Technology news

Tesla lost $702 million in the first quarter of 2019, after posting back-to-back profits for the first time ever to finish out 2018, the company announced in an official filing Wednesday. CEO Elon Musk had predicted Tesla would slide back into the red on a February 28th call with the media. Telsa generated $4.5 billion in revenue for the quarter.The company also announced that it doesn’t expect to turn a profit in the second quarter, either. Musk had previously guessed that Tesla would re

Although major design flaws with the Galaxy Fold have forced Samsung to delay its launch indefinitely, smartphone accessories maker Spigen is still continuing plans to develop cases for the phone. Spigen has three cases in development: the Tough Armor, Ultra Hybrid, and Thin Fit. After showing us some mock-ups in March, the company has now shared actual photos of some of its prototype cases.
Spigen notes that its Tough Armor case was the hardest to develop due to its focus on hinge protection.

Slack arrived more than five years ago with the bold attempt to try to kill email in the workplace. It’s 2019, we’re all still sending emails, and Slack may have even made emails stronger. Thankfully, Slack has realized that our email and calendaring solutions are useful and should work more closely with its chat software. We’ve seen this recently with Office 365 integration, and now the company is going a few steps further by bridging email and calendaring directly into Slack

Facebook’s financial success continues unabated in the face of countless security and privacy scandals, including a potential record-setting Federal Trade Commission fine. The fine, the potential amount of which was first reported by The Washington Post in February, is related mostly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was revealed in March of last year, as well as the seemingly never-ending series of subsequent breaches and leaks that have dogged Facebook in the months since.The comp

Microsoft posted the third quarter of its 2019 financial results today, reporting revenue of $30.6 billion and net income of $8.8 billion. Revenue has jumped 14 percent year over year and net income has increased 19 percent. Cloud and Office continue to push Microsoft’s revenue in the right direction, but Xbox, Surface, and Windows have held their own this quarter to help drive some solid results.
Microsoft might not have launched any new Surface products in the recent quarter, but it&rsq

Anker’s first gallium nitride (GaN) charger — the 30W PowerPort Atom PD 1 — was interesting, largely due to its size, but it was less practical due to its low power and single USB-C port. The company’s new GaN charger, the aptly named PowerPort Atom PD 2, looks to solve most of those issues with 60W of power, a second USB-C port, and an improved design.The changes are obvious just by looking at the Atom PD 2. Where the Atom PD 1 looks like a beefier iPhone brick, the PD

Spoiler alert: This article does not address or reveal any plot points from Avengers: Endgame. It’s just a recommendation for a specific refresher course. Trust us on this one.
Ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame, anti-spoiler mania has reached a point of frenzy, driven in part by the directors’ anti-spoiler statement, a seemingly actively malicious pro-spoiler movement, and an extremely popular social media hashtag urging people not to be dicks about it. The Verge is so on bo

Last week, at TechCrunch’s robotics event at UC Berkeley, we sat down with four VCs who are making a range of bets on robotics companies, from drone technologies to robots whose immediate applications aren’t yet clear. Featuring Peter Barrettof Playground Global, Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator and Andy Wheeler of GV (pictured above), we covered a lot of terrain (no pun intended), including whether last-mile delivery robots make sense and how much r

Companies store a ton of data. You know this. Everyone knows this. But we’re not always happy about the kinds of data they store. We rightfully get pretty touchy when we hear our address, credit card number, mental health inquiries, or private conversations are just hanging out on some internet server where they might wind up in the wrong hands — like, say, an employee of the company that collected them.
The latest example: Bloomberg is reporting today that a team of Amazon Alexa em

Blizzard’s team shooter Overwatch is getting a big new feature. Today, the developer announced the Overwatch Workshop, which it describes as “a simplified game scripting system” that will let players create their own custom games. Essentially, players will be able to take existing game modes and add new rules and win conditions to them. As an example, Blizzard released a floor-is-lava-style mode today where players catch fire if they touch the ground.
Currently, the Workshop i

The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Avengers: Endgame, is just starting to hit screens, and already, there are reports of viewers ending the movie with a titanic groan of disgust. It’s not because they hated the movie — which is actively designed as a rousing payoff for 10 years of MCU films — but because they stayed all the way through the credits, and got nothing. There’s no friendly visual joke with a giant ant, no rush straight into the next movie, no low-key

