Technology news

A trade group representing California car and truck dealerships has filed a petition with the state’s New Motor Vehicle Board to stop Volvo from offering cars on a subscription model. The filing, first reported by Teslarati, is an escalation of the dealer group’s effort to disrupt Volvo’s subscription program, which became public late last year after it sent a letter to the CEO of the Swedish automaker’s North American division.The subscription service, dubbed “Car

Netflix has released numbers for some of its films and series — a show of strength to investors ahead of upcoming streaming wars with Disney and AT&T.
Bird Box, which Netflix previously reported accrued more than 45 million unique account streams seven days after its release, has now surpassed 80 million views, according to CEO Reed Hastings’ letter to investors. You, a Lifetime series that Netflix has purchased the rights to, will surpass 40 million household streams within the

It’s been less than a year since Epic Games kicked off the competitive circuit for Fortnite, but the company says it’s learned enough to make a substantial change to how it balances the consumer version of the game with the one played by pros at big tournaments. In an announcement on its website, the developer says it will now leave a window of time, somewhere between a few days and one week, for players to acclimate to a new update, one that could include game-changing new items, v

Ever sign up for a free trial, only to get slapped with a monthly fee when you forget to cancel in time? For a moment, it looked like Mastercard was ready to provide the ultimate solution — a new policy that would require merchants to explicitly ask you again, each and every month, before charging you a dime.
Physical products, not digital services
Unfortunately, Mastercard has now clarified that it’s a way more limited solution than the company originally let on. The new policy onl

Walmart is shelving its streaming service ambitions and ditching plans to launch a competitor to Netflix and Hulu, anonymous sources told CNBC. The retailer had considered launching a service aimed at “Middle America,” but it decided against it due to the large investment needed to make original content.
The streaming service’s focus on middle America followed the initial success of the TV show Roseanne. But Walmart found investing in content to be a risky play, according to t

Denon DJ has announced a new four-channel standalone DJ unit called the Prime 4. It’s the first standalone unit with the ability to play four decks of tracks using only two platters, which is something DJs have wanted for some time. This not only makes the Prime 4 unique, but it hammers home that Denon DJ is sniping at Pioneer DJ’s stranglehold on the DJ tech market.
Pioneer DJ’s equipment has long been the uncontested standard used by the industry. It’s requested by mos

If you’ve used Twitter on your Android phone anytime since 2014, you might want to double-check your settings. Twitter disclosed on its Help Center page today that some Android users had their private tweets revealed for years due to a security flaw. The issue caused the Twitter for Android app to disable the “Protect your Tweets” setting for some Android users who made changes to their account settings, such as changing the email address associated with their account, between

Just as triumphant reports come in about Fortnite‘s success, the world’s most popular game is forced to contend with stories about security vulnerabilities that could have exposed its millions of players to hackers. Data analysis firm SuperData today reported that Fortnite earned $2.4 billion in revenue last year, topping the list of games for the year (and probably beating out top earners of years past easily). While both Fortnite and its battle royale mode

I gotta hand it to LG. The company doesn’t always hit its mark, but it’s always doing new things with its phones that no one else tries. From its audiophile-friendly headphone jack to its modular G5, the company has run the gamut of unique ideas. Its latest venture: a phone with a detachable second screen. Cnet reports one of LG’s upcoming flagship phones – to be announced at Mobile World Congress in February – will be compatible with an optional “case w

Bose’s QuietComfort 35 Series II are just over $80 off of their usual $349 price today for anyone who makes a free Rakuten account. Even without the discount applied, the online storefront already offers them for $45 less than most retailers, but you can save even more at checkout until January 22nd by entering the code PRO40 to pay $264 for these over-ear headphones.We’ve seen discounts like this from Rakuten before, so more are likely to come if you miss out on this one. But anyon

Amid all the cultural debates about women’s struggles to be heard in Hollywood, over everything from onscreen representation to sexual abuse to open gender discrimination, Karyn Kusama’s name is one of the most visible, both because of her struggles in the industry, and because she’s so clearly managed to fight past them. After her breakout movie Girlfight — the muscular, uncompromising boxing movie that launched Michelle Rodriguez’s film career — Kusama foug

We’ve been hearing rumblings of a midrange Pixel 3 ‘Lite’ for a few months now, but a new leak by Andro News seems to all but confirm the phone is on the way – and it’s already looking interesting enough for me to want one. The video gives a rather thorough preview of the pre-production phone’s design and features. Spec-wise, the leaker corroborates earlier reports of a midrange Snapdragon 670 and 32GB of storage, but there’s also a 5.6-inch F

