Technology news

Koan, a three-year-old online platform that aims to help teams achieve their objectives and stay engaged, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Uncork Capital and Crosslink.
Koan,co-founded and led by CEO Matt Tucker — who previously co-founded Jive Software, an outfit that made social software for businesses and went public in 2011, then sold in 2017 — is trying to set itself apart from the many other performance management tools in the world by catering less to HR department

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Smart Summon, the autonomous parking feature rolled out by Tesla in mid-September, has already been used “over one million times,” the company said in its quarterly earnings statement Wednesday.The feature enables a Tesla vehicle to leave a parking space and navigate around obstacles to its owner. Tesla owners who purchased the Full Self-Driving option on their car received it as part of the version 10 software update that went out on September

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge iRobot finds itself in a bind. The Massachusetts-based robotics company that makes the Roomba, among other autonomous cleaning devices, saw its stock plummet by nearly 20 percent today, after reporting third quarter earnings yesterday, as a result of lower sales in August and September. But its sales were only lower because it decided to increase prices in the US, an ill-fated move that’s hurt the company domestically.The culprit? President Trump’s o

Photo by Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat before dozens of members of Congress on Wednesday, charged with the goal of convincing them that the company’s foray into cryptocurrency is a good idea. But nearly every lawmaker who spoke today took Zuckerberg to task over the company’s past failures, calling on him and Facebook to make efforts to regain their trust before moving forward with the Libra project.At the top of the House Financial Servi

A record number of cars shipped in the third quarter of 2019 were enough to help Tesla turn a modest profit, according to financial figures released by the Silicon Valley automaker on Wednesday. And with the Shanghai Gigafactory nearly ready to begin production of the Model 3, Tesla’s most affordable car, all eyes are now on China to see what kind of lift the automaker can get in the biggest market for electric vehicles in the world.Tesla reported a net income of $143 million, and generate

Teslareturned to profitability in the third quarter after two periods of losses surprising Wall Street and sending shares higher in after-market trading, according to earnings reported after the market closed Wednesday.
The automaker’s third-quarter results included $143 million in net income, or 80 cents a share, compared with $311 million, or $1.82 a share, in the same year-ago period. Tesla earned $342 million, or $1.91 a share, in the third quarter when adjusted for one-time items.
Ana

Personal finance startup Truebill announced today that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
The new funding was led by Eldridge Industries,with participation from Evolution VC and previous investors, including Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.
When the Y Combinator-backed startup raised seed funding back in 2016, it was focused on what Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada now describes as “a single function” — helping users

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Samsung has released a patch for the Galaxy S10 and Note 10’s fingerprint reader, fixing a problem discovered by The Sun that could allow anyone’s fingerprints to be used to unlock an S10 with certain types of screen protectors attached (via Reuters).
According to Android Central, the update is only available for S10 and Note 10 devices in South Korea for now, although it should be rolling out to additional countries in the near future.The

Natalie Massenet,the fashion entrepreneur who founded the designer fashion portal Net-a-Porter, chaired the British Fashion Council for four years and today runs Imaginary Ventures, a venture firm that’s focused on consumer startups, took the stage a bit ago at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit. There, she was asked why Imaginary has funded more women founders than men (it has just happened that way, suggested Massenet). She was also asked about starting a brand and enumerated t

Photo by Dana Starbard / Hulu Building a TV series around a location made famous in stories without actually adapting those stories is a strange choice, but for Hulu’s Castle Rock, it’s proven rewarding. Created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Stephen King, among others, the show is set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, which is the setting for many King stories. Castle Rock incorporates elements from King’s fiction, but it l

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft posted the first quarter of its 2020 financial results today, reporting revenue of $33.1 billion and a net income of $10.7 billion. Revenue is up 14 percent, and net income has increased by 21 percent. Once again, it’s Microsoft’s cloud and Office revenues that have pushed the company to solid earnings, as both Surface and overall gaming revenue has decreased.
Microsoft’s Surface revenue performed well in this same period last

U.K.-based lunar rover startup Spacebit, a company developing robotic exploration hardware for use on the Moon, announced two new partners that will help it develop and finalize its technology ahead of its target mission date of 2021. The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA) and Mexico’s Dereum will be providing the technology that Spacebit will employ on both its deployer and the robot rover it’s preparing for use on the Moon.
This marks the first time that Latin American companie

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Libra will make money for Facebook by increasing the price of digital ads, Mark Zuckerberg explained at a hearing on Capitol Hill today. The answer came in response to a question posed by Congressman David Kustoff (R-Tenn), who cut through Zuckerberg’s typical explanation about the project being largely charitable.
“When you came up with this idea and went to your board of directors, how did you tell them that Facebook could monetize or profi

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Every major phone launch has a “-gate”: a drama about some problem or worry with the hardware. With the Pixel 4, there are several: the battery may be too small, the face unlock works with your eyes closed, and now the conditions at which the screen will refresh at 90Hz and when it will ratchet down to 60Hz are pretty confusing. Google calls the feature “Smooth Display,” but its reception has been anything but smooth in the pas

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Screenshots can be very useful — if, for example, you want to post a photo boasting how many miles you ran today or if you’re a writer for The Verge who is trying to illustrate a how-to article. Things like that.
Creating a screenshot from an Apple Watch isn’t all that difficult, although viewing the screenshot directly on the Watch takes a few initial steps.Set your Watch to take screenshots
Before you can take a screenshot with your Watch, y

Photo: Film Frame / Marvel Studios There’s a war brewing between some of Hollywood’s most revered directors and fans of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the latter camp just got some help from Disney CEO Bob Iger.At a Wall Street Journal conference in California on Tuesday night, Iger was asked about recent criticisms Academy Award-winning directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola leveled against comic book movies. Scorsese compared Marvel movies to theme park

