Technology news

Tesla launched an online store for its merchandise on Amazon on Tuesday, as was first spotted by Electrek. The new Amazon store is already stocked with a number of different Tesla products, like branded iPhone X cases ($35-$45), hoodies ($70-$75), and 1:18 scale die-cast models of the company’s cars ($250).
Tesla has dabbled with selling merchandise on its own website for a few years now alongside accessories for its cars. There’s a Tesla-branded wireless smartphone charger, a porta

Disney CEO Bob Iger spoke to investors during Disney’s quarterly earnings call about the forthcoming Disney+ streaming service at length, but he still didn’t offer any specifics. Pricing is still a mystery, and Iger didn’t say much beyond the end of 2019 for a release window. More information will hopefully become available following Disney Investor Day on April 11th, where Iger and his team have said they will discuss the company’s streaming plans in greater detail.But

If you're nostalgic for the Reddit of ten years ago, we have good news: you can now relive it. 
The new subreddit r/Stuck10YearsBehind imagines what the platform was like a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, it's a warm, nostalgic place that reminds me of the days when the internet was fun.
SEE ALSO: This plating account for Fig Newtons is genuinely *chef's kiss*
Do you remember that time? I do. It was glorious time of memes, GIFs, and weird viral videos. Our president didn't tweet out conspiracy

Snap is finally starting to turn things around. 
Snapchat's growth has finally stabilized after two straight quarters of losing users, following an unpopular redesign. What's more, the company is making substantially more money off the users it does have, the company revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings report for 2018. 
Snap reported $390 million in revenue, an increase of 36 percent from last year, and $10 million above the high end of its own projections for the quarter.
Meanwhil

Disney is looking to invest heavily in exclusives for its upcoming streaming service, Disney+, and that means having movies like Captain Marvel stream exclusively on the service.
In an investors call on February 5th, Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors that Disney plans to forgo its current rate of $140 million year over year in licensing revenue, in favor of moving its currently licensed content to Disney+. He noted that Captain Marvel will be the first Disney movie that the company will comple

Google has shared its cloud revenue exactly once over the last several years. Silence tends to lead to speculation to fill the information vacuum. Luckily there are some analyst firms who try to fill the void, and it looks like Google’s cloud business is actually trending in the right direction, even if they aren’t willing to tell us an exact number.
When Google last reported its cloud revenue, last year about this time, they indicated they had earned $1 billion in revenue for the qu

If you’re looking for discounts on tech, we’ve found a few today that may interest you. Amazon and Walmart are both selling the Xbox One controller for $37.17, which is lower than its usual sale price of around $40. If you’re in need of a new controller for your Xbox One, this is an obvious choice, but this model has a feature that might appeal to non-Xbox owners: it supports Bluetooth, so you can easily connect it with Bluetooth-capable PCs, as well as Android smartphones for

A smartwatch designed for children, the Enox Safe Kid One, was recalled by the EU over data privacy concerns, as reported by ZDNet. It was discovered that the watch, which is equipped with a GPS, microphone, and speaker to make calls and send SMS texts, could be easily hacked by third parties. It doesn’t appear that the watch was ever sold in North America, and although it’s not the first time that children’s toys have been found to have security holes, this marks the first ti

An exploding vape killed a 24-year-old man named William Brown in Texas last week, CBS DFW reports — highlighting the ongoing lack of safety standards for electronic cigarettes.Shattered fragments from the vape sliced open a blood vessel in Brown’s neck that delivers blood to the brain, and he died at the hospital from a stroke on January 29th. His death is a sad reminder that e-cigarettes are still largely unregulated. The FDA announced in July 2017 that it plans to come up with pr

Does your Twitter timeline spark joy? If you’re like most people, probably not. Over the years, you probably politely followed back a few too many Twitter accounts, and now have a timeline filled with all sorts of random tweets from people you can’t even remember following in the first place. A new Twitter tool, Tokimeki Unfollow, may help.
Designed by Julius Tarng, previously of Facebook and Branch, “tokimeki” roughly translates to “spark joy.” It’

Tesla has done it again. 
The company that brought us insane mode and questionably sourced farting unicorns is back to remind the world that no one speaks to the soul of children trapped in adult bodies better than its childlike CEO. That's right, Tesla just launched its own Amazon store, and you wouldn't believe the goodies for sale.
SEE ALSO: Stankmemes.com owner runs Tesla, Space X
In the mood for a $250 1:18-scale Tesla Model S toy car with "Steerable wheels"? Or maybe a $45 iPhone X ca

Breanna J. McDaniel hopes black girls will recognize themselves in her debut picture book Hands Up!. Even before they flip to the first page, they'll see a smiling black girl jumping on the cover. 
"Unfortunately, you still don't see a ton of that. And not just black girls. Girls of color, period," says McDaniel. 
McDaniel's story is about Viv, a lively, responsible, and talented black girl. As readers flip through the vibrant illustrations, Viv grows older and raises her hands in diff

History will be made following President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
Stacey Abrams will make history as the first black woman to deliver the official response to the State of the Union for either major party. The progressive Georgia Democrat, who also made history last year as the first ever gubernatorial nominee from a major party, is a great pick to deliver the response as a unifying voice among the party’s many wings and factions.
However, a bit of