Facebook’s Portal smart displays have had an uphill battle, trying to convince people to willingly give the notoriously security-lax social media company another avenue into their homes. But it seems some people are pretty happy with their Portals: Facebook employees, who were just caught leaving five-star reviews for their own product on Amazon.Credit for spotting this incredible coincidence goes to tech columnist Kevin Roose:Speaking of coordinated inauthentic behavior, what are the odd

Google and watchmaker Fossil Group today announced an agreement for the search giant to acquire some of Fossil’s smartwatch technology and members of the research and development division responsible for creating it. The deal is worth roughly $40 million, and under the current terms Fossil will transfer a “portion” of its R&D team, the portion directly responsible for the intellectual property being sold, over to Google. As a result, Google will now have a dedicated team w

SeeTree, a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses drones and artificial intelligence to bring precision agriculture to their groves, today announced that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A funding round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from previous investors Canaan Partners Israel, Uri Levine and his investors group, iAngel and Mindset. This brings the company’s total funding to $15 million.
The idea behind the company, which also has offices in California and Brazil, is that in

Netflix is not planning to remove footage of a real-world train derailment that was used in its fiction film Bird Box, despite outcry from citizens of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec, Canada, The Verge has confirmed.The film, in which society breaks down after the arrival of madness-inducing monsters, uses stock footage of the derailment to illustrate the catastrophes resulting from the creatures’ presence. The video was taken from the 2013 disaster, in which a train carrying crude oil dera

With the rolling over of the calendar, we’ve got an entire year’s worth of books coming our way. I’ve already written up a preview of what to expect — there are a ton of really excellent-looking reads coming throughout the year that I can’t wait to read — but this month brings its own crop of intriguing volumes.My goal this year is to try to read a bit more in the way of nonfiction, particularly history. I’ve started with a new book from author Myke Col

Last September, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Copyright Directive: a sweeping piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age, but critics said it would fundamentally break the internet. Now, as negotiations over the directive’s final wording draw to a close, Google has issued a warning about the damage the directive might do in an unusual format: an empty search results page.To be more precise, it’s an empty search results page for news. One o

Meet the Orcam MyMe, a tiny device that you clip on your T-shirt to help you remember faces. The OrCam MyMe features a small smartphone-like camera and a proprietary facial-recognition algorithm so that you can associate names with faces. It can be a useful device at business conferences, or to learn more about how you spend a typical day.
This isn’t OrCam’s first device. The company has been selling the MyEye for a few years. It’s a wearable device for visually impaired people

3D-printing the first rocket on Mars.
That’s the goal Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone set for themselves when they founded Los Angeles-based Relativity Space in 2015.
At the time they were working from a WeWork in Seattle, during the darkest winter in Seattle history, where Ellis was wrapping up a stint at Blue Origin . The two had met in college at USC in their jet propulsion lab. Noone had gone on to take a job at SpaceXand Ellis at Blue Origin, but the two remained in touch and had an i

Advanced robots are expensive, and teaching them can be incredibly time consuming. With the proper simulation, however, roboticists can train their machines to learn quickly. A team from the Robotic Systems Lab in Zurich, Switzerland have demonstrated as much in a new paper.The research outlines how training a neutral a neural network using simulation taught the Boston Dynamics-esque ANYmal robot how to perform some impressive feats, including the ability to roll over, as a method for recovering

Spotifyis making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons, and no distractions from album art. In Car View, you’re only shown the track title and artist, so you can read the screen with just a glance.
The site 9to5Google was th

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. U.S. will reportedly seek criminal case against Huawei for stealing tech secrets
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 — specifically in the company’s actions aro

As artificial intelligence moves into the courtroom, much has been written about sentencing algorithms with hidden biases. Daniel L. Chen, a researcher at both the Toulouse School of Economics and University of Toulouse Faculty of Law, has a different idea: using AI to help correct the biased decisions of human judges.Chen, who holds both a law degree and a doctorate in economics, has spent years collecting data on judges and US courts. “One thing that’s been particularly nagging my

In 2017, a veritable civil war was fought between camps of Bitcoin believers: those who sought to keep its “block size” at 1MB, and those who wanted to increase it. Those looking for bigger blocks found themselves rallying behind a then-new cryptocurrency – a “hard fork” of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – whose premise rested on re-creating Bitcoin to mine 8MB blocks. The idea was (and still is) that larger blocks technically allow for more transacti

