Technology news

Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images A new competitor has entered the streaming wars: the Food Network.Discovery is launching a streaming service in partnership with Amazon called Food Network Kitchen, which will cost $6.99 a month (or $59.99 annually) and feature live cooking classes taught by chefs like Martha Stewart, Bobby Flay, and Guy Fieri. Subscribers will be able to attend up to 25 live cooking classes a week, and get access to more than 800 on-demand cooking classes and 3,000 step-b

Amazon has just announced a total of 15 new products, and while the Echo Buds, Echo Frames, and Echo Studio are the main attractions, it also refreshed or released new products across its Echo and Ring product lines.
New Echo Products
One of those new products is the Echo Dot Clock, which is a third-gen Echo Dot with a simple LED clock in the front of it. Amazon says it built this product because people constantly ask Alexa for the time, and now they won’t have to.
It also can be used as a

Project A, the Berlin-based VC that backs startups in Europe at seed and Series A stage, has raised a new $200 million fund (€180 million). This brings total assets under management to $486 million (€440 million) and is the third fund Project Ahas raised.
The venture capital firm, whose investments include the likes of WorldRemit, Catawiki, Voi and Uberall, is also announcing it will now have a presence in London and Stockholm in order to put people on the ground in what it says are &l

Amazon took a whole damn Echo speaker and put it into a ring and called it the Echo Loop. It’s part of a program Amazon is calling “Day1,” which is code for “here are a bunch of products that are not really ready for mass sales, but we want to put them out there anyway.” The first two are the smart eyeglass frames and this little ring.
It works, but the audio is not very loud. That is probably a combination of design and necessity, as the idea here is you don’

In an attempt to make the smart home simpler, smarter, and safer, Amazon is announcing a new “Certified for Humans” program, which is designed to make it easier to set up new smart home devices. The program builds upon the “frustration-free setup” initiative that Amazon announced last year, which stored user’s Wi-Fi details to share them with compatible smart home devices.
Amazon says that any device that carries this new certification will be designed to cut down t

Amazon is taking Alexa’s show on the road with its new Echo Buds, truly wireless headphones that pair with a connected smartphone and promise to offer the full Alexa experience.
I have tried them on and can report that they are comfortable in my ears. But as they are in the noise-isolating style, they might not in yours — especially if you have small ears. Basically, if you’ve used the Jabra 65t headphones, you will know.
Overall, Amazon has done a remarkable job at nailing mos

Amazon’s huge 2019 hardware event has wrapped up. The company announced 15 new products, including the Echo Buds truly wireless headphones, the Dolby Atmos-equipped Echo Studio speaker, and the Echo Frames, which have built-in microphones so you can chat with Alexa.
A few of the announcements were minor revisions, like the Echo Dot smart speaker with an integrated clock, and the Alexa Smart Oven that can convection bake and air fry food items (in addition to being a regular microwave). But

We’ve just gotten some brief time with Amazon’s first smart eyeglasses, the Echo Frames, at the company’s Seattle headquarters. Amazon is positioning the glasses as the ultimate take-Alexa-everywhere product, but it’s also trying to balance that pitch with privacy: there’s a button on the glasses to disable its microphones, and the Echo Frames lack any kind of camera. As the company considers these a “day one” product for tech enthusiasts, they’ll

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I spend a lot of time on Twitch — for my job, yes, but also because I love watching streamers. Over the last few months, though, I’ve been trying to diversify what I watch there. I want to see smaller creators, more art and music, and some talk shows and podcasts. I know all of that is out there, plus I’m convinced that there are some gems I’m missing. But I find myself running into the same wall: it’s hard to find streamers

At its fall event today, Amazon announced two new versions of its Ring Stick Up security cameras and showed off a way for Alexa to have conversations with people who come to your door via a Ring doorbell.
Amazon refreshed the Stick Up Cam at last year’s event, but it’s giving it another refresh this year. The new Stick Up Cam is sold in wired, battery-powered, or solar-powered versions. It also has 1080p video, motion detection, and night vision like the previous version, but Amazon

Image: Respawn Respawn Entertainment, the EA-owned game studio behind shooter hits Titanfall and Apex Legends, is taking a departure from the far-future, sci-fi settings of its most famous games, including the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. In partnership with Oculus VR, the studio today revealed Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, a virtual reality take on the classic WWII franchise. The game was announced with a 2020 release date onstage by Mike Verdu, the head of VR and AR content at F

