Technology news

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has made an offering to the cryptocurrency community: he will pay developers to work full-time on Bitcoin Core and other “cryptocurrency ecosystem” projects. Are you currently contributing to bitcoin-core or other crypto ecosystem projects for free in your off-time? We’d like to pay you to do it full-time. If interested, DM @SqCrypto, and follow for updates on our progress. Thank you! — jack (@jack) March 20, 2019 Bitcoin Core is an open-source pr

Ford plans to invest more than $850 million to add more production capacity at a second U.S. factory for its next-generation battery-electric vehicle program.
The investment, which will be made through 2023, will focus on expanding Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly Plant in southeast Michigan. The plant investment also includes funding to build the next-generation Mustang and is part of a $900 million investment in Ford’s operations in southeastern Michigan.
The announcement is tied to Ford&

Microsofthas rolled out a patch that will warn Windows 7 users that security updates will soon come to an end.
The patch rolled out Wednesday warning users of the impending deadline, January 14, 2020, when the software giant will no longer roll out fixes for security flaws and vulnerabilities. The deadline comes some 10 years after Windows 7 first debuted in 2009, more than half a decade before Microsoft’s most recent operating system Windows 10 was introduced.
Microsoft’s move to st

Many of the themes and stories found in Hulu’s“Shrill” will be familiar to fans of writer Lindy West — after all, it’s based on her book “Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman,” and she’s a writer on the series.
But “Shrill” has mined the autobiographical material in West’s book to tell a fictionalized story about a young journalist played by Aidy Bryant of “Saturday Night Live” (she also co-wrote the first two episodes).
Wh

Motorola’s Moto Z4 phone has leaked, and while it isn’t much of a surprise that the company would make a fourth iteration of its flagship Android phone, it’s the first indication we’ve seen that its Moto Mod initiative may still be alive and kicking — because you can clearly see the copper contacts for its modular Moto Mods accessories on the back of this alleged phone.
The release of new Moto Mods has slowed over the past couple years, so much so that it was uncle

Earlier this month, JetPack Aviation threw down the gauntlet, offering up its futuristic hover bike, dubbed the Speeder, for pre-order. It promised delivery next year. The hovercraft features four turbojet engines capable of 750 pound-feet of thrust, an on-board vehicle stability system, touchscreen navigation, and a 360-degree automatic collision avoidance system. It’ll reach altitudes of 15,000 feet, and top speeds of 150 miles per hour. There’s even a consumer-friendly version th

Faraday Future has sold its Los Angeles headquarters in a move to help fill the EV startup’s exhausted coffers, according to property documents obtained by The Verge. A subsidiary of New York-based real estate firm Atlas Capital purchased the headquarters on March 8th and immediately began leasing the building back to Faraday Future for an undisclosed amount.The documents did not reveal how much Faraday Future received in the sale of its headquarters, which consists of two buildings just

Tim Merel Contributor Tim Merel is managing director of Digi-Capital. More posts by this contributorFor AR/VR 2.0 to live, AR/VR 1.0 must die Chinese investment into computer vision technology and AR surges as U.S. funding dries up
There has been some negative sentiment surrounding the games industry recently, with stock prices of public games companies in question in both the U.S. and China. While being contrarian to market sentiment is always risky, it’s also possible that folks might b

Today, Apple finally announced its second-generation AirPods, most notably adding wireless charging to the popular headphones. Apple is even selling the wireless charging case separately, so that existing AirPod owners can join in the fun. The move brings Apple in line with its main competitors, whose phones and earbuds support similar Qi charging functionality, but there was one piece missing: Apple’s long-absent AirPower charger. If there was ever a moment to re-announce AirPower, this

AT&T and Comcast are partnering to authenticate calls made between the two networks, letting customers know when there’s a genuine caller — not a spammer — on the phone. It won’t cover every call AT&T and Comcast customers receive, but it’s a step in the right direction to battling the scourge of robocalls.
AT&T says the deal is likely the “nation’s first” to authenticate calls between two providers through the SHAKEN/STIR (which stand

Want to star in your favorite memes and movie scenes? Upload a selfie to Morphin, choose your favorite GIF and your face is grafted in to create a personalized copy you can share anywhere. Become Tony Stark as he suits up like Iron Man. Drop the mic like Obama, dance like Drake or slap your mug on Fortnite characters.
Now after three years in stealth developing image-mapping technology, Morphin is ready to launch its put-you-in-a-GIF maker. While it might look like just a toy, investors see real

