Technology news

At a press conference today, Apple and Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, announced that the company would bring 2,000 employees to the city over the next five years. That’s double the number of employees Apple had originally planned when it announced Seattle was part of a major US expansion this past December. Apple plans to occupy two 12-story towers, both powered by renewable energy. GeekWire reports that it will total 630,000 square feet of floor space.Apple intends for its Seattle o

Model Gigi Hadid believes she should be able to post paparazzi pictures on her Instagram account because her participation in their photos — from posing to choosing her outfit — invalidates a photographer’s ownership claims.In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in January this year, an agency, Xclusive-Lee, alleges that Hadid posted one of its images to her Instagram, which it claims violates the company’s copyright. In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this month, as

The easy pitch for the new HBO / BBC co-production Years and Years might be “What if Black Mirror, but a family drama?” But the more accurate pitch might be “What if Black Mirror, but with a full and beating heart?” That isn’t intended as a slam on Charlie Brooker’s anthology series about dystopian futures. It’s more of an appreciation of what creator Russell T. Davies has been able to achieve with his six-episode limited series, premiering Monday, June

The founder of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX reportedly siphoned money to other accounts without users’ knowledge before being reported dead last year. As The Wall Street Journal and CoinDesk report, the exchange’s court-appointed monitor released a 70-page report laying out its financial situation. It says founder Gerald Cotten transferred “significant volumes” of currency to personal accounts on rival exchanges, apparently using funds to pay for luxury goo

WordPressnow accounts for 34 percent of all websites globally, and today one of the key companies that helps handle the creation and management of some of those WP-hosted sites is getting a little bigger through some consolidation in the wider ecosystem. WP Engine, which works with businesses to build and manage their WordPress-hosted sites, has aquired Flywheel, a smaller competitor.
Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, WP Engine’sCEO and chairperson Heather Brunner said i

There’s a great video of Bill Gates speaking to a venture capital firm called Village Global going around today, in which Gates says that Microsoft losing mobile to Android is his “greatest mistake ever.”
“So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is,” says Gates, adding “Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.”This is all true,

Warner Bros. has hired former BBC executive Ann Sarnoff as its new CEO, marking the first time in studio history that a woman is at the helm of the company.Sarnoff will join John Stankey, CEO of WarnerMedia, as a top executive overseeing content as the company heads into a streaming-heavy future. She’s stepping in to replace Kevin Tsujihara, who left the company after a Hollywood Reporter story about using his influence to help Charlotte Kirk’s acting career after they began a sexual

Apple has filed its response to Spotify’s antitrust complaint in Europe, and its answer is essentially that Spotify has greatly exaggerated how much money is being taken by the App Store. Apple says that it’s currently taking a 15 percent cut of subscription fees for around 680,000 Spotify subscribers, representing 0.5 percent of Spotify’s total subscribers, and that Spotify is not paying a 30 percent cut on anything. The details were first reported by Der Spiegel.
The takeaway

Google’s Nest Hub is on sale more frequently than not, and today’s discount brings it down to its best price ever. Usually $129, it’s just $61 (before tax) at Rakuten with the offer code SAVE15 used at checkout.Formerly known as the Google Home Hub, this smart display is worth the cost if you’re invested in Google services. As noted in our review, the Nest Hub makes for an excellent digital photo frame if you have a Google Photos library. Amazon’s brand-new, freshly

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s smart city subsidiary, released its massive plan Monday to transform a slice of Toronto’s waterfront into a high-tech utopia. Eighteen months in the making and clocking in at 1,524 pages, the plan represents Alphabet’s first, high-stakes effort to realize Alphabet CEO Larry Page’s long-held dream of a city within a city to experiment with innovations like self-driving cars, public Wi-Fi, new health care delivery solutions, and other city planning

Last week, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic’s magical-themed follow-up to Pokémon Go, launched a day early, but the rollout was limited to users in the US and UK. Over the last few days, the launch has become much more global. Right now, the game is available in more than 140 countries, spanning North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and more. It’s available as a free download on both iOS and Android, and Niantic says that “the game will continue to roll

Apple is planning to release iOS 13 this fall to iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads (under the guise of the new iPadOS). It has a lot of improvements under the hood, but the most dramatic overhaul is coming to Apple’s in-car interface known as CarPlay.
CarPlay was first introduced four years ago, and aside from gaining the ability to use third-party mapping apps last year, it hasn’t really changed since then. But in iOS 13, it’s getting a major overhaul that makes it much more co

iOS 13, iPadOS, macOS Catalina, and tvOS 13 are available in public beta, and you can download and install them now. The process for installing each is a bit different, but we’ll walk through what’s new and how to get the new software on your device.
Unless you’re enrolled in Apple’s developer program, this is your first opportunity to try out the new software in beta. These betas will update periodically, culminating in the final release, which we expect at the end of su

