Technology news

Photo by Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images Gaming and politics do mix, as the recent furor over Blizzard’s censorship of pro-Hong Kong voices has shown: it hasn’t blown over, and the conflict shows no signs of stopping. Today, a new challenger appeared: the nonprofit organization Fight for the Future, which has spun up a campaign called Gamers for Freedom to put pressure on Blizzard to reevaluate its stances on China and Hong Kong.
Fight for the Future organizes online (

Amazonshares fell by nearly 7%, or $118.38, in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company reported its first earnings miss in two years.
Financial analysts had predicted that the launch of one-day shipping would eat into Amazon’s earnings, but even with the forewarning investors pummeled the stock after the market closed. It didn’t help that the company predicted revenues for the fourth quarter — including the all-important holiday season — also look soft.
The good

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, TikTok fired back after weeks of attacks from Congress over the company’s ties to the Chinese government. In a blog post, TikTok maintained that it doesn’t censor content critical of the Chinese government, and that none of its operations are subject to Chinese law.
On Wednesday, senior senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) penned a letter to US intelligence officials asking that they investigate TikTok, which is own

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Nissan unveiled a strange new electric concept car this week at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show. Not strange in the sense that it had a virtual koi fish assistant, or that it resembled a boxy, Blade Runner-y sedan, or that it sings. No, the new Nissan Ariya concept is strange because of how normal it looks. For the first time in a few years, you can look at the newest Nissan concept and get a real sense of what the company might do with an electric car that isn’t

Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images Twitter will never join Libra, CEO Jack Dorsey said today at a Twitter media event in New York City. He said “hell no” when asked if he would join and explained that the Facebook-created cryptocurrency initiative didn’t need to be a cryptocurrency to pull of its broader goals of democratizing the financial system. “I don’t know if it’s a gimmick,” Dorsey said, “but a cryptocurrency wasn’t necessary to make that

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Amazon’s business tends to oscillate between periods of extreme high-spending and extreme profitability, and the company is now fully in the former. Amazon posted third quarter earnings this afternoon, boasting sales of $70 billion and profit of $2.1 billion. While sales blew past analyst expectations, thanks largely to a record-setting Prime Day, the profit came in far under.The culprit: higher shipping and other fulfillment costs Amazon is now incurri

Lotame, a company offering data management tools for publishers and marketers, today unveiled a new product called Cartographer — described by CMO Adam Solomon as “our new people-based ID solution.”
In other words, it’s Lotame’soffering to help businesses connect their visitor and customer data across platforms and devices.
We’ve written about plenty of other cross-device targeting technologies — and in fact, Lotame acquired one of them, AdMobius, i

Apple Arcade introduced the idea of all-you-can-eat subscription-based mobile gaming to the mainstream. Google Play Pass soon followed as a way to subscribe to a sizable collection of both apps and games on Android devices. Today, a startup called GameClub is launching in the U.S. to offer an alternative. For $4.99 per month, mobile consumers will be able to access a library that includes some of the best games to have ever hit the App Store.
To be clear, GameClub is not a cloud gaming platform,

Enterprise software tool startups are so often birthed to either un-bundle or re-bundle what came before them. In an age where “consumerization of the enterprise” is a trendy phrase for investors, it was natural a startup would come along to bundle its take on some of the trendiest startup tools.
Taskade appears to be the love child of Notion, Slack and Asana. It’s a tool for startup teams to collaborate around projects that can be re-organized based on how the individual user

In a wide ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal’s global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat.
The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a chart Microsoft released in July during the Slack quiet period, which showed Microsoft Teams had 13 million daily active users compared to 12 mi

Jake Saper ContributorShare on Twitter Jake Saper is a partner at Emergence Capital. More posts by this contributorHow Solar Software Can Save The World
Pricing is the most important, least-discussed element of the software industry. In the past, founders could get away with giving pricing short shrift under the mantra, “the best product will ultimately win.” No more.
In the age of AI-enabled software, pricing and product are linked; pricing fundamentally impacts usage, which directl

Uber is introducing an updated version of its colorful Beacon gadget, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission.The digital display is meant to sit on the car’s dashboard, and will glow a specific color that riders chose in the app to help them find the right car in crowded situations. The Beacon’s digital display also reminds riders to wear their seat belt, close car doors gently, and exit curbside. The original Beacon first rolled out in 2016.
Here’s ho

Uber is introducing an updated version of its colorful Beacon gadget, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. It’s the Beacon 2.0.
The digital display is meant to sit on the car’s dashboard, and will glow a specific color that riders chose in the app to help them find the right car in crowded situations. The Beacon’s digital display also reminds riders to wear their seat belt, close car doors gently, and exit curbside. The original Beacon first rolled

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has admitted that, in the past, the platform was skewed to show more ads to users with fewer followers, as first reported by CNBC. The policy was intended to give popular users a better experience, incentivizing them to stay on the platform.
“Historically, users with high follower counts have seen fewer ads,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “Recently, we’ve shifted our approach to showing ads to eve

At this week’s International Astronautical Congress, where the space industry, international space agencies and researchers from around the world convene to discuss the state of space technology and business, I asked NASAAdministrator Jim Bridenstine about what role he sees for startups in contributing to his agency’s ambitious Artemis program. Artemis, named after Apollo’stwin sister Artemis, one the gods of Greek myth, is NASA’s mission to return human beings to the sur