Snapchat is getting into the game, literally. Rumor has it an in-app gaming platform, along with a handful of games, are coming to the social network. While we don’t yet know which titles Snap has snapped up, there are some games that we think will work best within the app — and a few things it should avoid. According to a report from Cheddar, Snap Inc will be revealing its platform, codenamed “Project Cognac,” at an event in April. It’ll allegedly show a few

Starbucks is serving up a steaming hot $100 million cash commitment to anchor a new food-focused fund in partnership with the consumer and tech-focused focused private equity firm Valor Equity Partners.
The behemoth of burnt-coffee said that its commitment to the Valor Siren Ventures fund is an attempt to focus on “new ideas and technologies that are relevant to customers, inspiring to partners (employees), and meaningful to Starbucksbusiness.”
The Starbucks announcement was short on

The OculusRift S is a bit of an odd one. Three years after the Rift’s initial launch, Oculus has released a product that feels like a lateral move rather than a leap forward. It’s better in a few ways and worse in a few ways. After spending some time playing with it and spending a lot more time thinking about it, it’s not super clear to me why Oculus made it.
The best reason I can think of is that Facebook sees standalone VR as the area where it should be completely ignoring pr

Postmates is launching a new feature called Postmates Party that lets customers within the same neighborhood pool their orders. In return, these customers get the food delivered for free, eliminating a major pinch point for potential Postmates users.
The feature illustrates how Postmates,one of the earlier entrants to the billion-dollar food delivery wars, is trying to remain competitive by appealing to price-sensitive customers.
Customers using the app can tap on the Postmates Party tab, which

Amazon today updated its entry-level Kindle, making it at once a bit more useful and a bit more expensive – the starting price has gone from $79.99 to $89.99 . It’s a welcome update, but you should probably buy the Kindle Paperwhite instead. The biggest change is the addition of an adjustable front light, meaning you can finally use the entry-level Kindle in the dark. This isn’t automatic brightness adjustment like we’re used to on our phones and laptops, mind you; you&r

The way people and packages move from Point A to Point B is in the midst of a remarkable transformation driven by technological innovations in AI, robotics, electric battery development, digital platforms and manufacturing.
A mobility revolution is in the making. And TechCrunchis here — and we’re not just along for the ride. We’re here to uncover new ideas and startups, root out vaporware and dig into the tech and people spurring this change.
In short, we’re helping drive

Decentralized betting protocol Augur is dealing with a situation: fraudsters can illegitimately profit by gaming the system, and there’s not much its devs can do about it (for now). Augur co-founder Joey Krug recently addressed community concerns about scammers taking over the platform. They’re alleged to be intentionally creating invalid markets en masse, which fool the system into mistakenly distributing profit to the attackers. For context, Augur is a blockchain-based market

At its 2019 “Cloud Summit” industry conference in Hong Kong, Huawei unveiled a new blockchain-based cloud service. Huawei Cloud now offers blockchain oriented services designed to help Hong Kong-based businesses make use of the decentralized platform’s typical characteristics. These being, decentralization, immutability, and traceability (transparency). Huawei hopes this will aid the Chinese province’s mission to become an international financial and logistics hub. Speci

Giving patients an anesthetic can help them forget a disturbing memory, according to research published today in the journal Science Advances. It’s the latest study to investigate the conditions that might prevent memories from sticking, and it could be a step toward finding a technique that helps people deal with harmful memories related to anxiety, trauma, or addiction.Researchers showed 50 participants two different and unpleasant narrated slideshows. One was about kids being kidnapped

After peppering Google employees with questions regarding Stadia’slatency, pricing and supported devices, to mostly no avail, I got my hands on one of their new controllers and pressed play on the Doom 2016 gameplay they were showing off on a big-screen TV.
Things started off pretty ugly. The frame rate dropped to a fast-paced PowerPoint presentation, the resolution dipped between 4K crispness and indecipherable blurriness and latency seemed to be as much as a half-second. As the Google em

