Technology news

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Google’s big hardware event in October will likely focus a lot on the excessively leaked Pixel 4. But the company apparently has some other products to announce, too, including its newest Chromebook: a 13.3-inch, 4K new Pixelbook, according to 9to5Google.The Chromebook, officially to be called the Pixelbook Go, is said to harken closer to Google’s original Chromebook Pixel from 2013, with a simple clamshell design, as opposed to the transforming 2-

Alex Castro When I tuned into the Grand Theft Auto V role-playing server earlier today, the first thing I saw was a hostage situation. Kyle Pred, a cadet in the Los Santos Police Department, was talking a gangster out of killing a random hostage in a bank. The gangster, Speedy, was yelling questions at Pred. “How many dots are there on two dice?” he asked through the locked door. “21 times two, so 42,” Pred replied, correctly. The situation went on in this way for a minu

Engage:BDR announced today that it has raised $23.25 million in new funding.
CEO Ted Dhanik told me that this includes both debt and equity funding, and will be used to grow the company’s NetZero payments program.
NetZero is designed to address the ongoing issue of long delays faced by publishers before they get paid by advertisers. Dhanik said “the terms are getting worse and worse,” with publishers being asked to wait 30, 60, 90 or even 120 days after they invoice their

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In California, federal prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into Juul Labs, the immensely popular e-cigarette manufacturer, according to The Wall Street Journal. The focus of the probe is unclear, but the investigation is being led by the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, according to the Journal.Juul has faced a number of legal challenges in recent months, as government outrage grows over hundreds of illnesses link

Stationhead, the mobile app that turns its users into streaming radio DJs, got a big upgrade today. Where StationheadDJs were previously limited to broadcasting live, they can now record their shows, making them available on-demand for anyone to listen later.
The idea behind Stationhead is to democratize and recapture the personality of traditional radio broadcasts — the kind of conversation and personal connection that’s missing from a playlist.
The app includes features like the ab

Julian Shapiro ContributorShare on TwitterJulian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributorHow to get people to open your emails How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it
We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them in

For the past several years, Unity’s valuation has ballooned alongside their public ambitions to become essential to customers beyond game developers.
One of the more interesting use cases of the real-time rendering game engine had been helping companies train their systems inside a virtual environment. This has become a key part of the workflows for robotics startups and self-driving car companies that build technologies that need to be trained repeatedly on ever-changing circumstances.
To

Twitter is now letting users add up to five lists as alternative timelines in the main Twitter app, allowing you to quickly swipe between different groups of accounts directly from your home screen.The company tested the feature back in June, but it’s rolling it out to everyone on iOS starting today. Check the tweet here for a better look at how the multiple lists actually work in practice.
Customizable timelines that are easy to access? We’re thinking about ways to do this! One idea

Disrupt SF will light up San Francisco on October 2-4, and as usual we’ve designed the show to be unmissable for founders, investors and just about anyone in the global startup scene. In a post two weeks ago, we spelled out five of the best reasons to attend, including the amazing speaker agenda, the perennial favorite Startup Battlefield and the new founder-focused Extra Crunch stage. 
Needless to say, we can think of many more reasons to join the show, and here are a few: 
#1 D

Amazonis building wireless earbuds that offer Alexa voice assistant access, and fitness tracking for use during activities, according to a new report from CNBC. These earbuds, combined with a new, larger Echo designed to provide more premium sound, could feature into Amazon’s hardware event taking place this Wednesday in Seattle, though the outlet is unclear on the release timeline for this gear based on its source.
These earbuds would be a major new product for Amazon,and would be the com

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has a hardware event lined up for Wednesday, and if last year’s showcase was any indication, we might see multiple new devices from the company. CNBC has just published a report saying that Amazon is working on wireless earbuds with health-tracking features and “a new, bulkier Echo device that comes with a woofer and better speakers than the original version.”
The earbuds are expected to cost under $100, putting them at an advanta

Photo: Epic Games Epic is making a big change to the way matchmaking works in Fortnite. With the game’s next major update, v10.40, the developer will be introducing skill-based matchmaking to the battle royale. “Since battle royale launched, the matchmaking strategy for our core modes has remained mostly unchanged,” Epic explained in a blog post published today. “Over the past two years, however, the range of player skill has grown considerably.”
It’s not cle

The next time you get pegged with a Nerf dart, it might be from an incredible 120 feet away — because Hasbro’s new Ultra One blaster, coming October 1st for $49.99, is boasting ranges we’ve never seen from an unmodified blaster thanks to a completely redesigned dart with new stabilizing fins.
It could be the single most important change to Nerf blasters in years, since range has always been a limiting factor in Nerf wars. When Nerf introduced the “Elite” dart with i