Amazon has announced a new secure wireless standard called Amazon Sidewalk, a low-bandwidth protocol that’s designed to power ultra-low power devices and connect them over long distances. The first device to use this new standard is a device that’s designed to connect to your pet’s collar from Amazon called Ring Fetch, which is designed to let you to track your dog, allowing you to geofence your yard and get an alert when it leaves.Fetch uses Amazon’s new Sidewalk network

Amazon is getting into the smart glasses race. Today at its Echo and Alexa-focused hardware event, VP Dave Limp gave an early look at Echo Frames. The glasses resemble traditional prescription lenses, but allow wearers to take Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant with them anywhere and everywhere. Echo Frames are part of a program that Amazon calls “Day One editions,” which are devices, aimed at enthusiasts, that aren’t quite ready for mass, widespread release. They’ll be

Amazon has announced the new Echo Studio, the first high-end smart speaker from the company. The Studio was built specifically to provide Echo customers with a way to listen to lossless music through Amazon’s new Amazon Music HD streaming service. It’s also the first smart speaker to support 3D audio, with both Dolby Atmos and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio codecs on board. The Echo Studio is available for preorder starting today, September 25th, for $199, and it will be available la

Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge Facebook has confirmed (yet again) that it’s building augmented reality glasses, and it announced a project called “Live Maps” that will create 3D maps of the world. At the Oculus Connect developer conference, Facebook augmented and virtual reality head Andrew Bosworth said the company had “a few” prototypes of AR glasses, although he didn’t offer detail about them.
Facebook Reality Labs will mapping and modeling many different

Oculus is adding new social features to its headset powered by Facebook, the company said. Later this year, Oculus devices will gain new social features designed to integrate the company’s virtual-reality division more closely with the core social network. The changes were announced today at the Oculus Connect developer conference today in San Jose.While inevitable, the addition of Facebook features to Oculus devices may rankle longtime Oculus fans who prefer to keep their VR gaming separa

Amazon is introducing another way to get Alexa into your home, the Echo Flex. It’s a tiny speaker that you plug directly into a wall outlet, so you can get Alexa in every room of your house more easily. Amazon has built a USB port into the bottom of the $24.99 Echo Flex, so you can use it by your nightstand and still charge your phone, or even plug additional accessories into the Echo Flex.
Amazon is announcing two Echo Flex accessories that you’ll be able to slot into the bottom, a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s fall hardware event is underway. We expect to hear about a ton of new products, and there have already been several announcements, including the new Eero mesh Wi-Fi system, a new eight-inch Echo Show, the Echo Dot with an integrated clock, and the high-end Echo Studio speaker, all of which you can see below.Last year’s event saw the debut of a smart microwave, smart clock, and more, so Amazon will likely expand its efforts to take ove

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Alexa is coming to America’s largest carmaker. General Motors announced Wednesday its plan to integrate Amazon’s popular voice assistant into millions of its vehicles starting in 2020. Any 2018 Cadillac, GMC, and Chevrolet vehicle or newer will be eligible for the upgrade, the automaker said.GM is the latest company to partner with Jeff Bezos’ tech giant. Only a few — Toyota, BMW, Ford, and, most recently, Audi — have ann

Amazon has just announced a brand-new $99 Eero router at its big hardware event, marking the first new product from the mesh networking company since Amazon bought it earlier this year.The new router promises ease of use, with “set up in 10 minutes or less,” with a dual-band radio system and support for the Eero Secure and Eero Secure Plus premium subscription services.Also new are deeper Alexa controls (something that both Eero and other routers have supported before in a less integ

Amazon is introducing a new Echo companion device today, Echo Glow. It’s a small bulbous lamp that you can tap to change the color, and it can even blink to do lights for an Alexa-powered dance party (yes, really). The Echo Glow is similar to Amazon’s Echo Buttons that the company launched for $20 two years ago, and this lamp is designed to complement Echo and Alexa devices.
Alexa users will be able to ask the digital assistant for a flickering campfire light for kids, a sleep timer

After a string of industry-wide privacy scares, Amazon is rolling out a new set of tools designed to give users more control over the stored voice recordings from their Alexa device. Announced at Amazon’s fall 2019 hardware event, the new skills are part of a host of hardware and software upgrades for the company’s personal voice assistant.Onstage at the event, Amazon hardware and services chief Dave Limp announced a new push towards privacy, which began with a set of skills to let u

Vox Media announced yesterday that it’s acquiring New York Media, making it the new owner New York Magazine, as well as digital offshoots like The Cut and Vulture.
The companies said Vox Media’s chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff will continue to lead the combined organization, while New York Media CEO Pam Wasserstein will become president and join the Vox board of directors.
Along with the titular website, Vox also owns SB Nation, Recode, The Verge and other online properties. It’s

