Technology news

The Academy Awards will forgo a proper host for the first time in three decades, according to a new report from Variety.Sources told Variety, “Producers will select a crop of A-listers to introduce various segments instead of relying on one marquee name to kick things off in a monologue filled with Trump zingers.” The show is also expected to “play up a high-profile year for music in film, thanks to likely nominees Lady Gaga, Dolly Parton, and Kendrick Lamar,” according

A small indie game on Steam was on probation for several months after its release, only yesterday being granted access to the platform’s full features. While the exact reason for the problem appears to be a small bug, the developers seemed to think, at least for a bit, that the game’s huge amount of positive reviews had fooled Steam into thinking the game was a phony. The indie game in question is a rhythm game called Wandersong, the Steam page of which appeared to be held in a

Production company Skydance Media announced today that it is hiring John Lasseter, the former chief creative officer of Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Animation Studios, to head Skydance’s nascent animation division. Lasseter, who worked his way up from an animator job at Pixar to a powerful position overseeing Disney’s animation strategy and storytelling, was first placed on a leave of absence from Disney in November 2017, then was pushed out of the company in June 2018, following

Being engrossed in the world of tech can prove to be an expensive pastime, but it doesn’t have to be. Sure, some enthusiast products will always be a little pricey, but a few must-have gadgets are super easy to find discounted — so much so that you should think twice before paying full price for them.
We’ve all be there before: getting price-gouged for a set of throwaway earbuds at the supermarket, or paying extra because you waited until the last minute to buy all of the tech

2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 is the year VR will finally break into the mainstream! Okay, so we’ve all heard that one before. Despite the fact analysts predict it’ll be a great year for VR companies, the tech is still a novelty to most. HTC hopes to change that by finally addressing VR‘s biggest problem: a disjointed user experience. HTC unveiled a slew of updates to its Vive platform earlier this week during its presentation at CES. The biggest splashes came in the form of the new

Bose wants to bring its acclaimed noise-canceling technology from your headphones to your car. The Framingham, Massachusetts-based company just unveiled a new technology called QuietComfort which claims to measure your vehicle’s vibrations in order to eliminate noise from your daily drive.eliminate noise from your daily drive
As noted by Bose, this type of noise-canceling technology is likely to gain more prominence as vehicles get lighter and more electric. Sitting inside a whisper-quiet

Twitter is starting to test status availability and ice breaker-like tweets, which will roll out as part of a beta program in the coming weeks.A green bubble will appear beside beta users’ names when they’re actively online and using the app, similar to Instagram’s status indicator, according to new screenshots released by Twitter and first reported by Engadget. Twitter hopes that by seeing someone is online, you’ll be more likely to respond to their tweets and start a c

Twitter is starting to test new ways of displaying tweets, which will roll out as part of a beta program in the coming weeks.
The beta program will include new features like speech bubbles, indenting, and different colors determined by whether you follow someone or are replying, according to a Twitter representative. They can be seen in the tweet below.Other features, like status availability seen in the screenshot below, may roll out in the future, according to Twitter’s rep. This featur

Disney announced today that it has renewed Star Wars Resistance for a second season, which will debut this fall. The studio also released a trailer for the second half of the first season, which resumes this weekend.Launched last October, Star Wars Resistance is the third animated Star Wars TV show from Dave Filoni, who created The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Resistance is set in the post-Return of the Jedi era of the franchise, and it follows a young New Republic pilot named Kazuda &ldquo

Instagram is adding the ability to let you publish a post to multiple accounts at the same time, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The feature will become available to all iOS users, but there’s no word on if or when it will come to Android.
When the option to “self-regram” becomes available for you, it will appear when you are about to share a new post. Underneath the options to tag people and mark your location should be “Post to Other Accounts,” wh

TiVo is launching apps for the Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV streaming devices later this year, letting people watch live or recorded video on multiple TVs without investing in a separate separate TiVo Mini box. Zatz Not Funny spotted the apps at CES and reported that they’re launching in the second and third quarters of 2019 — with the Fire TV coming first, Roku second, and Apple TV last. TiVo previously launched a beta app for Fire TV, but it was retired in 2017.
TiVo has been appea

Spoiler warning: This review reveals some plot points of the first three episodes of The Passage.
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but in Fox’s new show The Passage, which premieres on January 14th, the road to the end of the world is paved with bad ideas. Based on Justin Cronin’s best-selling trilogy about the vampire apocalypse, the show uses voice-over from spunky orphan turned government test subject Amy Bellafonte (Saniyya Sidney) throughout its first episode

I draw on a Wacom Bamboo tablet every day, and while digital art is quick and efficient, sometimes I miss the feeling of drawing on paper. I’ve tried out a lot of “smart writing pads” that digitize text written on paper, but the iSKN Slate was among the first I tried in 2016 that was geared toward artists. The follow-up Slate I briefly tested at CES this year is a big improvement.
The original Slate was unique in that it let the user fit magnetic rings on their own pens and pe