After two quarters of losing users, Snap’s losses seem to have stabilized. The company says today that it has the same number of daily active users globally as it did last quarter at 186 million. That’s still fewer than the 191 million it had at this same time last year, but suggests the platform’s user base may have stabilized.
Beyond the stable user base, Snap set a new record for quarterly revenue at $390 million, which brings its yearly total to more than $1.1 billion. The

Apple’s retail leader, Angela Ahrendts, will leave the company in April, Apple announced this afternoon. Ahrendts joined Apple in spring 2014, coming over from her position as CEO of Burberry to serve as head of retail.
Apple’s current human resources leader, Deirdre O’Brien, will take over the company’s retail and online store operations. O’Brien will continue to lead Apple’s HR team as well. She’s been at the company for three decades.
“The most

A gaggle of new emoji have just been approved by the Unicode Consortium, meaning they’ll be standard across any platforms that choose to support them. This batch includes some much-needed representation for people with various disabilities, new animals from guide dogs to otters, food and many more objects.
Folks with disabilities get a nice variety of new emoji, though of course these aren’t exhaustive (for example, how do you represent a learning disability or mental illness?). Stil

Angela Ahrendts will depart Apple in April, almost exactly five years after taking on a role as the company’s senior vice president of retail. Apple says Ahrendts is leaving “for new personal and professional pursuits.”
Ahrendts joining Apple in 2014 was massive news, with her having just served as the CEO of the luxury fashion brand Burberry from 2006 to 2014. She led the charge to “reimagine” Apple’s retail stores, shifting them to what she hoped felt more l

Should we break up Amazon and Facebook? Columbia Law School academic fellow Lina Khan, who wrote the impactful “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” for The Yale Law Journal, joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel to discuss whether Amazon and Facebook should be broken up and what it might look like if that were to happen.
You can listen to their discussion about the case for breaking up Amazon and Facebook in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt

Electronic Arts said today that it’s next Star Wars game, to be called Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, will come out this fall. The company had previously set 2019 as the release window for the story-focused game, which is in development with EA-owned studio and Titanfall creator Respawn Entertainment. But we haven’t gotten anything more concrete until EA disclosed the spring deadline in its quarterly earnings announcement this afternoon.Given recent news that EA scrapped its narrativ

In a move toward greater inclusion, the freshly finalized set of 2019 emoji addresses people with physical disabilities, covering mechanical arms and legs, sign language and hearing aids, and even the difference between manual and motorized wheelchairs. The Unicode Consortium evidently heeded Apple’s proposal last year to better represent people with disabilities, and the new Unicode Emoji 12.0 additions announced today reflect that desire to the fullest. There’s also greater inclus

Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced she will no longer prosecute pot possession cases regardless of the quantity or the offender's criminal record. The State's Attorney hopes this will improve police-community relations, and make it easier for the city to focus on fighting violent crimes, which has impacted the city at a high rate over the last three years. Read more...More about Mashable Video, Marijuana, Baltimore, Cannabis, and Marilyn Mosby

Snapchat isn’t growing again, but at least it didn’t hemorrhage any more users in its Q4 earnings report. The company stayed flat at 186 million daily users after falling from 191 million in Q1 to 188 million in Q2 to 186 million in Q3. It exceeded an expected quarterly count of 184.2 million user, though 186 million is still down 0.3 percent year-over-year. It reached record revenue of $390 million in the holiday quarter, up 36 percent year-over-year to beat the $378 million Wa

Snap has finally begun publicly testing the engineering overhaul of its slow and buggy Android app that for years has cost Snapchat users. Promising early results and reduction in app startup time could help Snapchat fix its growth problem after daily active users sank in Q2 and Q3 before staying put at 186 million in Q4, Snap announced today in its earnings report today.
“We ended the year with user engagement stabilizing and have started rolling out the new version of our Android applica

If you’ve never thought about how much design work goes into even the tiniest parts of a UI, then you can now play a game which will enlighten you on the subject. The game is called “Can’t Unsee” and it challenges the player to choose between two different pictures of the same design element. One is the “correct,” or more aesthetically pleasing option, while the other is off in some way. It’s basically a spot-the-difference puzzle, only the minute chang

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company did a poor job with its annual wrap-up video last year, writing today that her kids described it as “cringey.”
YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video became the most disliked video on the platform in just over a week after it was posted in December, with more than 15 million dislikes to date. Fans and creators criticized it for not accurately depicting YouTube’s current culture.“We hear you that it didn’t accurately show the y

Evan Nisselson Contributor Evan Nisselson is a partner at LDV Capital.More posts by this contributorDeep learning with synthetic data will democratize the tech industry The war over artificial intelligence will be won with visual data
Visual assessment is critical to healthcare — whether that is a doctor peering down your throat as you say “ahhh” or an MRIof your brain. Since the X-ray was invented in 1895, medical imaging has evolved into many modalities that empower clinicia

