Technology news

SpaceX says it plans to begin offering broadband services to customers with its massive internet-from-space initiative, known as Starlink, as early as mid-2020, SpaceNews reports. The company needs to complete six to eight launches, with 60 satellites per ride, in order to get the service up and running, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell told reporters during a media roundtable in Washington, DC.
Starlink is SpaceX’s proposed constellation of thousands of satellites, which are desig

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Snap’s future depends on how well it builds its augmented reality platform. The company announced in its quarterly earnings call today that it added more users — 7 million in the last quarter — and generated more money, but it’s still unprofitable and lags far behind other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram in terms of user base size. Instagram’s ephemeral Stories product counts 500 million users per day as of Janua

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Pixel 4 doesn’t come out until Thursday, but it’s already discounted on Amazon, where you can buy a 64GB Pixel 4 in “clearly white” right now for $699.99. That’s $100 cheaper than its usual starting price of $799.
The Pixel 4 is a pretty solid phone, so this is a nice way to save a good amount on Google’s latest flagship. It also makes it the same price as Apple’s 64GB iPhone 11 — so if you’ve

In less than two weeks, Kylie Jenner’s innocuous office tour video on YouTube morphed into a massive TikTok meme, which she’s now turned into sold-out merchandise and a trademark application that would cover even more products.
Jenner filed the trademark application to cover merchandise using the words “rise and shine,” which is a reference to the recent meme. If the trademark application is accepted, it would be applied to dresses, jackets, socks, and even cosmetics, acc

Me at my friend Matt’s Windows 7 party. | Photo by Matthew Bellemare On this day in 2009 — 10 years ago — Microsoft released its new Windows 7 operating system to the public. Less than three years after its unfavorable predecessor, Windows Vista, was released, it added support for touchscreen computers and brought new features like snapping windows, a new Superbar, and an updated file management system to PCs.I don’t particularly remember a huge difference in user experi

Mount Pleasant Planning Commission Foxconn never does anything in Wisconsin without first announcing, canceling, and then announcing it again. So right on schedule, the company has refiled plans to build a network operations center (NOC) in the shape of a giant glass dome.The dome, which will contain both the NOC and an auditorium, was initially revealed in early September — but Foxconn yanked the plans on literally the same day, and didn’t comment on whether the dome would come bac

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge If you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber, Spotify is offering you a Google Home Mini for free now through November 15th, or until supplies run out (via Business Insider).
Before you try to jump on this offer, note that the deal is for the previous generation of Google’s smallest smart speaker, not the newly released Nest Mini. And some circumstances will rule you out of the promotion (more on that later). But if you qualify, it’s a great way to g

One of the first shocks that you may experience when you buy your first Chromebook probably comes when you look at the keyboard. Where is the Caps Lock key? What (if you have a Pixelbook) is that strange-looking key between the Ctrl and Alt keys? What is that strange key in the top row that looks like a square with two straight lines next to it?
Google has tweaked the keyboard of its Chromebooks in ways that emphasize the way in which Chrome OS differs from Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. And

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Hulu was slower than other streaming services in offering the option to download videos for offline viewing, but at least the company is moving quickly to expand the feature. Today Hulu announced that downloads are now available on Android smartphones and tablets.
Downloads first launched on iOS and iPadOS earlier this month. Only customers who pay for Hulu’s No Ads plan ($11.99 per month) are able to save movies and TV shows to watch later if t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook today announced a pledge of $1 billion and a partnership with the state of California to help build more affordable housing, after the company contributed for over a decade to an influx of tens of thousands of highly paid technology workers that exacerbated the problem in the Bay Area. Facebook says the money will go toward building 20,000 new housing units “to help essential workers such as teachers, nurses and first responders live closer

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This week for our interview series on The Vergecast, host and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy. We’ve had Gigi on the show before to talk about the ramifications following the repeal of net neutrality.This time, we brought her back to talk about some recent developments in the tech policy world, including lawmakers in states like California

Mobvoi announced that it is launching sleep tracking for its TicWatch Pro smartwatches today, as well as an Android app called TicSleep to track sleep data from the watch. Mobvoi says that the TicWatch Pro’s sleep tracking features work automatically, so you should be able to just go to bed with the watch on and it will start tracking.
The watch can track sleep cycles and heart rate
The Wear OS smartwatch will track your sleep cycles and heart rate, according to Mobvoi, and can wake you up