Image: Bethesda Bethesda is taking a rather unique approach to adding new in-game content for its multiplayer survival shooter Fallout 76. Instead of adding it in for free or making it part of a paid expansion, the developer is now selling a $12.99 monthly subscription it’s calling Fallout 1st, which will grant access to premium features. In particular, the membership — Bethesda is calling it a membership and not a subscription — “offers something players have been askin

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1. WeWork confirms an up to $8 billion lifeline from SoftBank Group; names new executive chairman
Confirming earlier reports, The We Companyand SoftBank Group have agreed to a new capital infusion, which will see SoftBankcommitting $5 billion in new financing and issuing a tender offer for anothe

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge While looking for some new and interesting wallpapers for my Apple Watch, I came across a Reddit post showing Apple Watch wallpaper that had been created from a GIF — and I simply had to create some of my own. Mostly because a) Apple’s default time lapse wallpapers felt a bit boring, and b) Live Photos I shoot with my phone aren’t as interesting as some of the glitch art you can find online.The process is very simple — you’re basic

Photo: Dean Rogers / 101 Studios It’s unusual for a film to arrive in theaters labeled “Director’s Cut,” but it’s happening with The Current War, a historical film about the tech face-off between irascible inventor Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and genteel industrialist George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon). The film’s themes are integrity, the damaging effects of powerful men, and the importance of savvy branding — and those same themes have pla

YouTube debuted the trailer today for its first interactive original show, a special starring gaming personality Markiplier that lets viewers lead him through a heist. The show will debut on October 30th and include 61 total videos leading to 31 possible endings.
Creator-made interactive shows have been on YouTube for well over a decade, with the earliest relying on YouTube’s since-deprecated annotation feature to let viewers make choices and advance to a new video. Markiplier has even mad

How would you feel if your phone’s wallpaper displayed a running tally of the number of times you unlock your device every day? Ashamed? Indifferent? If you’ve got an Android phone, Google is now giving you that option — plus other new initiatives that are part of the company’s ongoing Digital Wellbeing effort.
As noted by Android Police, Google has released several new Digital Wellbeing “experiments” in the Play Store. The one I mentioned above is called Unlo

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is announcing that last year’s version of Android, Android 9, accounted for 22.6 percent of the ecosystem as of this past August. That’s more than twice as good as the update rate from Android 7 to 8 was the year before, but it’s still abysmally low compared to the update rates on the iPhone — less than a month after launch, iOS 13 now accounts for half of all iPhones.
By comparison, fewer than a quarter of Android users

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Pixel 4 doesn’t come out until Thursday, October 24th, but it’s already been discounted by $100 on Amazon — twice. Earlier today, the 64GB Pixel 4 in “just black” was available for $699.99, and for a brief period yesterday, you could have bought a 64GB Pixel 4 in “clearly white” for the same price.Now, you can’t buy either, even at full price. At the time of this update, every Pixel 4 model is sold

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Pixel 4 doesn’t come out until Thursday, October 24th, but it’s already discounted by $100 on Amazon — again. You can buy the 64GB Pixel 4 in “just black” right now for $699.99.
The Pixel 4 is a pretty solid phone, so the deal is a nice way to save a good amount of money on Google’s latest flagship. It also makes the Pixel 4 the same price as Apple’s 64GB iPhone 11, instead of costing more.
If you read th

Photo: Everybody House Games Sometimes, it can feel impossible to get what you want from a smart assistant. That problem is the premise of a new board game called Hey Robot, which tasks players with getting Alexa or another digital assistant to say a specific word before their opponents can.
The gameplay works much like Taboo: players are given a selection of words, and they have to figure out what they can ask a smart assistant that will get it to recite the word without saying any form of the

Getty Images On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions from Congress about the company’s latest venture into blockchain and cryptocurrency, Libra.
The hearing comes after months of heated debates from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about whether Facebook should create its own global currency. The head of the Libra Project, David Marcus, made the case for Libra in front of Congress earlier this year, but it wasn’t enough for lawmakers. N

Image: OnePlus OnePlus has announced its second 5G phone, the OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren Edition, and it’s set to be exclusive to T-Mobile in the US. OnePlus announced the 7T Pro and the McLaren variant earlier this month, but at the time, it made no mention of a 5G version of the device.The McLaren Edition of the phone is similar to the standard 7T Pro model, but it features an orange-and-black color scheme and increases the amount of RAM from 8GB to 12GB. It’s available as a 4G-only m

Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images This week, ExxonMobil goes on trial, facing a potentially historic legal showdown in New York. The company faces charges that it misled investors by downplaying how much future environmental regulations could affect its bottom line. If prosecutors nail Exxon on this case, it could be the start of a major reckoning for Big Oil.
Watching this week’s case is sort of like seeing notorious mobster Al Capone face a jury on tax evasion. It hinges on w

Raydiant, a startup promising to turn TVs into interactive digital signs, is making several announcements today — a new company name, a new CEO, new partners and $7 million in new funding.
Until today, the company was known as Mira, and it was founded by Tuan Ho (who previously founded internet TV company Philo), along with venture studio Atomic. The goal is to offer an alternative to existing digital signage solutions, which it says are often improvised, bespoke or expensive.
With Raydian

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On October 22nd, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest critics introduced a bill that’s meant to undercut social media monopolies. The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act is designed to make “large communications platforms” loosen their hold on user data. It builds on regulations that have already been implemented in Europe, and it speaks to serious concerns about online walled gardens.
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