instagramsuddenly transformed into a landscape-oriented Tinder-esque nightmare, the app’s dedicated users extremely lost their minds and immediately took to Twitter to be vocal about it.
As we reported, the company admitted that the abrupt shift from Instagram’s well-established vertical scrolling was a mistake. The mea culpa came quickly enough, but Instagram’s accidental update was already solidified as one of the last meme-able moments of 2018.
That was s

One of Silicon Valley’s prominent billionaires is in hot water after funding deceptive social media campaigns with echoes of Russia’s own political playbook. Reid Hoffman,who co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 and is now a partner at Greylock, footed the bill for a small political project with the aim of getting Democrat Doug Jones elected in 2017’s special election. Now, Hoffman is sorry — but he also maintains that he didn’t know where his money ended up.
It’s not

Snap had one of its most unexciting years to date. As 2018 went on, the company began to lose both talent and users. At the same time, it set loftier plans in motion to compete with its greatest competitor, Facebook, through augmented reality, new merch, and another version of Spectacles, despite tons of unsold stock. This year, it seemed Snap had a bigger game plan and we’re seeing it try to execute – but none of that matters if the company has no staff or users.
Just this year, Sn

The secondary luxury goods market has been growing wildly in recent years, with more shoppers opting to both sell their lightly used luxury goods like clothing and jewelry for cold, hard cash, as well as buying the pre-owned, authenticated luxury goods of others.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the trend is The RealReal, a nearly eight-year-old shopping destination for the growing population of people who might not be willing or able to purchase a new Hermes Birkin bag but are willing to buy

Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the British cave rescuer who sued the billionaire entrepreneur for calling him a pedophile.
Musk’s motion presents numerous reasons to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, all of which come back to a two main points: Twitter is “infamous for invective and hyperbole,” and therefore should not be considered fact and these “imaginative attacks,” even if offensive, “are by their nature op

China’s internet celebrity economy has expanded exponentially in recent years. According to a report released by iResearch, the number of online celebrities in China with more than 100,000 followers has increased by 57.3 percent since 2016. With a single embedded ad in a WeChat post worth up to $145,000 USD for influencers with dedicated followings, and a total market estimated at $14 billion USD in 2018 by Beijing-based research agency Analysus, it’s a sizeable, attractive market f

Popular to-do list software Any.do now has a smart grocery list feature within its mobile app that you can share with friends and family to make shopping more efficient. Algorithms naturally sort food items by category such as “fruits & vegetables” and “dairy & cheese,” to keep you from having to visit the same aisle twice. They will also suggest grocery items based on previous things you’ve purchased. So if you always get a loaf of bread with some olive oi

Next to the Apple AirPods, the Jabra Elite 65t are the best truly wireless headphones that you can buy. Jabra also makes a more expensive, slightly better version (depending on your use cases) called the Elite Active 65t, and you can get the titanium black color variant for $50 off of their usual price over at Best Buy, or the retailer’s eBay seller page.
For most, the differences between the Elite 65t and Elite Active 65t are too subtle to consider given the extra cost. Though, since the

Startups supporting startups are blazing a new trail with support from venture capitalists.
Co-working spaces like The Wing and The Riveter raked in funding rounds this year, as did Brex, the provider of a corporate card built specifically for startups. Now Carta, which helps companies manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments and equity plans, has announced an $80 million Series D at a valuation of $800 million. The company, formerly known as eShares, raised the capital from le

Samsung announced a new feature for its 2019 TVs today that will allow people to control various devices, like PCs, tablets, and smartphones, from their TVs. The company says Remote Access lets users connect certain accessories, like their keyboard or mouse, to their TV, so they can play games off their PC from their TV or broadcast web-based office services on the bigger screen.It’s unclear how all of this will work, as details are sparse, but it sounds like users will need to install va

Tesla CEO Elon Muskis making some audacious promises again for the company’s network of electric fast chargers, known as Superchargers. This time, he’s aiming for 100 percent Tesla Supercharger coverage in Europe by next year.
In response to a question on Twitter, Musk said Tesla’s Supercharger coverage will extend to 100 percent of Europe in 2019. “From Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey,” Musk wrote.
A look at Tesla’s Supercharger map shows a high concen

Alexa wasn’t the only thing that crashed over Christmas due to an influx of new users. Apparently, Philips Hue has been having an outage, as well. A multi-day outage, in fact. The company confirmed on Wednesday that customers were experiencing issues creating new accounts, logging in and linking their account to third parties. It blamed the issues on “a lot of new activations.”
In other words, many people received Hue’s connected lighting products over the holidays and we

Amazon is hosting its annual Digital Day tomorrow, December 28th, lowering prices on just about everything digital. Whether the holidays brought you a new Kindle Fire tablet, Kindle e-reader, or an iPad, you’ll be able to fill it up with apps, movies, subscriptions, ebooks, and more, for less. To preview the event, there are already a few deals currently live for your perusal.
Best-selling ebooks from the likes of Haruki Murakami, Marie Kondo, Gary Shteyngart, and more are less than $5 ea

The White House is considering an executive order that would ban American wireless carriers from buying equipment from Chinese companies, according to a new report from Reuters. Such an order would primarily impact Huawei and ZTE — both Chinese companies, and two of the largest manufacturers of telecom equipment — and have a significant impact on the ongoing rollout of 5G network infrastructure.
The planned executive order would direct the Commerce Department to block purchases of C