Bang & Olufsen has a new, second-generation version of its Beoplay H4 headphones out today, offering an improved design, USB-C charging, and support for your phone’s voice assistant through a new dedicated hardware button and extra microphone.At $300, the original Beoplay H4 were some of the cheapest headphones Bang & Olufsen offered, and the second-generation model maintains that price point as an effective entry-level option for the premium headphone brand. The new H4s are still

If you want to keep your Apple Watch from disturbing you with alarms, notifications, or any other sounds, you have no fewer than three different ways to keep it quiet: silent mode, theater mode, and Do Not Disturb. They differ subtly, but all have their place, and are all managed from the same screen.
You control the three quiet modes from your watch’s Control Center, which you access by swiping up from the bottom of any screen. If you don’t see the specific icon you want, either fli

Facebook is getting its own dedicated news tab later this week, apparently. The platform’s tricky relationship with news is now crystallizing into a partnership, in which Facebook will pay big publishers to post to the news tab. CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased this new announcement during his tete-a-tete with Congress this week: “Later in this week we actually have a big announcement coming up on launching a big initiative around news and journalism where we’re partnering with a lo

As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued, venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restructuring before public opinion forces the issue on them.
Fair.com, a startup building a flexible car ownership business that is valued at $1.2 billion — backed by some $500 million in equit

IBM Research today revealed a breakthrough nanotechnology technique that allows researchers to position individual atoms and control their quantum properties. This could be a watershed moment on the path to generally useful quantum computers. The research team developed the technique in order to build a quantum computing simulator. Binary computers – like the kind you’re using to read this article on – only understand ones and zeros. They work like a light switch, they&rs

Image: Square Square announced today that you’ll soon be able to invest in stocks using its Cash App, and says you’ll be able to start investing with $1. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to buy a full share of Apple for a buck, though — you’re going to be investing in a fraction of a share, however much that $1 will get you.
This concept, fractional share trading, isn’t quite new — you can already do it with some other investment apps, such as Sto

Yesterday, in addressing nervous WeWork employees at an all-hands, the company’s new chairman, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, told those gathered that their days of worrying are over, says Recode, which obtained a leaked recording of the meeting.
In comments that may stun industry observers who haven’t done the math — and upset at least some percentage of SoftBank investors — Claure is quoted as telling employees: “We have guaranteed the future of WeWork, but mo

Two lawmakers have asked the government’s most senior U.S. intelligence official to assess if video sharing app TikTokcould pose “national security risks” to the United States.
In a letter by Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), the lawmakers asked the acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire if the app maker could be compelled to turn Americans’ data over to the Chinese authorities.
TikTok has some 110 million downloads to date and has spike

Anyone who has tried to ride an electric scooter knows the likelihood of finding one with a charged battery is quite low. Swiftmile, which just landed a contract with the city of Austin, supplies cities and private operators with docks equipped to park and charge both scooters and e-bikes.
What Swiftmile offers serves as a win for operators, riders and cities alike. Operators can provide a better (charged) product to their customers, the likelihood of finding a charged scooter increases and citi

What happens when an algorithm cuts your health care | Artist: William Joel A health care algorithm makes black patients substantially less likely than their white counterparts to receive important medical treatment. The major flaw affects millions of patients, and was just revealed in research published this week in the journal Science.The study does not name the makers of the algorithm, but Ziad Obermeyer, an acting associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on

 
I’ve been tearing my gadgets apart for as long as I can remember. Consoles, phones, printers, whatever — I’ve always needed to see what makes it all work. Sometimes they even work when I put them back together.
As soon as Google announced that the new Pixel 4 had friggin’ radar built in for detecting hand gestures, I needed to see under the hood. While I haven’t picked up a Pixel 4 yet, our friends over at iFixit busted out the heat guns and did what they do

Photo: STXfilms It’s abundantly clear to anyone who’s ever used Twitter that our apps want to kill us. The new horror movie Countdown just wants to ask how and why.
Instantly and frequently summarized as “the killer app movie,” Justin Dec’s writing and directing feature debut is that and more. In a premise with the outward appearance of J-horror classics like The Ring, yet lacking those films’ flavor, a sinister-looking program starts appearing on smartphones

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Pandora today announced it will display full song credits for millions of songs on its desktop app and on the web. The new feature will be available to all tiers of Pandora users, not just premium ones, and it will include everything from who played the keyboards to who contributed audio engineering to who helped pen the lyrics or compose the melody.Pandora is positioning the feature specifically as a remedy to one of the pitfalls of the streaming era

Photo: Reddit (/u/Bubba_Nosferatu) Nvidia’s new Shield TV Pro and Shield TV streaming boxes have both already throughly been leaked by various online retailers, but things aren’t stopping there: some Best Buy locations are already selling the new Shield TV boxes ahead of the rumored October 28th launch, via 9to5Google.Photos of the new Shield TVs have already been posted on Reddit, and The Verge has confirmed that at least one Best Buy location had the devices out for sale, although

Photo by Robert Reiners/Getty Images Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek is the latest Twitch megastar to abandon the Amazon-owned streaming service in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer platform.Grzesiek, a former professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, made his announcement on Twitter today. His first stream is today at 8pm ET. He jokes in the announcement video that he’s “making moves,” following in the same footsteps as another popular streamer, Ninja.Tyler &