A neutral hearing officer in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has denied Uber -owned JUMP’s appeal regarding the SFMTA’s decision to not provide JUMP a permit to operate shared electric scooters in the city.
“We are pleased the hearing officer validated our permitting process, which above all, prioritized the public interest,” SFMTA Communications Manager Ben Jose said in a statement to TechCrunch.
JUMP argued that the SFMTA did not fairly judge its offer

Just last month, Google showed off an “Interpreter mode” that would let Google Home devices act as an on-the-fly translator. One person speaks one language, the other person speaks another, and Google Assistant tries to be the middleman between the two.
They were only testing it in select locations (hotel front desks, mostly) at the time, but it looks like it’s gotten a much wider rollout now.
Though Google hasn’t officially announced it, AndroidPolice noticed that a supp

T-Mobile CEO John Legere, in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday, promised not to increase consumer plan prices for three years if the company’s proposed merger with Sprint is approved. Legere said the combined company will offer “the same or better” rates as either wireless carrier currently does today. T-Mobile and Sprint have said it will take around three years to fully combine their networks.The merger is a $26 billion deal that would shrink the nation’s maj

A NASAmission that sent two tiny spacecraft farther out than any like them before appears to have come to an end: Cubesats MarCO-A and B (nicknamed WALL-E and EVE) are no longer communicating from their positions a million and two million miles from Earth, respectively.
The briefcase-sized craft rode shotgun on the Insight Mars Lander launch in May, detaching shortly after leaving orbit. Before long they had gone farther than any previous cubesat-sized craft, and after about a million kilometers

Facebook today removed 22 pages associated with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as part of a previously announced update in which the company is tightening rules for administrators whose pages have been previously banned. The pages, which were among 89 removed by the social network, were created before Jones was banned in August for violations related to hate speech, bullying, and graphic violence.
Previously, Facebook would prevent administrators of banned pages from creating similar

The Office's influence is so incredibly strong that even cats are fans of the show, now. And no, we're not just talking about Angela Martin's.
Brittney Jernstrom, a 26-year-old Office superfan named her cat Michael Scott after noticing some striking similarities between him and Steve Carell's careless and beloved character in the NBC comedy. The funny feline is really living up to the name.
Since joining the family, the now 3-year-old black cat has embraced the World's Best Boss persona, and is

Microsoft’s Xbox One controllers are $37.17 at Walmart and Amazon. That’s more than $20 off their regular price, and just a few dollars shy of the lowest price we’ve ever seen. Better still, this discount is for the newer model that can also connect to non-Xbox devices via Bluetooth, and has a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening.That’s a good deal if you’re in need of a new controller for your Xbox One, and it’s a smart investment if you game on other

It's pretty easy to scare your mother, but this son has taken it to another level.
You may remember the "scare cam" trend, where people would record themselves... well, scaring their friends. But this shriek-filled video adds fresh life to a trend that was otherwise gasping for air. 
Part of what makes this video so great is not only that this mom repeatedly gets so freaked out every time, but also the fantastic cackle it gets out of her son every time. 
All in all, it's a frighteningl

It may not seem like it takes a lot of smarts to play a game like Pictionary, but in fact it involves a lot of subtle and abstract visual and linguistic skills. This AI built to play a game like it is similarly complex, and its interpretations and creations when you play it (as you can now) may seem eerily human — but it’s also refreshing to have such an agent working collaboratively with you rather than beating you with superhuman skills.
Iconary, as the game’s creators at the

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
In the middle of the documentary Jawline, 16-year-old nano-celebrity Austyn Tester organizes a fan meetup in a mall food court. A gaggle of teen and tween girls show up, and he soaks up their rapturous affection, offering compliments, hugs, and photos. Then, the group walks the mall together in a strange parody of a f

Thanks to organizing guru Marie Kondo, we are collectively purging our homes of old items that no longer spark joy, and our drawers are looking a little neater for it. We know now that cleaning out our physical spaces is important to our well-being, so shouldn’t our digital spaces go through a little spring cleaning as well? That’s what designer Julius Tarng set out to do with Tokimeki Unfollow, a KonMari-inspired tool for your Twitter feed.“Tokimeki” is the Japanese wor

Back at CES, Google demonstrated a new interpreter function of the Google Assistant that lets you speak one language to the device and have it translate what you said into another. Now the company has revealed via a support page that the interpreter function is rolling out to Google Home and smart display devices, as reported by Android Police (and confirmed via testing by The Verge).
The interpreter mode supports 26 different languages and can be invoked by asking the Google Assistant to help

In Ape Out, you play as an ape who’s trying to get out. It’s unique. It’s jazzy. It’s thrilling.
I played a preview build of Ape Out, navigating my way through two “discs,” which act as sorts of worlds and contain a handful of levels that increase in difficulty as a percussive jazz track pushes you forward through heavily guarded rooms, sporadic drum beats encouraging a fast pace of movement as satisfactory cymbal crashes punctuate every kill.The two discs I p

The P&G acquisition of This is L., a startup retailer of period products and prophylactics, shows just how profitable investing in women’s healthcare brands and products can be.
A person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million — a healthy outcome for investors and company founder Talia Frenkel. But just as important as the financial outcome is the deal’s implications for other mission-driven companies.
This is L. launched from Y