Technology news

Ford’s legendary and popular F-series pickup line will soon have electric options, the company announced today. The move is intended to “future-proof” the enormous truck business against rising gas prices and regulations favoring electric vehicles over internal combustion.
Jim Farley, Ford’s president of global markets, announced the news at a press conference in Detroit. As reported in the Detroit Free Press, he specified that there will be both pure/battery electric and

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made a stir on the campaign trail for her effective use of social media, and tomorrow she’ll be sharing her knowledge with her fellow Democrats, according to USA Today.
Ocasio-Cortez will be leading a session with the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee Thursday “on the most effective ways to engage constituents on Twitter and the importance of digital storytelling.” Her colleague, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) will be sharing his

Resolute Ventures, an early-stage firm with offices in San Francisco and Boston, just closed its fourth fund with $75 million.
It’s an almost shockingly conservative amount of capital in today’s era of big-is-better funds. And with valuable companies like the real estate startup OpenDoor, the applicant tracking system company Greenhouse and the dog products company BarkBox in its portfolio, one imagines that seven-year-old Resolute could have raised more.
It didn’t want to do t

Apple will slow down its hiring in some divisions after holiday iPhone sales came in lower than expected, according to a report from Bloomberg. That’s not quite as severe as a full-blown hiring freeze and far from layoffs. But it does indicate the company that was, just six months ago, valued at over a trillion dollars is entering a period of financial uncertainty, as the success of the iPhone has begun to visibly falter.
Apple CEO Tim Cook disclosed the hiring slowdown to employees in a

Apple’s newly launched battery cases for the iPhone XS and XS Max have more battery capacity than any of Apple’s prior cases. The Verge initially reported that the cases’ battery capacity was the smallest yet, but that information was incorrect.
Strictly speaking, the new Apple cases have the lowest mAh rating, at 1,369mAh. But that’s because instead of using a single large cell (like the iPhone 7 battery case’s 2,365mAh battery or the iPhone 6 case’s 1,877mA

If the usual cycle holds, it’s going to be a few months before Google is ready to share anything about Android Q. But XDA Developers apparently managed to spend some time with a very early version of Android’s next big update, and although it doesn’t offer the full view, it does provide a look at some of what Google might have planned.
The biggest visual change (for now) is a system-wide dark mode. Android 9 Pie’s “theme” can be changed from light to dark, bu

Data from a private insurance company has given scientists a new way to study whether nature or nurture matters more when it comes to staying healthy in the face of disease. Though the answer isn’t definitive or exact — it varies according to each of the 560 diseases that were studied — the technique holds promise for bringing more insights in the future.The traditional way of studying nature versus nurture relies on twins. Because identical twins share the same genetic code,

Federal prosecutors are pursuing a criminal investigation into the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei for reportedly stealing trade secrets and misappropriating technology from its US partners, including T-Mobile, according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to the Journal, this investigation is in its final stages and arose out of several civil lawsuits targeting Huawei. An indictment could come soon.
One of these civil lawsuits was posed by T-Mobile. In 2017, a Seattle jury found th

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, U.S. federal prosecutors are preparing a criminal indictment against Huawei for stealing trade secrets. The report, which cites sources with knowledge of the indictment, specifically mentions Huawei’s actions surrounding a T-Mobile smartphone testing tool known as “Tappy.” The report notes that the current investigation is far enough along that an indictment may come soon.
This isn’t the first we’ve heard

Spotify has started rolling out a new Car View mode to let users more easily control their music when behind the wheel. The feature is automatically enabled when the app detects a Bluetooth connection with a vehicle, according to 9to5Google.
Car View basically just supersizes the song info, track controls, and other critical buttons like shuffle. Album art is not displayed in Car View. Spotify has been testing an in-car mode for some time now. In July 2017, the company was toying with an early

Update: CEO Elon Musk says on Twitter that Starship and Raptor (rocket engine) development is staying in Hawthorne, while prototypes are being built in Texas. Musk also said that the story “stems from a miscommunication by SpaceX .” Original story follows (the headline has also been updated).
The source info is incorrect. Starship & Raptor development is being done out of our HQ in Hawthorne, CA. We are building the Starship prototypes locally at our launch site in Texas, as thei

SpaceXwill center its largest-scale operations not in its Los Angeles-area headquarters but in south Texas facilities, the company said today. Development of at least the test versions of its next-generation Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle will take place in Texas, while Falcon 9 and Dragon work will remain at Hawthorne. The L.A. Times first reported the news.
The decision spells trouble for workers at the Hawthorne, Calif. facility, where many of SpaceX’s work has been done hereto