Pinterestis a great place to find digital art but a terrible place to sell it. The fact that anything online is infinitely copyable makes it tough for artists to establish a sense of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as valuable. Yash Nelapati saw this struggle up close as Pinterest’s first employee. Now he has started MakersPlace, where creators can generate a blockchain fingerprint for each of their artworks that proves who made it and lets it be sold as part of a limited

We’re still several years away from 5G blanketing the US in coverage and delivering on all the promises of breakneck speeds and low latency we’ve been hearing about. But when that eventually happens, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson foresees a change to the way that mobile providers price their plans today. During today’s AT&T earnings call, Randall Stephenson said 5G might be more closely modeled after broadband internet at home, with different prices for different speed t

Ally F.’s favorite Peloton class, a 45-minute cycling course, used to crescendo to her perfect playlist: a pleasant warmup to the tunes of Sheryl Crow before a heart-pumping climb alongside Pat Benatar’s powerhouse vocals. But today, Ally is disappointed to find that classes now feature repeats of pop songs from the Now That’s What I Call Music catalog, ruining her workout vibes. “Random songs are plopped in the middle of an otherwise consistently themed playlist,”

A two-pack of Tile Pro Bluetooth trackers usually costs $70, but Daily Steals is offering Verge readers a $25 discount. This brings the price at checkout down to $44.99. The offer code will automatically apply if you click the link, but if you run into trouble, paste VERGETILE in at checkout.
Tile claims that the Pro is its most durable Bluetooth tracker yet, and unlike older models, it has replaceable batteries so you’ll be able to swap it out instead of trashing the whole tracker. A Blu

Democratic presidential hopeful John Delaney wants to hit President Donald Trump where it hurts — his Twitter following. In a Wednesday tweet, Delaney called for everyone to unfollow the president, as part of a broader campaign against the White House’s Twitter obsession.
The unfollowing campaign comes after a closed-door meeting between Trump and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday afternoon. In a statement, Twitter said that the meeting was scheduled to discuss the 2020 US election

Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of car rental companies Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental, and Alamo Rent A Car, announced on Wednesday plans to launch a car subscription service. It’s the car rental giant’s first foray into the buzzy Mobility-as-a-Service space, and could possibly disrupt car companies’ own efforts to offer alternatives to car ownership.Enterprise says customers pay a monthly fee to chose from six different vehicle classes — full-size a

Microsoft hasn’t officially released Windows 10’s May 2019 Update to everyone just yet, but the company is already warning of a very weird bug with it. Microsoft is blocking the update on PCs that have a USB hard disk like a thumb drive attached, or machines with an SD Card in the SD Card reader. “Inappropriate drive reassignment can occur on eligible computers that have an external USB device or SD memory card attached during the installation of the May 2019 update,” wa

Vue.ai, a U.S./India startup that develops an AI platform to help online retailers work more efficiently and sell more, has announced a $17 million Series B round.
The investment is led by Falcon Edge Capitalwith participation from Japan’s Global Brain and existing backer Sequoia Capital India. Parent company Mad Street Den was founded in 2014 and it raised $1.5 million a year later; Sequoia then bought into the business via an undisclosed deal in 2016. Vue.ai is described as an “AI

Apple’s premium newspaper and magazine subscription service, News Plus, launched on March 25th, which means that if you signed up for the month-long free trial, your free ride is over, and you will be charged $9.99 per month going forward.
If you’re a reader of the magazines and newspapers that are available in Apple News Plus, it might be worth keeping the service, provided you can put up with its weird and sometimes incongruous interface. But if you aren’t planning to read a

Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services will continue to be free to submit their films to the Oscars next year, after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided against changing its entry rules to more clearly favor films intended primarily for theatrical release. The Academy announced that Rule Two, which says a film is eligible to be considered for an Oscar so long as it has a seven-day run in an LA theater, will remain unchanged for the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020, despite

At Tesla’s Autonomy Day event for investors on Monday, CEO Elon Musk made a characteristically big deal out of the company’s new microchips. Describing the new FSD computer (it stands for “full self-driving”) that will power Tesla’s vehicles, Musk said they contained what was “objectively” the “best chip in the world.” And that’s not best by a little, but “by a huge margin.”
Experts and rivals beg to differ. They say this c

