Technology news

Today EA released its quarterly earnings, and unsurprisingly Apex Legends was a big hit. According to EA, the Respawn-developed battle royale game is “easily the fastest-growing franchise we’ve ever had.” What might be surprising, though, is that EA said it’s looking to bring the game from PC and console to mobile platforms. “We are in advanced negotiations to bring Apex Legends to China and to mobile,” the company said during today’s call.
Unfortunatel

Game of Thrones is almost over, and while executives at HBO are rushing to work up a spinoff that will ensure HBO Now subscriptions remain mandatory, there’s one obvious take: a buddy adventure story starring Arya Stark and the Hound.
A new fan trailer from Lance Krall, published on Vimeo, sets up an idea of what a series called Arya and The Hound could look like. The style of Krall’s video is similar to what other fan-trailer editors have done over the years with The Avengers cast

Google just took the wraps off its latest smartphone: the Pixel 3A, a cheaper version of its flagship Pixel phone that starts at just $400, or roughly half of what the more powerful Pixel 3 costs.
If you want to know whether the Pixel 3A is good, I’d recommend reading my colleague Dieter Bohn’s review (spoiler: it’s very good, especially for the price). But the question isn’t whether the Pixel 3A is good — it’s whether the regular Pixel 3 (and Pixel 3 XL) are

Android Q’s third developer preview brought along several new features, one of which is fairly contentious: iPhone-like gestures. Once they’re activated, the home button will disappear. In its place, you’ll swipe up to go home. And, say, where’d that back button go? To navigate back and forth through apps, you can swipe left or right on your screen to get where you need to go.
After a few minutes of use, some Verge staffers really like the changes since it makes switchin

Scientists from Italy and Switzerland recently performed an experiment demonstrating that antimatter, like matter, has the characteristics of both waves and particles. This means antimatter fits within the established theory of quantum mechanics – making its rarity all the more curious. The Big Bang, by all scientific accounts, should have exploded forth equal parts matter and antimatter when it poofed the universe into existence. Unfortunately antimatter is incredibly hard to find.

Waymois partnering with Lyft to bring self-driving vehicles onto the ride-hailing network in Phoenix as the company ramps up its commercial robotaxi service.
Waymo will add 10 of its self-driving vehicles on Lyftplatform over the next few months, according to CEO John Krafcik. Once Waymo vehicles are on the platform, Lyft users in the area will have the option to select a Waymo directly from the Lyft app for eligible rides.
“This first step in our partnership will allow us to introduce the

Google seems to be waking up from its VR daydream. The company’s ambitious plans to leverage the smartphones that people already own to power VR experiences went unmentioned at its I/O developer conference.
After spending 2016 and 2017 making big promises for how the company would shape the mobile VR market and ensure that its Daydream platform would dominate, Google has largely abandoned its plans letting the headsets gather dust and its VR content in the Play Store.
The only virtual real

Samsung may have just had its first ever, high-profile foldable phone flame out in embarrassing fashion, but that’s not stopping other companies from looking into the technology. Ahead of its I/O developer conference, Google says it’s also looking into foldable tech and has been prototyping foldable displays for quite some time, according to CNET.“We’re definitely prototyping the technology. We’ve been doing it for a long time,” Mario Queiroz, Google’s

Google today announced a change coming to Chrome that will help image-heavy websites load more quickly — but the addition for now is only available in the experimental version of the web browser, Chrome Canary. Explained Chrome Product Manager Tal Oppenheimer, speaking at the Google I/O conference on Tuesday, the company is rolling out a new way to create a better image loading experience on websites that leverages “lazy loading” — a technique that only loads images on a

Google has announced that 10.4 percent of the total Android install is running Android Pie, the latest version of the mobile OS that the company officially released last year on August 6th, 2018 (via Android Police). Today’s announcement marks the first time in the nine months since Google released Pie to the public that the company has given hard stats on what percent of devices have it installed.Compared to last year, Google’s numbers are way up: as of May 2018, Android Oreo was o

It won’t be long before Red Hatbecomes part of IBM, the result of the $34 billion acquisition last year that is still making its way to completion. For now, Red Hat continues as a stand-alone company, and is if to flex its independence muscles, it announced its second agreement in two days with Microsoft Azure, Redmond’s public cloud infrastructure offering. This one involving running Red Hat OpenShift on Azure.
OpenShiftis RedHat’s Kubernetesoffering. The thinking is that you

Google’s Flutter UI toolkit for cross-platform development may only be two years old, but it has quickly become the framework of choice for many developers. Until now, though, ‘cross-platform’ only referred to Android and iOS. Late last year, Google announced that it would also take flutter beyond mobile and to the web. Today, at its I/O developer conference, it’s doing exactly that with the launch of the first technical preview of Flutter for the web
Google also today an

In its first-ever earnings report as a public company, Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) failed to display progress toward profitability.
The ride-hailing business, which raised $2 billion in a March initial public offering, posted first-quarter revenues of $776 million on losses of $1.14 billion, including $894 million of stock-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses. The company’s earnings surpassed Wall Street estimates of $740 million while losses came in much higher as a result of IPO-r