Yesterday, Google announced plans for a new game-streaming service called Stadia. Besides the logo, the controller, and a single game — Doom Eternal — the announcement left us with more questions than answers. Primary in my mind has been the query of why Google needs to be in the gaming business at all. Isn’t it enough to dominate web search, ads, and browsers, smartphone operating systems, and maps? What part of our lives does Google not want to know about? And then it dawned

At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absolutely no one is safe from the spam epidemic.
Over the past few months, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission have been feeling the pressure from lawmakers and consumers who are urging them to put an end to the relentless onslaught of robocalls people receive every day. Last year, cons

UberFreight, the newly spun out Uber business unit that helps truck drivers connect with shipping companies, is kicking off its global expansion plans. The company said Wednesday it is launching the app in Europe, starting with the Netherlands.
Local carriers and drivers will be able to book and move their first loads with Uber Freightin the next few weeks, CEO Lior Ron wrote in a blog posted Wednesday. Uber Freight plans to expand to more European countries this year.
The EU and U.S. freight ma

Facebook is updating Messenger today with a new feature: the ability to quote and reply to specific messages in a conversation, making it easier to keep track of things (especially in larger group chats), as reported by VentureBeat.
The feature comes as an expansion of the company’s existing reaction emoji. Now, when you hold down on an individual message, in addition to simply adding a reaction, you’ll be able to reply with a new “reply” button, which will attach a quot

Over the past decade, French studio Quantic Dream has become closely associated with the PlayStation platform, thanks to games like Detroit: Become Human and Beyond: Two Souls. But now, the developer is expanding its reach to the PC, and it’s starting with Epic’s new game store.
Today, Quantic announced plans to bring its three latest games — Detroit, Beyond, and Heavy Rain — to Epic’s digital shop as timed exclusives for a year after launch. The move comes not lon

Skymind, a Y Combinator-incubated AI platform that aims to make deep learning more accessible to enterprises, today announced that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A round led by TransLink Capital, with participation from ServiceNow, Sumitomo’s Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital and GovTech Fund. Early investors Y Combinator,Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures, also joined the round/ With this, the company has now raised a total of $17.9 million in funding.
The i

Fortnite creator Epic Games is in a unique position. Not only is the company overseeing development of one of the most popular and lucrative games on the planet, but it’s also now utilizing the success of that software to make its Unreal Engine development tools and, more recently, its online PC game store two of the most ubiquitous and disruptive elements in the industry.One of the main architects of this dramatic shift at Epic is CEO Tim Sweeney who hasn’t shied away from using hi

Cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia has resumed trading following a debilitating hack in mid-January. The New Zealand-based company said on Twitter today that it had resumed trading “on 40 trade pairs […] quantified as secure,” adding that it would continue to expand its offering as more coins were cleared. A list of the available trading pairs is available on its website. As previously reported by Hard Fork, the exchange is thought to have had more than 1,095 di

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. Apple announces new AirPods
The new AirPods are fitted with the H1 chip, which is meant to offer performance efficiencies, faster connect times between the pods and your devices and the ability to ask for Siri hands-free with the “Hey Siri” command.
“They are powered by the n

At its annual GDC showcase for the widely used Unreal Engine, Epic Games revealed a pair of gorgeous demos featuring a haunting future and an eerie fantasy realm. For developers, the two shorts demonstrate various new possibilities for the engine, but they also stand alone as beautiful — albeit brief — pieces of work.
The first, called Rebirth (embedded above), was designed by studio Quixel as an example of photorealism. It depicts a harsh terrain at an indeterminate point in the fu

Postmates is launching a new delivery option that comes without its sometimes pricey service fees: essentially, carpooling for your food.
The new delivery option, called Postmates Party, allows you to opt in to having your meal delivered as part of a group. The food will still be delivered to each person separately, but it’ll be sent out in a batch, with the delivery person making multiple stops along their route.
It means your order could take slightly more time to arrive. But in exchang

German startup Yoolox, makers of a portable wireless charger for smartphones, tablets and laptops, exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt with the goal of spreading awareness of their first products, Yoolox 10k and 16k. Given Disrupt’s global brand exposure, Yoolox decided it would be the perfect place to debut what they had been working on:TechCrunch Disrupt gave us the opportunity to exchange with potential distribution partners and investors. It was a great opportunity to get a direct fe