2018 was a landmark year for Apple, one that saw the Cupertino company soar to new heights as a business, including a span that saw it surpass $1 trillion in market value to become the first US company to hit that mark.And yet, even as Apple’s stock rises higher than ever, the year as a whole for the company was oddly subdued, with new software and hardware that either largely maintained or bought outdated products back to the status quo, but didn’t really see the company move the i

Instagramconfirms that a bug this morning mistakenly rolled out a massive change to its feed that replaced the traditional scrolling with horizontal tap-to-advance, like with Stories. In October, TechCrunch reported Instagram was testing tap-to-advance for browsing through Explore posts. But many users woke up to a shock this morning when their familiar vertical swipe stopped advancing the main feed. Many users immediately complained that the gesture felt awkward and annoying.
“Due to a bu

Grove Collaborative, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that sells household, personal care, baby, children’s and pet products, has been busy raising money in 2018, shows two new SEC filings that lists representatives from the company’s earlier investors, including Mayfield, Norwest Venture Partners and MHS Capital, as well as apparent new investor General Atlantic, represented by partner Catherine Beaudoin.
One of the filings shows that Grove Collaborative,which

Gfycat, a home for GIF-making tools and an online community, is rolling out a new way to create GIFs — it will now let you keep the sound on. With “Gfycat Sound,” as the feature is called, GIF makers will have the option to retain the audio from the video file they’re using to create their “GIF” — something Gfycat believes will be especially popular among gamers.
The company had already experimented with other types of non-traditional GIFs, like longer G

Instagram has quietly started testing a horizontal feed for some users, a huge sideways shift from the vertically-scrolling user experience that’s been the norm since the app launched. The company had previously been testing the feature back in October in the Explore section of the app, but it seems that it’s rolling it out more widely to users’ main feeds today.
The new feed basically turns all posts into a single, giant Instagram story, complete with tapping to advance and a

Epic Gameshad as good a year in 2018 as any company in tech. Fortnitebecame the world’s most popular game, growing the company’s valuation to $15 billion, but it has helped the company pile up cash, too. Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year fueled by the continued success of Fortnite, a source with knowledge of the business told TechCrunch.
Epic did not respond to a request for comment.
Fortnite, which is free to play but makes money selling digital items, has popularized t

Just after midnight on January 1st, a NASA spacecraft will whiz past the most distant space rock that’s ever been visited in our Solar System. This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood.
The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it’s been traveling through space for the last 13 years. You may remember this

Apple is set to start building its high-end iPhone models in India in early 2019, with the company partnering with the local branch of Foxconn (which already handles a huge chunk of Apple’s existing iPhone manufacturing), according to a report from CNBC.While Apple has been assembling iPhones in India since 2017, beginning with the iPhone SE and followed by the iPhone 6S earlier this year, the newly reported Foxconn partnership would see newer and more expensive iPhones like the iPhone X

What the heck is “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”?
It’s probably not just a regular episode of the critically acclaimed science fiction anthology series. Netflixhas been pretty cryptic about it, only announcing its existence last week, ahead of a December 28 release.
Given the reported 5 hour, 12-minute runtime, “Bandersnatch” may be the choose-your-own-adventure episode that we know was in the works — in that case, it wouldn’t actually take hours and hours

As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to look at some our favorite apps of the year. While not all of these are brand new, many of them popped up onto our radar for the first time in 2018, and are definitely worth the attention. Others are some of our favorites that are still best-in-class despite having been around for some time now. We aim to do things differently at TNW, and as such you’re not going to find the recommendations you’re probably used to seeing: Gmail, Skype

In the words of its writer, Hugo Award nominee Zoe Quinn, the Vertigo comic book Goddess Mode is a “weird neon baby of cyberpunk and magical girls,” a world where Arthur C. Clark’s first law reigns supreme, where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Our heroine is Cassandra Price, a brilliant mess of a human being eking out an existence at a megacorporation that her father’s work helped elevate into one of the most lucrative companies in

At a certain point, all the bad Facebook headlines start to blur together. Earlier this month, a New York Times investigation found that Facebook had carved out exceptions to its data-sharing policies for major companies like Netflix and Spotify, agreements that were still in place as early as last year. In the same week, we learned the company was sucking up more data from third party apps through its login system, had enabled a misinformation campaign in Bangladesh, and keeps logging location

In July, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Cause for termination: a series of offensive tweets, in most cases about a decade old, that were circulated by a right-wing media personality. Gunn’s tweets, many of which were about molestation or pedophilia, were indefensible. But the method in which they were dug up, as well as the people who circulated them — bad-faith conspiracy theorists who used old jokes made in poor taste to brand Gunn as a pedophile —

Apple’s macOS operating system has matured to the point where, out of the box, your new Mac laptop or desktop pretty much has the bases covered when it comes to email, calendar management, and some basic productivity tools. But there’s a whole world of better and more powerful Mac software out there that can make everything from GIF-making to photo editing to window organization a whole lot easier.While paying for software might seem like some pre-Google anachronism, many of the bes

Microsoft has done a good job updating its Windows 10 operating system with useful utilities and features, but there’s still room for plenty of third-party apps. If you’ve just received a new PC over the holidays, we have some favorite Windows apps that will improve your experience — and maybe your life.
We here at The Verge have rounded up our favorite and most-used apps, games, and utilities. Look for our app picks for iPhones, Android phones, PCs, and Macs;our favorite game