The ongoing shutdown of the federal government has already had adverse effects on millions nationwide, and now could even delay a major legal challenge to the FCC’sinfamous net neutrality repeal. The agency moved yesterday to delay oral arguments scheduled for just two weeks from now.
The arguments in a consolidated lawsuit against the FCC led by the likes of Mozilla, Vimeo and industry group INCOMPAS were set to begin on February 1. But of course no one could have predicted a record-setti

Steve Carell is coming back to small-screen comedy for a new Netflixseries about the people tasked with creating the “Space Force” — the proposed sixth branch of the military.
Details about the new show from Carell and Greg Daniels, who was the mind behind the American version of “The Office,” are sketchy. Netflix hasn’t given any specifics about the number of episodes or potential release date.
What’s certain is that this Space Force is less likely to

Facebookis bringing on the engineering lead for Google’s entire AR/VR team to tackle Portal hardware.
Ryan Cairns comes aboard after 12 years at Google,where he was most recently the engineering lead for a team of more than 500 people tackling AR/VR at the big G, including Daydream, Lens and ARCore, according to his LinkedIn.
Excited to announce that I'll be leading Hardware for AR/VR at @facebook…and would like to welcome Ryan Cairns, who will now lead Portal. Launching @porta

Grocery store chain Stop & Shop announced today that it will begin testing driverless grocery vehicles in Boston starting this spring, combining the hype of autonomous delivery cars, cashier-less stores, and meal kits into one experimental pilot. The launch is part of a partnership with San Francisco-based startup Robomart, whose vehicles will cart around Stop & Shop items like produce, convenience items, and meal kits to customers’ doorsteps.The electric vehicles will be temperat

It looks like the new $129 Smart Battery Case for the iPhone XS will support last year’s flagship iPhone X after all.
Yesterday, it seemed like Apple was leaving its most dedicated customers out in the cold when the company announced the new battery case for the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR but not for the iPhone X that early adopters snapped up in late 2017.
Worse, even though the iPhone X and the iPhone XS are practically the exact same size and shape, Apple told us point blank that the XS

Local TV broadcasting company SinclairBroadcast Group today announced the launch of a new streaming service called STIRR that aims to bring local TV news and other content to the growing number of cord cutters across the U.S. The company today owns more than 190 TV stations, which it’s leveraging in order to create its own “skinny bundle.” However, unlike TV streaming services such as Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV or YouTube TV, for example, STIRR will be free an

Continuing a trend that VCs here in London tell me is seeing an increasing amount of deal-flow in Europe attract the interest of top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms, TechCrunch has learned that email security provider Tessian is the latest to raise from across the pond.
According to multiple sources, the London-based company has closed a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital. I understand that the deal could be announced within a matter of weeks, and that the round size is in the regio

SanDisk’s 400GB microSD card is $83.98 on Amazon today, which is just a few dollars over its lowest price ($80) that popped up around Black Friday a few months ago. If you are thinking about buying some extra storage for your smartphone, or Nintendo Switch, this is a good opportunity to buy a high-capacity card that will take you a long while to fill up.
Storage is one of the many tech products that you should avoid buying at full price. Seeing as how this 400GB microSD card started at $2

Looking at the first trailer for High Life, the upcoming space thriller from A24 and director Claire Denis, it’s understandable if viewers have no idea what to suspect. There’s some frantic cutting and screaming and bellowing and blood that makes it look like a space-madness movie along the lines of Event Horizon. There are quiet images of Twilight star Robert Pattinson playing with a baby, which feel more like they belong to a quiet, internal science fiction story like Moon. There

New year, new you, new Slack. The popular workplace chat service’s resolution clearly involved a bit of a facelift, starting with a new logo. A redesigned version of the familiar grid logo launched this week, and appears to have rolled out on most major platforms.Slack did the customary thing of explaining the hell out of the new design over on its blog. All of the usual stuff about maintaining the spirit while modernizing the thing a bit is there. The company also calls the design “

Lance Armstrongrevealed last month that an early investment in Uber — courtesy of a $100,000 check that he funneled into the company in 2009 through Lowercase Capital — “saved” his family from financial ruin. This was after evidence surfaced in 2012 that he used performance-enhancing drugs and he was stripped not only of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles but also lost the many lucrative endorsement deals he enjoyed at the time.
Armstrong, talking with CNBC in De

Robots are amazing things, but outside of their specific domains they are incredibly limited. So flexibility — not physical, but mental — is a constant area of research. A trio of new robotic setups demonstrate ways they can evolve to accommodate novel situations: using both “hands,” getting up after a fall, and understanding visual instructions they’ve never seen before.
The robots, all developed independently, are gathered together today in a special issue of the