[Update 5pm] Lucasfilm got in touch with us to let us know the job postings that raised this speculation were to beef up an internal team that assists game developers with licensed IP. It’s not so much a “mysterious project” as it is all the upcoming Star Wars stuff we already know about, such as the ninth film in the series and Respawn’s Jedi Fallen Order, both of which are due to come out later this year. As exciting as it was to believe our old buddy LucasAr

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is planning to launch what it calls the Alamo Season Pass, a MoviePass-style subscription service, nationwide by the end of this year. The company is already beta testing the program in a small selection of its theaters. “It’s working for us, and we love it,” CEO Tim League told Business Insider. “It’s one of our biggest priorities this year, to get that rolled out.”
In “most” areas of the country, the subscription will cos

Epic Games today announced a new grant initiative that will dole out $100 million to game developers, artists, students, educators, and those developing tools for other creators that make use of its Unreal Engine 4 toolset. The company is calling the initiative the MegaGrant program, and it builds off a similar, albeit much smaller, Unreal developer grant program it launched back in 2015, prior to the success of the mega-hit battle royale game Fortnite.“This is our way of sharing Fortnite

At GDC today, Nintendo announced another huge slate of indie games that are coming to the Switch. It’s becoming something of a theme lately. Since its launch, the Switch has steadily become a platform of choice for independent developers, and Nintendo has regular indie-specific showcases to announce new waves of titles.
Today’s announcement included a number of big names, like Cuphead and the surprise Zelda spinoff Cadence of Hyrule, as well as a handful of other surprises, some of

If the upcoming remake of Link’s Awakening wasn’t enough for you, today, Nintendo revealed that another new Zelda adventure is coming this year — though it’s not what you’d expect. In fact, the new game, dubbed Cadence of Hyrule, isn’t actually developed by Nintendo at all. Instead, the company has handed the keys to Hyrule to indie studio Brace Yourself Games, the team behind the cult hit Crypt of the Necrodancer.
The new game looks a lot like Crypt, with a

Yep, today Apple released its new pair of AirPods, something you can read about in detail here. While the updates are undoubtedly good, I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t do more. I’m a regular AirPod user and, while I like them a lot, the earbuds could easily be better. In many ways, the newest pair feels like AirPods 1.5, instead of the 2.0 version I was dreaming of. Don’t worry though – I’m here. So, Apple design team, pick up your pencils and crayons

As of 12:02am Eastern today, Disney has closed its acquisition of 21st Century Fox .
The goal of the enormous deal is to help Disney position itself for a streaming-centric future. The company has already taken a step in that direction with the ESPN+ streaming service, and it has plans to launch another service called Disney+ later this year, which will include new shows based on the Star Wars and Marvel universes, as well as Disney’s entire movie library.
With the Fox acquisition, Disney

Tech has a bad reputation for pulling money out of musicians’ pockets, but Splice is changing that. The audio sample marketplace and music production collaboration tool has now paid out $15 million to artists since 2013, doubling in the last year. Splicelets musicians sell their sounds for royalty-free use, and songs by Eminem, Ariana Grande and Marshmello that were powered by those samples have topped the charts. Splice charges $7.99 per month for unlimited access to its array of 3 millio

There are exactly 50 days left until TNW Conference. Do you know what that means? It means if you haven’t got your ticket yet, I’m officially offended. You really don’t want to be missing out, so get yours now. We’ve got so much fun stuff in store, and I can’t even tell you everything yet – but I will in the next few weeks, so stay tuned! Today, I’d really like to talk about how attending our conference is not just for your own benefit, but rather for t

Ugh, the Gregorian calendar is so boring. That’s why we’re disrupting monthly series with a lunar cycle-based series about the best patents of the last synodic month, picked by the PatentYogi team. Get ready when that moon gets gibbous, y’all. This March-ish roundup lands on the icky Worm Moon ! Since my last post, the US patent office issued over 13,028 patents and published over 13,113 patent applications. Each patent asset adds a little something new to the human knowl

After years of high-profile onstage announcements, Oculushas decided to quietly deliver the successor to its flagship Rift virtual reality headset, confirming most bits of our October report with the release of the new Oculus Rift S.
As we first reported, the biggest improvements to the Oculus Rift S are a move to the company’s inside-out “Insight” camera tracking system and modest updates to the display resolution. The biggest surprise is that this headset is being built in pa