If you’re active on several social networks, it can be a real pain trying to keep up with all your accounts. When you want to spread around some photos of your vacation, get some recommendations for your next phone, or simply complain about the weather, having to go to each service and send the same message to each — and then return to each so you can follow any responses — is time-consuming and inconvenient, to say the least.
One way around it is to use a social network manage

The founders of Argo AI, the self-driving startup backed by Ford, are giving back to their alma mater to the tune of a $15 million investment in Carnegie Mellon University to fund the creation of a new research center.
The Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research (phew) will use those funds to “pursue advanced research projects to help overcome hurdles to enabling self-driving vehicles to operate in a wide variety of real-world conditions, such as winter we

When the 10-year challenge went viral earlier this year, everyone who wanted to brag about how hot they used to be had the same idea for where to find those nostalgic photos: legacy photo hosting site Photobucket, which saw a massive uptick in traffic that week. “We found that people were like, ‘Where do I find that picture of myself 10 years ago? It’s probably on Photobucket,’” its CEO Ted Leonard tells me.The company is trying to make a comeback as more than just

The third flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is set for this evening, and this launch is perhaps the most important one yet for the powerful rocket. The Falcon Heavy will be flying a mission for the Air Force known as STP-2 that’s ultimately meant to certify the vehicle as capable of launching future national security missions. If all goes well, the launch could help solidify the Falcon Heavy as a dependable rocket for the Department of Defense and potentially position SpaceX as a go-to

Samsung is expanding the range of its SmartThings line of connected smart home gadgets today with the new $89.99 SmartThings Cam, $17.99 SmartThings Wifi Smart Plug, and $9.99 SmartThings Smart Bulb. The new products work within the SmartThings ecosystem and are available starting today.
All three products fill some gaps in the SmartThings lineup with entry-level devices that are ideal for smart home beginners. They also are aggressively priced, either matching or undercutting the main players i

The Echoteam must have started sweating when the Lenovo Smart Clock was announced during CES. Deep inside Seattle’s Day One building, Amazonwas reading the release of the Echo Show 5, a pint-sized version of the company’s smart screen that bore more than a passing resemblance to Lenovo’s Google Assistant device.
Amazon, of course, beat Google to the category by years with the first Echo Show and innovated the bedside model with the Echo Spot. But Google and its cohort have a wa

Osmo,a Palo Alto-based education startup acquired by Indian unicorn Byju’s for $120 million this year, is expanding its product lineup to serve a new and largely untapped market: pre-schoolers.
Osmo today announced Osmo Little Genius Starter Kit, a set of tools that aims to help children that have yet to enter schools to understand letters, expand their vocabulary, and build motor and social skills. The kit is priced at $79 and is available through Amazon, Target, and Apple stores in the U

International shipping giant FedExis showing it’s serious about attracting the ecommerce crowd after a high-profile termination of one of its contracts with Amazon to provide delivery using its express air service in the US. FedEx is now offering the same two-day express air shipping direct to some customers for the same price it usually charges for ground service, which is typically much less expensive, the New York Times reports.
FedEx is offering the price cut in order to better compete

Cloudflare, a company providing performance and security to websites, is having network problems of its own this morning — and taking down a lot of its customers’ sites and apps in the process. Affected companies include podcast app Overcast, chat service Discord, managed hosting provider WP Engine, eCommerce hosting provider Sonassi, public web front-end CDN service CDNJS, and many others — including the sites that rely on the web hosting or who partner with Cloudflare for the

As hundreds of millions of people turn their attention to the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup tournament, many of them are using an Indian streaming service to follow the ins and outs of the game.
More than 100 million users tuned in to Hotstar,an on-demand streaming service owned by Disney, on June 16, the day India and Pakistan played a league match against each other. That’s the highest engagement the four-year-old service has clocked on its platform to date, it said in a statement today.

Popular chat service Discord experienced issues today due to network problems at Cloudflare and a wider internet issue. The app was inaccessible for its millions of users, and even Discord’s website and status pages were struggling. Discord’s problems could be traced to an outage at Cloudflare, a content delivery network. Cloudflare started experiencing issues at 7:43AM ET, and this caused Discord, Feedly, Crunchyroll, and many other sites that rely on its services to have partial ou