Apparently a lot of people want to put Alexa in their cars, as Amazon tells TechCrunch it received over a million preorders for the company’s recently announced Echo Auto. The credit card-sized device sits on your dashboard and brings Alexa capabilities to your car via a 3.5mm aux jack, or over a smartphone’s existing Bluetooth setup.
Amazon recently revealed it has sold more than 100 million devices with Alexa, so in the scope of things, 1 million might not seem like that much. But

Google is rolling out a new feature in search today that can help make research on a specific topic easier over a long period of time.
They’re called activity cards, and as long as you’re logged into your Google account, they’ll let you access your past search history on a specific topic right in the results. Whether you are looking for a new gym routine or a few new recipes, your previous related searches will be available at the top of the results page, making it easier to &

Qualcomm helped create the smartphone as we know it. Its patents are part of the standard for modern wireless broadband systems, and the company is now the world’s largest producer of baseband processors — the modem chip that lets phones connect to data networks. But over the next few weeks, a judge will determine whether Qualcomm abused that power, hearing a complaint brought by the Federal Trade Commission in 2017.
The Qualcomm trial started on January 4th, and it will run through

Ikea has set a release date of April 1st for its aggressively priced smart blinds in the United States, according to a Fast Company report, only a couple of months after the motorized shades’ debut in Europe on February 2nd. There, Ikea priced its Fyrtur blackout shades between $113 and $181 (converted from euros), with blind sizes ranging from the width of your average room window, all the way up to 195 cm (76.8 inches) wide.
If you’ve never heard of smart blinds before — int

Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook, according to a new analysis by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities. Older users shared more fake news than younger ones regardless of education, sex, race, income, or how many links they shared. In fact, age predicted their behavior better than any other characteristic — including party affiliation.
The role of fake news in influencing voter behavior has been debated continuously since Donald

After launching last year in the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will expand to every country in the world on July 9th, Google said in an announcement today.Google started blocking ads last year based on guidelines developed by the Coalition For Better Ads, a trade group the company helped launch. The guidelines prohibit websites from using obtrusive advertising strategies, like employing pop-ups or videos with auto-playing sound.Two-thirds of noncompliant

Our Vergecast CES 2019 coverage continues with part two of our roundup show. Dami Lee and Dan Seifert join Nilay and Dieter to discuss a range of gadgets from a laundry-folding robot to gaming PCs. There’s also some talk on the various new products and features with Google Assistant, as well as the continuing fake 5G drama.
2:05 - Tim Cook says Apple will “announce new services this year”
8:02 - Google’s plan to take on Alexa: new features, new devices, and a Trojan hors

Fair warning: next time Microsoft rolls out one of its big semi-annual Windows 10 updates, you’ll probably lose a big chunk of storage. In a blog post, Microsoft announced that “with the next major update,” Windows will set aside about 7GB of disk space for updates, apps, temporary files, and system caches. Though that may be annoying for those of us on limited drive space, the logic seems pretty sound. By Windows reserving space beforehand, you can avoid having to clear up sp

Astronomers have spotted more than a dozen new pulses of radio waves coming from outside our galaxy, including a few bursts that stem from the exact same location in the sky. It’s only the second time we’ve found these weird intergalactic flashes, known as fast radio bursts that repeatedly come from one spot in space. This discovery brings us one step closer to figuring out where these weird pulses come from.
Today’s discovery, presented in two papers in the journal Nature, ex

AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it’s primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that’s competitive with Nvidia’s RTX 2080. It’s called the Radeon VII (“Seven”), and it uses the company’s first 7nm graphics chip that we’d seen teased previously.
It’ll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the c

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:1. Facebook is the new crapware 
Well Facebook,you did it again. Fresh off its latest privacy scandal, the troubled social media giant has inked a deal with Android to pre-install its app on an undisclosed number of phones and make the software permanent. This means you won’t be able to

Funding into cryptocurrency and blockchain startups in the UK reached a new record last year. According to data published by Pitchbook and London & Partners, companies in the space raised more than £200m from venture capital investors. Big rounds included the £61M raised by blockchain software firm Bitfury and a Series A closed by London-based TradeIX. In stark contrast, startups in the sector only received £19.11M in 2017 and £51.96M in 2016. Overall, London’s

The war of the digital game stores continues, and this time it’s Epic making a major move. Today, Epic announced a deal with Ubisoft to bring The Division 2 to its freshly launched game store. The PC version of the online shooter will also be available through Ubisoft’s own digital store, but it won’t be for sale on Steam; this in spite of the fact that the original The Division was sold through Steam, and the sequel was previously listed on Valve’s store as recently as

Portable wireless chargers are one of those ideas that seems better on paper than in practice. The idea of being able to stick a charger in your pocket with your phone, and it’ll magically charge while you walk with no cable required runs into the problem of keeping the phone and charger aligned enough to actually charge. But Kickstarter-funded battery pack Yoolox may have found the solution at with an odd analog approach: use a bunch of rubber suction cups to keep your phone and charger

Robots are a staple of the CES show floor. They’re fun to film, they grab attention, and, most importantly, they symbolize the futuristic fantasies that sustain so much of the tech industry. Without the dream of a robot butler cleaning your house, where would that next round of funding for the struggling robot startup come from?But as with past shows, this year’s robots are a mixed bunch. More often than not, companies are touting functionality they can’t yet deliver, though t