Technology news

With the first details coming out around the next Xbox and PlayStation, you might expect those upcoming consoles to be the buzz of this year’s E3. But instead, subscription services have become the talk of the show, as seemingly every console maker and game publisher looks to shift the way that games are sold.
Every major publisher is racing to offer the first real “Netflix for games,” selling games to players via a monthly subscription service. Ubisoft is launching its own su

VMware has been trying to reinvent itself from a company that helps you build and manage virtual machines in your data center to one that helps you manage your virtual machines wherever they live, whether that’s on prem or the public cloud. Today, the company announced it was buying Avi Networks, a six-year-old startup that helps companies balance application delivery in the cloud or on prem in an acquisition that sounds like a pretty good match. The companies did not reveal the purchase p

Cloud gaming is the undeniably industry-altering shadow looming over this year’s E3 video game conference. Paired with the rise of subscription services, the idea of running games from remote servers could not only change how they’re are played, distributed and sold, but even how games are developed, thanks to the promise of running software off the equivalent of multiple consoles strung together.The two frontrunners in the race are Google and Microsoft, two of the tech industry&rsq

A number of Huawei phone owners have noticed that their devices have suddenly begun displaying ads in their lockscreens, according to Android Police.Users began complaining yesterday that ads from Booking.com have appeared on their phones. 9to5Google notes that a variety of phones appear to be displaying them, and that Huawei appears to have slipped them into the phone’s Magazine Unlock feature. That feature allows users to have a rotating set of images on their lockscreen, which change e

Supermassive Games has a unique problem. As with its horror game Until Dawn, where every character could die a horrific death, Man of Medan — the first in its Dark Pictures Anthology — will carry on that tradition. Keeping those deaths fresh, however, keeps the team on its toes. “It’s s a real big problem because killing people — it’s easy to just kill people,” says game director Tom Heaton. ‘We have to kill people in really entertaining ways.&rdq

Valve has just announced Underlords: its own version of the popular Auto Chess mod for Dota 2. Underlords will be a standalone game for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Valve says it has been running a “friends and family” beta of the game for the past few weeks, and will be expanding the test today to all Dota 2 Battle Pass owners. A free open beta of the game will then launch after a week of preview stress testing.
Underlords is the second breakout title from the company&rsq

Target announced today that US customers — with some geographic exceptions — can now select same-day delivery for orders placed directly through its website that total more than $35 for a flat fee of $9.99, or for free if they’re already a member of shopping app Shipt.
It’s part of the company’s integration with Shipt (which it acquired in 2017 for $550 million) to take on competing retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Shipt costs $99 per year, and with its app, cust

Apple has released an updated version of Logic Pro X, its professional music production software. The software is now souped up to show off the capabilities of the new Mac Pro, with improved responsiveness and a huge increase in the amount of tracks it can support in a project file.
This is a significant upgrade for Logic — it’s gone from support for 255 stereo audio tracks, 255 software instrument tracks and 255 aux channels to 1,000 for each, and now also supports 1,000 external M

Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I still download a lot of music from Spotify. It’s really handy to have tunes stored locally on my phone for a multitude of reasons. I can listen without buying on-flight Wi-Fi, and every day during my commute on the NYC subway when the Wi-Fi and LTE signals inevitably cut out underground.
Having easy access to these downloaded songs and albums is important to me, but the latest Spotify update that’s rolling out now (version 8.5.9.737 for Andro

The latest game to come to Tesla’s massive touchscreen infotainment center is Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter, the free-to-play post-apocalyptic spinoff title that came out for mobile devices back in 2015.The announcement was made this afternoon by Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, the director of Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 and the executive producer of Fallout Shelter. The game joins indie platformer Cuphead, announced for Tesla earlier this month, and a series of Atari classics t

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown discusses the evolution of plant-based burgers, the science of protein, why his company avoids GMOs, and its mission to help create a more sustainable food system.
Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Brown just days before their product upgrade discussing Beyond Meat’s continued efforts to make their meatless burgers taste more like meat in the latest episode of The Vergecast.Nilay Patel: So right now you’re Beyond Bu

Apple has filed for several new Mac models with the Eurasian Economic Commission database; in the past, these registrations have been a precursor to product announcements only a few months later. As noted by MacRumors, the seven model numbers are designated as “portable” computers by Apple — meaning these are MacBooks of some sort — are A2141, A2147, A2158, A2159, A2179, A2182, and A2251.
That sounds like a lot of computers, especially when you consider that Apple just r

Google has created a video game called Game Builder that allows you to craft simple Minecraft-style games for yourself and others to play through. The game lets you drag and drop characters and scenery into an empty sandbox to construct your world, then use preset commands to string together how things interact. It’s free to play and available on both Windows and macOS.
The game comes from Area 120, Google’s incubator for experimental projects (some of which have quickly disappeared

Verizon today launched sales of the $99.99 Verizon Smart Locator, a tiny device that can be kept with your keys, bag, or other possessions (or pets) that you never want to lose. Similar to the Samsung SmartThings Tracker that AT&T sells, Verizon’s new gadget uses a combination of Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi-based positioning (WPS), and LTE coverage “for pinpoint accuracy wherever your mobile network is present.”Unlike a Tile, which requires you to be in Bluetooth range to find a

Nintendo’s E3 2019 sale has a lot of great deals, but the best deal of all is on Hollow Knight, which is just $7.50 (usually $14.99). For those who haven’t played it, Hollow Knight is in a league of its own when it comes to side-scrolling action games. The art style of the characters and the worlds are spectacular, and it masterfully scales up the difficulty and doles out item upgrades and skills without feeling unfair.To be honest, I bounced off of it the first time that I tried it