Twittertoday says it’s expanding its policies to prohibit financial scams on its platform — something you’d think would have already been banned, but apparently was never directly addressed through Twitter’s policy documentation. Instead, financial scams until now have been handled through Twitter’s spam reporting tool, which was expanded last year to specifically identify what exact type of spam a tweet contained.
Among the choices were options to indicate if the t

One of the highlights of House House’s Untitled Goose Game, the “slapstick-stealth-sandbox” game in which you play a terrible goose wreaking havoc in a lovely English village, is the adaptive soundtrack of Debussy’s Preludes. The playful piano music almost provides a kind of insight into the goose’s mind — the melody plays in quiet, short bursts when it’s up to no good, creeping up on its next victim. When the goose is in full chaos mode, waddling away f

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. As Adam Neumann reportedly faces pressure to step down; it’s looking like a fight for life between WeWork and SoftBank
Members of WeWork’s board of directors are pressuring controversial CEO Adam Neumann to step down and become non-executive chairman, according to The Wall Street J

Amazonis introducing a new feature to its Alexa Show device designed to help blind and other low-vision customers identify common household pantry items by holding them in front of Alexa’s camera and asking what it is. The feature uses a combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques in order to recognize the objects the Echo Show sees.
The Echo Show is the version of the Alexa-powered smart speaker that tends to sit in customers’ kitchens because it helps them with o

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images Last night’s Emmy Awards was nothing new. HBO, Amazon, and Netflix took home many awards at TV’s most prestigious event. Yet the most interesting part of the evening wasn’t necessarily who won, but the commercials for major streaming services that played between acceptance speeches, a signal of how stretched out TV is about to become.The ads were louder this year. The Emmys, airing this year on Fox, were full of commercial spots for Apple TV Plus, D

Running an ethical tech company is underrated. From fostering a diverse and inclusive company to examining your technology’s impact on society, it all comes down to ethics.
Ellen Pao,who previously served as CEO at Reddit and sued her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for gender discrimination, has made it her life’s work to foster diversity, inclusion and ethics in the tech industry.
The same goes for Tracy Chou,who first hit the spotlight when she provoked tech c

After several months of speculation, Appletoday confirmed that it will be manufacturing the latest version of the Mac Pro in the United States. The move is in keeping with earlier versions of the high-end, pro-focused desktop. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple would move production of the long-awaited desktop to a plant outside of Shanghai.
Apple didn’t deny the report at the time, instead stating, “Like all of our products, the new Mac Pro is designed and engineer

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge Apple will make its new Mac Pros in Austin, Texas, continuing to build the computers at the same facilities that have been assembling the prior-generation Mac Pros since 2013.
Apple says building the computer in the US is possible thanks to receiving a tariff exemption on “certain necessary components.” Production is supposed to begin “soon.”
This is a surprise announcement from Apple. When the new-generation Mac Pro was announced, Apple

Photo: Pixar Animation Studios Toy Story 4 debuted in a world that’s changed profoundly since the original Toy Story hit theaters nearly 25 years ago. Toy Story was the first-ever entirely computer-animated film; now CGI animation is common, and the hand-drawn cel animation it replaced is a shrinking rarity. Toy Story was considered a huge success because it made more than $300 million at the box office; the newest sequel was considered a mild disappointment because it didn’t meet t

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Best Buy is hosting a new promotion that will give you a free Google Nest Hub if you purchase a Nest Hello video doorbell, or a free Amazon Echo Show 5 when you buy a Ring Video Doorbell 2.
Neither video doorbell is discounted, so the Nest Hello costs $229.99 while the Ring Video Doorbell costs $199.99. But smart displays are great as far as freebies go, especially since they serve as good companions to smart doorbells. Whether you buy the Google product or the

After stating clearly on Friday that he would honor a $95,000 contract with ICE, CEO Barry Crist must have had a change of heart over the weekend. In a blog post this morning he wrote that the company would not be renewing the contract with ICE after all.
“After deep introspection and dialog within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire over the next year. Chef will fulfill our full obligations under the current contracts,” Crist wrote in the

Following the well-received launch of Apple Arcade, Google today is officially introducing its own take on subscription-based access to premium mobile games — or, in Google’s case, premium mobile apps, too. The new GooglePlay Pass subscription, arriving this week, will offer more than 350 apps and games that are completely unlocked, with no upfront fees, in-app purchases or advertisements. And the initial price point is something of a no-brainer — it’s just $1.99 per mont

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Today, Google is launching a new service called “Google Play Pass,” which for $4.99 per month gives Android users access to over 350 games and apps which will be served ad free and without any in-app purchases. Google will give users 10 days free and is also planning on offering the first year at $1.99 per month. It will be available in the US this week and other countries “soon.”
Google’s take on the app subscription model