Sometimes it seems as though all good things — well, all free things — must come to an end, at least as far as internet services are concerned. In this case, we’re talking about Flickr, one of the most popular free photo storage services. The service was purchased by professional photo hosting service SmugMug, and last November announced that free users will be limited to 1,000 photos rather than their previous 1TB of storage.According to Flickr’s blog, as of January 8th

Mastercard announced a new policy today for merchants who retain your card information after you sign up for a free trial. Soon, Mastercard will require those merchants to request an official authorization for any recurring subscriptions.This is great news for forgetful or busy people who might not want to continue paying for a service or product that they just wanted to test out. For example, if you signed up for a new streaming service with your card info, then forgot you had the subscription

Slack, the workplace chat app that plans to become a public company this year, is making a new marketing push that includes an updated logo. The multicolor hashtag logo of yore has been replaced by something that more closely resembles a pinwheel, while retaining the basic color palette. The lowercase “slack” wordmark also appears to have gotten a minor update.
The company needed to change the logo because the old one was extremely problematic, the company said in a blog post.
It wa

If nothing else, the addition of ECG/EKG reinforced Apple’s commitment to evolving the Watch into a serious medical device. The company has long looked to bring its best-selling wearable to various health insurance platforms, and, according to a new report, it’s reaching out to multiple private Medicare plans in hopes of subsidizing the product.
If Medicare companies bite, the move would make the $279+ tracker much more successful for older users. Along with electrocardiograph functi

Today, Ubiquity6 has announced that it is acquiring Wavy, a small AR music startup founded last year.
In a blog post, the Wavyteam confirmed they’ll be joining the Ubiquity6team and won’t be continuing their work on the Wavy app. “When we met the team at Ubiquity6, it became apparent that joining the team there would be a leap forward towards our shared mission of enabling creators to edit reality,” the post reads.
Wavy’s app sought to give musicians an outlet to br

Acorn Biolabs wants consumers to pay them to store genetic material in a bet that the increasing advances in targeted genetic therapies will yield better healthcare results down the line.
The company’s pitch is to “Save young cells today, live a longer, better, tomorrow.” It’s a gamble on the frontiers of healthcare technology that has managed to net the company $3.3 million in seed financing from some of Canada’s busiest investors.
For the Toronto-based compan

Steve Carell and Greg Daniels, best known for producing the American version of The Office, are teaming up for a new workplace comedy, and this time, they have their eyes set on space.Space Force is a series about a group of “people tasked with creating a sixth branch of the armed services,” known simply as the Space Force, according to a tweet from Netflix.Space Force takes its inspiration from President Trump’s proposed new military branch of the same name. Trump called for

Microsoft is making some big changes to Cortana in Windows 10. The software giant is planning to decouple search and Cortana in the Windows 10 taskbar, allowing voice queries to be handled separately to typing in a search box to find documents and files. This change will be implemented in the next major Windows 10 update, currently scheduled for April. Windows 10 will direct you towards an built-in search experience for text queries, while Cortana will exist for voice queries instead of them bo

A Fortnite security bug let attackers access user accounts after they clicked a suspicious link that was sent to them. Researchers at Check Point Research found the bug and notified Epic Games in November, which then patched the vulnerability within a few weeks.
Epic Games told The Verge in a statement: “We were made aware of the vulnerabilities and they were soon addressed. We thank Check Point for bringing this to our attention. As always, we encourage players to protect their accounts

The Ghostbusters franchise is coming back again. Entertainment Weekly reports that Sony Pictures has tapped Jason Reitman (the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original 1984 film) to direct a sequel set in the world of the original Ghostbusters. It’s planned for a summer 2020 release.Reitman is coming off his own string of well-received films, including Juno, Up in the Air, Tully, and last year’s The Front Runner. He tells EW, “This is the next chapter in the original fra

Silicon Valley venture capital firm BlueRun Ventures has lassoed $130 million in capital commitments for its sixth fund. The firm invests in early-stage mobile software and financial services companies, including online lending platform Kabbage and navigation tool Waze.
BlueRun has also announced the promotion of Cheryl Cheng to general partner. Cheng joined the outfit in 2008; she’s focused on mobile and data opportunities within the enterprise and consumer markets. The firm also counts f

Sprinttoday announced it will support Apple’s Business Chat — the new platform that allows businesses and customers to interact over iMessage. According to the carrier, customers can now message a Sprint customer service agent, get info about plans and other services, as well as look up store information in Maps, Safari and with Siri during a chat session.
The support from Sprint comes after two other launches on the platform this week.
TD Ameritrade said it will allow customers to f