Playing through a brief demo of Sayonara Wild Hearts is like riding a motorcycle through a Carly Rae Jepsen album.
At E3 2019, I had a chance to check out around 10 minutes of the game, which is being developed by Swedish studio Simogo, the same team behind titles like Device 6 and Year Walk, and published by Annapurna Interactive. It’s like nothing the studio has done before: bright, vibrant, and absolutely bursting with energy.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is essentially a rhythm game. In the o

Top House Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) issued a warning on Thursday that deepfake videos could have a disastrous effect on the 2020 election cycle.“Now is the time for social media companies to put in place policies to protect users from this kind of misinformation not in 2021 after viral deepfakes have polluted the 2020 elections,” Schiff said. “By then it will be too late.”
The warning came during a House Intelligence Committee hearing focused on analyzing the nati

Do you find your Switch’s Joy-Con controllers too small? Well, Hori may have the answer with its new Grip Controller, which takes advantage of the Switch’s modular design to replace Nintendo’s smaller options with controllers that hew much closer to a traditional gamepad (albeit, one that’s been split in two).Like a traditional gamepad that got split in two for the Switch
The Grip Controller is technically meant as a tie-in for the upcoming mech shooter Daemon X Machina

The Shining’s Danny Torrance is all grown up in the first trailer for Doctor Sleep.A sequel to Stephen King’s beloved 1977 novel, Doctor Sleep follows an adult Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) whose attempt to live a peaceful life is shattered when he encounters a teenager named Abra. Abra, like Danny, has a powerful extrasensory gift that she needs to use to take down an evil figure known as Rose the Hat and her followers, The True Knot. It’s through their inevitable team-up that

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That’s the next phase of social calendar app IRL that’s launching today on iOS to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.
The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don’t use apps l

So now that automatic synchronization between Google Photos and Google Drive is going away, how can you be sure that your photos and videos are being backed up safely?It’s actually pretty simple. Your photos can be backed up to Google Photos either via its mobile app or using Google’s Backup and Sync application for Windows and macOS systems.
A couple of notes first. If you decide to remove the Photos app from your Android phone, the Backup and Sync will not automatically turn off,

British mobile-only bank Monzo is making its way across the pond to the US today. Valued at more than $1 billion, Monzo has gradually been growing its customer base in the UK and recently hit 2.2 million customers. Unlike traditional banks, Monzo operates solely on iOS and Android via an app, and has no brick-and-mortar banks. It calls itself the “bank of the future,” that will take on the bigger banks.
Monzo has managed to grow quickly in the UK thanks to its focus on features that

Kickstarter is asking creators to stop claiming that their projects are “the world’s best,” and instead use realistic language to describe their campaigns. It isn’t banning the phrase altogether, but Kickstarter is today launching a new tool, alongside new recommendations and rules for projects, that discourages creators from using “superlatives,” or exaggerated claims about a product like “world’s fastest,” when naming their projects.
Kicks

If you need a microSD card for your Nintendo Switch, phone, tablet, or action camera, PNY’s 512GB microSD card is $80.99 at Amazon, a whole $20 cheaper than the best price we’ve seen on a card of this capacity.
The $80.99 microSD card claims to deliver 90Mb/s transfer speeds, which is just fine for most use cases. It was only a few months ago that SanDisk’s popular 400GB microSD card was this price, so your patience has been rewarded if you were waiting for a better deal.
If y

The BBC’s Orphan Black ran for five years on television, and it’s set to return later this summer on a new platform. Publishing startup Serial Box has announced that it will continue the story as one of its “serials” — an episodic novel with accompanying narration — with series star Tatiana Maslany set to narrate.Serial Box has a unique publishing model: it releases novel-length seasons of a story, broken up into a series of episodes. It’s a format that

When the team behind the upcoming Luigi’s Mansion 3 decided they wanted to add co-op play to the game, they realized they needed a new character. And they came up with something novel: a strange, gooey version of Luigi appropriately called Gooigi. Many of us got our first glimpse of the slimy double during Nintendo’s E3 presentation this week. But, despite being designed with the third game in mind, Gooigi actually made a brief appearance in last year’s re-release of the origi

Target Circle and TapHeaven announced they’re merging into a single company under the Target Circle brand.
TapHeavenco-founder and CEO Chris Hoyt, who is becoming chief growth officer at the combined organization, said the two companies have been “trying to solve the same problem” — namely, eliminating many of the inefficiencies in the mobile advertising business.
Hoyt said that for Target Circle,that meant trying to “unify this fragmented ecosystem into a sing

Tyson Foods, the biggest meat producer in America, is getting into the fake meat business. The company announced today a pea-based chicken nugget alternative that will be the start of a new Raised & Rooted meat alternative brand from Tyson, via CNBC. Looks like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger just got some big competition.“Today’s consumers are seeking more protein options so we’re creating new products for the growing number of people open to flexible diets that include

If you think about it, the basic concept of a toothbrush hasn’t evolved since… forever. Sure, many people have switched to an electric toothbrush, but it remains a stick with a brush at the end.
Willo thinks that’s not good enough. The company has developed an oral care device to improve brushing with a focus on plaque. The company says that basic brushing only cleans 42% of dental plaque, while electric brushes clean 46% of dental plaque.
The startup has worked with dentists