Slack has embraced third-party apps on its platform for years, but in recent months, the company has really been focused on extending its chat app. Earlier this year, Slack bridged the gap between email and instant messaging and also made its service easier to use with Microsoft’s Office 365 apps. Alongside all of this, Slack has been working with Google, Zoom, and other big third-party developers to more closely integrate apps into Slack. Today, at Slack’s Spec conference in San Fra

Over the past year or two, Squarespacehas been expanding beyond website-building with new products like email marketing and its first acquisition (of an online scheduling tool).
Today, it’s announcing a move into social media content creation with the acquisition of Unfold, which offers templates for creating stories on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat — you might even call it a Squarespace-style approach to social media.
“As part of our pursuit to be the all-in-one platform fo

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google’s MVNO wireless service — Google Fi — has offered certain users a unique benefit: it can piggyback on multiple networks. Depending on which one is stronger, some Android phones on Fi can use either T-Mobile, Sprint, or US Cellular. The feature is mainly used on Pixel phones, and now with the Pixel 4, Fi is taking advantage of that phone’s Dual SIM Dual Standby (DSDS) feature.
DSDS does pretty much what it says: two diffe

In June, electric scooter startup Bird announced that it would be rolling out a new moped-style electric vehicle called the Bird Cruiser. Today, the moped can be spotted in service around Los Angeles — but under Bird’s Scoot brand and not its own.The design and engineering of Scoot’s moped were based on the Bird Cruiser, which has been spotted recently near Bird’s Santa Monica headquarters. Both mopeds look very similar to the Juiced Scorpion, a moped-style electric bike

Easter eggs are a way for the people behind legacy films or television shows to demonstrate their love of and fidelity to its source material. When showrunners, writers, and directors stick a glancing reference to Luke Cage’s yellow shirt from his 1970s comics in the gritty 2016 Netflix series, it’s a way of nodding to the fans, of saying “We’re fans too, and we can be trusted with your beloved properties.”
That seems to be the intention behind the omnipresent Easte

Photo by Erin Schaff for The Verge Over the past few months, lawmakers have taken aim at Big Tech, calling out companies like Facebook for anti-competitive behavior and sometimes threatening to break them up entirely. But on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is expected to introduce a new bill with the goal of encouraging market competition by requiring large platforms to make their users’ data interoperable.The “Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Sw

Startup founders have a million things to worry about every day.
Finding product-market fit, great talent and and a sustainable plan for constant growth are top of mind, but perhaps most importantly, they need to keep the lights on, whether it’s by raising venture capital or managing cash flows while bootstrapping.
The flip side to thinking about fundraising and growth, however, is skipping ahead to the final chapter — whether that involves M&A, an IPO or perhaps a bankruptcy, ev

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge LG’s G8X ThinQ will go on sale in the US on November 1st, and it’ll come bundled with the device’s biggest draw: a case that includes a flip-out second screen. The package will sell for $699.99 unlocked, with preorders starting this Friday, October 25th. LG expects the bundle to go for around $300 when discounted through carrier agreements.
The G8X ThinQ is a unique take on a dual-screen phone. Instead of using a foldable screen, like Samsung&r

U.S. billionaire Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday his space company Blue Origin has signed agreements with Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and research and development organization Draper for development of its lunar lander designed to help NASA put humans on the moon by 2024.Blue Origin's so-called Blue Moon lunar lander, unveiled by Bezos in May, is in development and sits at the center of the space company's ambition to ferry humans into deep space and land key co

Photo by Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images for the WeWork Creator Awards Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is taking control of WeWork, and it’s giving WeWork founder Adam Neumann the equivalent of nearly $1.7 billion to sever most of his ties with the shared office space startup, according to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. SoftBank will also spend up to $3 billion buying out shares owned by employees and early investors in the company, and it’s lining up some

Image: Comcast Comcast made headlines last month when it announced plans to give a free streaming box to all of its internet-only subscribers — except, there’s an extra fee that Comcast didn’t clearly disclose at the time. It’ll only give the box to internet-only subscribers who also rent a modem and router from the company for an additional $13 per month.
After the free offer was announced last month, a Comcast spokesperson told me the rental requirement would be droppe