It’s been an astonishingly busy twelve months for Square, the upstart payments firm founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. In March, it launched operations in the UK. Then, last week, it got into the in-app payments game. And today, the company announced the launch of the Square Card — a free debit card aimed at its small business merchants. The Square Card has one interesting trick up its sleeve. As soon as a vendor receives funds (like, for example, from a customer buying something a

Squareis announcing a new debit card, called the Square Card, which will allow businesses to withdraw and spend the money they’re bringing in through Square payments.
In a conference call with reporters, the company laid out a number of benefits that the card should offer to Square sellers. The big one: It could help with cashflow, eliminating any delay between making a sale and having that money available to spend.
To be clear, businesses aren’t creating a new bank account. Instead,

Pro.com is basically a general contractor for the age of Uber and Prime Now. While the company started out as a marketplace for hiring home improvement professionals, it has now morphed into a general contractor and serves Denver, Phoenix San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. Today, Pro.comannounced that it has raised a $33 million Series B round led by WestRiver Group, Goldman Sach and Redfin. Previous investors DFJ, Madrona Venture Group, Maveron and Two Sigma Ventures also participated.
WestRi

We’re very excited to announce our first guests for this year’s TC Sessions: Robotics. TechCrunch is returning to the U.C. Berkeley campus again this April for another full-day session delving into all aspects of robotics. As we mark our third year, we’ve decided to add programming devoted to artificial intelligence, because you can’t really do robotics without AI.We’ve got a ton of speakers, panels and demos to announce in the coming months, but we’re excited

We’re coming to you with another episode of Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that takes a peek behind the headlines that go beyond tech.
This week, Megan Rose Dickey and I get into a discussion about women’s sexuality, because the world’s biggest “consumer electronics show” revoked an innovation award from Lora DiCarlo, a company that created a sex toy for women. In its initial objection, the CTA cited a clause that entries they believed “in their sole discret

Here’s our first look at the latest installment in Keanu Reeves’ John Wick franchise, John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum. Much like the previous two chapters, this trailer suggests we should prepare for some gruesome action at the hands of trained assassins.The trailer picks up where the second film ended; John Wick has been ex-communicated from the secret assassin organization that he belonged to and has a bounty on his head. He’s running around New York trying to kill e

Following last year’s $40 million raise, low-cost streaming service Philo is preparing to further differentiate itself from rivals with the launch of a new feature that will allow viewers to watch shows together in real-time. With co-viewing, the company hopes to make a case for choosing Philothat goes beyond its affordability.
Instead, the company hopes subscribers will pick Philo simply because it’s a better way to watch TV.
It’s only been 14 months since Philo first introduc

Squadcould be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.
With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time yo

America’s busiest spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida, is about to get a new tenant: a startup that shares SpaceX’s ambitious plans of turning humans into a multiplanetary species. The new occupant is LA-based launch provider Relativity Space, a company that wants to revolutionize how rockets are manufactured through the use of fully automated 3D printing. The company will soon have its very own launch site at the Cape for its future 3D-printed vehicles.
Thanks to a new deal with t

Tesla’s customer referral program, in which Tesla owners can give their friends a referral code to get six months of free charging via Tesla’s Supercharger network, will be ending March 1st, Elon Musk said in a tweet on Thursday.The referral program was adding too much cost to Tesla’s cars, especially the Model 3, Musk said in a follow-up tweet. The move comes amid a larger cost-cutting effort by the electric car company. Late last month, Tesla cut prices on the Model 3 in Chi

Players are mad at Ubisoft this week in the wake of the latest DLC episode for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The problem? Thanks to a fixed story point in the episode, the game‘s developers have apparently abandoned the player freedom that comprised the backbone of its marketing. I’m gonna drop some major spoils right about now, so prepare yourself for *SPOILERS*. Also, just for the sake of brevity, I’m gonna use my portmanteau of the player characters’ names: Ale

One Echo is good; several is better. Amazon’s Echo devices have multiroom audio support, allowing users to simultaneously stream music over multiple speakers, making it feasible for people to outfit their entire homes with Amazon’s smart speaker.The feature lets you play audio from Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify and Sirius XM over multiple speakers. It even added Apple Music support last December.
To set up multiroom audio, open the Alexa app and select Devices.

The style transfer craze kicked off by an app called Prisma a couple of years ago led to a tsunami of painterly selfies flooding social feeds for several months, as we reported at the time, before the rapacious, face-snapping hoards shifted their attention toward fresh spectacles. But that’s not the end of the story.
The same tech is now creeping into (paper) kids’ books, via a partnership between children’s publisher startup, Kabook, and Prisma Labs: aka the b2b enti