Apple released its second-generation AirPods just last month, but we may see a new version of its wireless headphones before 2019 is over. This information comes from a DigiTimes report, which also claims that a noise-canceling feature will be part of the next AirPods iteration. The ability to block outside sound had been rumored to be a part of Apple’s recently released model, but it may actually be coming this year with the new headphones.
Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst whose predictions of A

In January, Mark Zuckerberg published a blog post announcing his New Year’s resolution. After a year full of scandals, Zuckerberg wanted to publicly tackle big questions about technology’s place in society, showing that he was capable of handling the power of the world’s biggest social network in a thoughtful and humane way.
Now, that resolution has been shaped into something more manageable: a Zuckerberg-hosted podcast. Today, the Facebook Twitter account posted a link to a n

Bumble is launching a “private detector” feature that can automatically detect lewd images with AI and warn users about the photo before they open it. Users can then decide if they want to view, block, or report the image to moderators. The feature is part of a safety initiative from Bumble’s co-founders, and it’ll also come to the apps Badoo, Chappy, and Lumen — which are all part of the same dating group parent company — starting in June.
As one of the few

MongoDB announced today that it is acquiring Realm, an open-source database geared for mobile applications, for $39 million. The startup had raised just over $40 million before being acquired today. Not exactly a staggering return on investment.
It’s the kind of acquisition that makes a lot of sense from a tech perspective. Both companies are built on the premise that data is the center of application development, although they both come at it from a bit of a different angle. With Realm,Mo

On February 25th, Google introduced a new feature to Android that could have huge implications for our online security. The company announced that all Android devices running on version 7.0 and higher are now FIDO2 certified for password-free logins. Overnight, millions of Android users worldwide suddenly found themselves with a security key in their pocket. That security key has the potential to one day make passwords, and all of their accompanying problems and vulnerabilities, a thing of the

Best Buy is hosting a four-day sale that will end on Saturday night, and you’ll be able to save on 4K HDR televisions, the MacBook Pro, and more. Tech products spanning several categories are discounted, and since some of Best Buy’s deals are much better than others, we’ve picked those out from the rest.
4K HDR televisions built with Amazon’s Fire TV software are cheaper today. Toshiba’s 43-inch model usually costs $329.99, but you can buy one for $199.99. Amazon i

Disney just pulled off an impressive preview of its Disney+ subscription video service. We even got a price and launch date, which is more than Apple has been willing to share about its forthcoming Apple TV Plus offering. Not to be left behind, AT&T is now planning a showcase for its own WarnerMedia service that includes HBO, according to CEO Randall Stephenson. During today’s AT&T earnings call, Stephenson said the company is planning to demonstrate the paid video service sometim

Google Fit, the fitness tracking app that was redesigned on Android last year, has arrived on iOS. The app integrates with Apple Health, meaning your progress in other Health-compatible apps like Nike Run Club, Sleep Cycle, and Headspace will contribute towards your Google Fit goals. The iOS app syncs with both the Apple Watch and Wear OS devices.Google’s fitness app is designed around the idea of closing rings to hit activity goals based on recommendations from the American Heart Associa

It’s only been three months since I published our first round of Digital 2019 reports here on TNW, but our new Q2 Global Digital Statshot – produced in partnership with We Are Social and Hootsuite – shows that the connected world has already changed considerably during that time. You’ll find all the latest charts in the SlideShare embed below, but read on for my analysis of all the key trends. Highlights this quarter include some surprise numbers for Instagram and S

OPPO – the Chinese smartphone manufacturer – has a history of trying to straight-up murder the notch. Its Find X device introduced a slide system, but, with the brand new Reno, it has something different in mind: the pizza-slice selfie camera. We attended the phone’s launch in Zurich and were able to get our hands on the Reno for a day or so. Before we dive in though, it’s important to note this is an engineering version, not the final bit of hardware. So, this piec

I’m sitting at my laptop. The year is 2019, but the website I’m visiting feels oddly out of this time. It could’ve been built in the early days of the internet – or in a dystopian future where humans are desperately trying to resuscitate our once-thriving digital culture. The design is minimalistic – mostly black and white, with every shade of grey in between. Whenever I move my cursor, the site responds with a menacing synthetic sound, resembling the tonality of a