Today, at the I/O developer conference, Google announced a new way to limit how much advertisers can track you online. As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company is releasing a new set of controls that will allow users to see all of the cookies currently stored by the browser and give them the option of blocking any trackers they don’t like. It’s unclear how the new controls will work, and the pending interface was not made available to journalists, but the company de

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 4, “The Last of the Starks.”
Season 8 of Game of Thrones has had a lot to live up to. If the show’s big finale was going to be as good as the lead-up seasons that made it a sensation, it would need epic political intrigue, meaningful deaths, and even a touch of romance. While few people look to Game of Thrones as the epitome of romantic fiction — it’s featured a lot more rape, incest, and abuse than supportive r

Google today announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers.
“Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”
It was on

At its I/O developer conference, Googletoday announced that it is opening up its Smart Display platform to developers. Until now, there was no real way for developers to target devices like the newly-renamed Nest Hub. Only Google’s own first-party services got full access to the display. Now, however, Developers will be able to start developing Google Assistant actions for these displays, starting with games.
I wouldn’t expect that we’ll see very complex and highly-graphical ga

At its I/O conference, Googletoday announced a slew of new tools for developers who want to build experiences for the company’s Assistant platform. These range from the ability to build games for smart displays like the Google Home Hub and the launch of App Actions for taking users from an Assistant answer to their native apps, to a new Local Home SDK that allows developers to run their smart home code locally on Google Home Speakers and Nest Displays.
This Local Home SDK, may actually be

At the risk of sounding too optimistic, 2019 might be the year of the private web browser.
In the beginning, browsers were a cobbled together mess that put a premium on making the contents within look good. Security was an afterthought — Internet Explorer is no better example — and user privacy was seldom considered as newer browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox focused on speed and reliability.
Ads kept the internet free for so long but with invasive ad-tracking at its pea

Googletoday announced that its second- and third-generation Cloud TPU Pods — its scalable cloud-based supercomputers with up to 1,000 of its custom Tensor Processing Units — are now publicly available in beta.
The latest-generation v3 models are especially powerful and are liquid-cooled. Each pod can deliver up to 100 petaFLOPS. As Google notes, that raw computing power puts it within the top 5 supercomputers worldwide, but you need to take that number with a grain of salt given that

Googletoday announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use a reactive programming model similar to what React Native and Vue.js.
JetpackCompose is an unbundled toolkit that is part of Google’s overall Android Jetpack set of software components for Androiddevelopers, but there is no requirement to use any other Jetpack components. With Jetpack Compose, Google is essentially bringing the UI-as-code philosophy to Android deve

At last year’s I/O developer conference, Googleannounced Project Marble, an effort to bring more speed and stability to the company’s Android Studio IDE. That was in marked contrast to previous updates, where the focus was very much on adding new features. Over time, though, as Google extended AndroidStudio, it started to slow down. Android Studio 3.5, which the company is launching today, is the result of these efforts.
“We are certainly not done improving quality with Android

Sridhar Vembu Contributor Sridhar Vembu is the co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation. Sridhar initially founded AdventNet in 1996 and became its CEO in 2000. Prior to AdventNet, Sridhar worked as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University.Driven by ultra-easy central bank policy, global merger and acquisition activity is exploding. The

Half a year ago, at the AndroidDev Summit, Googleannounced a new way for developers to force their users to update their apps when they launch new features or important bug fixes. It’s only now, at Google I/O, though, that the company is actually making this feature available to developers. Previously, it was only available to a few select Google partners.
In addition, Google is also launching its dynamics updates feature out of beta. This allows developers to deliver some of their apps&rs

The third phase of Android Q is now available to download and install on your Pixel device, as well as on 15 other devices. The latest update brings a few new features in tow, including an oft-requested Dark Theme, some new gesture controls, and other changes that you can read about in Dieter Bohn’s exclusive look at the major Android update.
Since this is a beta intended primarily for developers, you might want to think twice before installing it on your personal phone. Past beta phases

Googletoday announced a major new initiative around its Chrome browser that will, in the long run, introduce significant changes to how Chrome handles cookies and enhance its users’ privacy across the web.
With this move, Google is making cookies more private and also adding new anti-fingerprinting technology to its browser. While some of the changes here are happening in the Chrome browser, developers, too, will have to prepare for this change and adapt their cookies to this new reality.