There is no more important savings asset for most American families than owning a home, but the dream of ownership has turned into a nightmare. Homeownership, which peaked in 2004 at around 70%, hit its nadir after the global financial crisis, reaching 63% in 2016 according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve bank.
While the reasons behind the decline are numerous and complicated, one point of friction is the extreme homogeneity of mortgage products available to consumers, which mostly re

Acquia announced yesterday that Vista Equity Partners was going to buy a majority stake in the company worth a $1 billion. That would seem to be reason enough to sell the company. That’s a good amount a dough, but as co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert told Extra Crunch, he’s also happy to be taking care of his early investors and his long-time, loyal employees who stuck by him all these years.
Vista is actually buying out early investors as part of the deal, while providing some liqui

Shane Dawson is one of the few YouTube creators whose documentary series following other creators have amassed more than 100 million views. His newest series, “The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star,” aims to be his biggest one yet, going behind the scenes with one of YouTube’s most prominent and controversial beauty moguls at a time when the community was undergoing its biggest feud to date.Dawson dropped the first trailer for the series yesterday after months of teasing. It has

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Embattled e-cigarette heavyweight Juul is shaking up its leadership and marketing practices as the company faces increasing regulatory scrutiny. Juul announced on Wednesday that CEO Kevin Burns is being replaced by K.C. Crosthwaite, an executive at tobacco company Altria, which bought 35 percent of Juul in December.In the same announcement, Juul declared that it is “suspending all broadcast, print and digital product advertising in the U.S.” T

Critical cyber attacks on both businesses and individuals have been grabbing headlines at an alarming rate. Cybersecurity has moved from a background risk for enterprises to a critical day-to-day threat to business operations, forcing executive teams to pour time and hundreds of billions in capital into monitoring and prevention efforts.
Yet even as investment in security ticks up, the frequency and cost of cybercrime to businesses continues to rapidly accelerate, with the World Economic Forum e

Unbabel, a Lisbon-based startup that’s built a platform for translating customer service messages at scale by combining the speed of machine translation with native (human) speaker nuance and expertise, has closed a $60 million Series C round.
The investment was led by Point72 Ventures,with participation from e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners. The 2013-founded startup last raised a $23M Series B in January 2018. The latest round brings its total funding to date t

Ford is bringing its autonomous vehicles to Austin, Texas, the company announced on Wednesday. Ford will start by mapping the streets of downtown Austin this November. Eventually, the size of the fleet and the geographic area will grow until Ford is ready to launch an autonomous taxi and delivery service at scale in 2021, the company said.The Blue Oval previously named Miami and Washington, DC as its two initial test cities. The company is also testing its cars in Detroit and Pittsburgh, though

Few organizations have the complex data and analytics problems that challenge the defense and intelligence communities every single day. Whether it is managing petabytes of text, audio, or video data, finding extraordinarily small patterns in the noise, or processing multilingual analytics, the agencies at the heart of America’s national security system confront cutting-edge problems every day.
Despite the desire for better tools though, intelligence analysts are often stymied to procure u

At the outset of Sayonara Wild Hears, a narrator — voiced by Queen Latifah — describes a world governed by three powerful arcana, and a new heroine who has emerged from the shard of a broken heart. That girl then appears, riding a skateboard across an astral highway, chasing an ethereal butterfly. Once she captures the creature, the heroine transforms into a masked superhero and sets off on a journey through a pink-and-purple fantasy realm where she chases biker gangs, rides a deer t

The current iPhone design has remained broadly consistent since 2017. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s 2020 iPhones could feature a metal frame design similar to the one that was used for the iPhone 4 back in 2010, Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted. MacRumors was first to report on Kuo’s latest research note, which says that the phones’ “metal frame surface will be changed to a similar design to the iPhone 4, replacing the current surface design.”Kuo,

Impossible Foods unveiled the latest version of its plant-based burger (pictured) at the beginning of the year. | Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images A week after Impossible Foods started selling the Impossible Burger in grocery stores on the West Coast, the company is announcing that its plant-based “meat” will soon be available in stores on the eastern shores of the US. It will be available in 102 stores starting tomorrow, including Fairway in New York and 100 Wegmans locations acr

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Every day, I use Alexa to turn on my lights, switch TV channels, and set timers when I’m cooking. Amazon’s digital assistant is the center of my smart home, but once I step out of the house, Alexa might as well be dead to me.Like many in the US, I use an iPhone that’s tightly controlled by Apple. Sure, there’s an Alexa app I can use, but I can’t summon the digital assistant with the regular “Alexa” on my iPhone, s