 
In a two hour keynote at the annual GoogleI/O Conference this afternoon, the company announced a ton of stuff it’s been working on over the last year, from new phones to a next-gen version of its voice-powered Assistant.
Don’t have time to watch it all? That’s okay — we’ll summed up the biggest stuff for you.
Google Pixel 3a and 3a XLAs rumored, Google is launching more affordable versions of its Pixel 3 phones.
To bring the price down, they’ve bumped t

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized the dark web index and news site Deep Dot Web, according to a warning notice posted on the site. The site’s dark web site has also been taken down and replaced with a similar notice.People reportedly arrested in multiple countries
The agency, according to the notice, seized the website with a warrant, working with computer crime investigators and European law enforcement. Two people in Israel were arrested in connection with the bust, accordi

Google Assistant is pretty fast, but it’s hardly as conversational as a real person. That’s in large part because using the Assistant requires a constant connection to the cloud, where a server sorts through 100GB worth of AI models, and beams the relevant information back down to you. But what if you could shrink that to just 0.5GB, and load the Assistant right from your device? It could be way faster – up to 10 times more responsive. It could be so fast that &ldquo

Electronic Arts today revealed it’d be offering EA Access, its game subscription service, for PS4 owners. For Sony’s fans, this means the console gets the service five years after its competitor, the Xbox One. Between this and its other concessions to modernity, it seems Sony is at least making an attempt to catch up with the times (but more on that later). EA Access, for the PS4 gamers who’ll be getting it for the first time, gives users access to the company’s &ld

Google typically hops between each I/O year to focus on either hardware or software news, and this year brought on more devices than we got from 2018. Now that the keynote’s wrapped, we can confirm a few rumors from the past few months: the Pixel 3A is real, as is the leaked Nest Hub Max smart display. There is also a slew of announcements on what’s to come from Android Q when it officially comes to consumers later this year and some updates coming soon to the Google Assistant.
Here

Google’s new Pixel 3A is the best phone under $500, according to our review. Prices start at $399 for the smaller 3A, and $479 for the Pixel 3A XL. Both phones are far cheaper than the Pixel 3, which currently goes for $799, yet B&H Photo and Google Store are making the deal even sweeter for a limited time.At B&H Photo, you’ll receive a $100 gift card to B&H’s store when you purchase the Google Pixel 3A. It has all color options available, including just black, cle

Glen Allsopp Contributor Glen Allsopp is the founder of Detailed.com, an SEO consultancy and newsletter focused on actionable tactics to grow search traffic. He also tracks successful online startups at Gaps.com.In 2019, it’s estimated that every minute there are 150 new websites coming online. While many of these won’t be long-term ventures, a large percentage will eventually find themselves looking to organic search engine traffic to grow their reach.
This invariably leads people

A set of new features for Android could alleviate some of the difficulties of living with hearing impairment and other conditions. Live transcription, captioning, and relay use speech recognition and synthesis to make content on your phone more accessible — in real time.
Announced today at Google’sI/O event in a surprisingly long segment on accessibility, the features all rely on improved speech-to-text and text-to-speech algorithms, some of which now run on-device rather than sendin

Google is releasing its augmented reality walking directions today — but only for Pixel phones. At today’s I/O conference, Google announced that it was launching a preview of AR walking directions in Google Maps, something it’s only offered limited trials of so far. The feature offers real-time navigation through your phone’s camera: you can hold it up to see arrows and directions overlaid on your surroundings. It’s available for the Pixel 3A as well as older Pixel

A time-lapse camera mode is coming soon to all Pixel phones, Google announced today at its I/O developer conference. In case you’ve never recorded a time lapse, each is a series of stills stitched into a clip that appears to play in fast motion. They’re a fun way to bottle up a scene when neither a single photo nor a video can do it justice. The feature is available now on the Google Pixel, Pixel 2, and Pixel 3 via an update for the camera app. It will also be available on the new G

Voice interfaces are more common than ever, but they’re not equally accessible. For example, if you have a speech disorder cause by a neurological impairment like ALS or multiple sclerosis, then using Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa will be off-limits to you. In today’s tech environment, that means missing out on a lot.That’s why Google is launching a new initiative to make speech technology more accessible to those with disabilities. It’s called Project Euphoni

The new Google Pixel 3A phone won’t support Daydream — Android’s built-in, but increasingly forgotten, virtual reality platform. Google confirmed the news before I/O, stating that “resolution and framerate” issues made the phone incompatible with Daydream. Google’s Daydream View headset will continue to work with the older Pixel 3 and other supported Android phones.
Google’s Cardboard headset gave VR a huge boost in the mid-‘10s, when it offered s

Last year at GoogleI/O, Google introduced a host of new digital wellbeing tools aimed at helping people better manage their screen time, track app usage, and configure their device’s ‘do not disturb’ settings. Today, Google is updating its suite of tools to include a new feature called “Focus Mode” that lets you temporarily disable distracting apps while not missing critical information, as well as a few new features for users of its parental control software, Famil

Google today launched its much-awaited mid-range Pixel phones – the Pixel 3a and the Pixel 3a XL – at its developer conference Google IO. The Pixel 3a is priced at $399 / Rs 39,999 and the Pixel 3a XL is priced at $479 / Rs 44,999. The devices are pretty much like their flagship cousins, with a mid-tier processor and no wireless charging support. More importantly, they use the same rear camera as the Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3a. So you can expect these phones to capture some sharp and

Google announced its newest, most affordable phones today — the Pixel 3A and 3A XL — and for the first time with Pixel phones, more carriers than just Verizon will sell them in stores. Google confirmed today that T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, and US Cellular will sell the phones, along with the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. AT&T will also support the 3A and 3A XL, which means that people can insert a SIM and use the phone, but the carrier won’t place it on store shelves. Smaller ca