Technology news

Apple is a notorious Black-Friday-skipper. When it comes to great deals directly from the company: Zip. Nada. You’re not going to find much of anything. 
But because they list so many of their products with major retailers (ieWalmart, Amazon, Best Buy — you know, the usual suspects), those sellers are able to offer some pretty sweet opportunities for you to get the Apple device you’ve always wanted. Well, the older ones at least. Don’t expect to see an iPhone 11 Ligh

If you work for someone else, you likely know the drill: in comes that annual email reminding you that it’s time for unconscious bias or sexual harassment training, and if you could please finish up this mandatory module by this date, that would be terrific.
The email — not to mention the programming itself — is straight out of “Office Space.” Little surprise that when Anne Solmssen, a Harvard-trained computer scientist, happened to call a friend recently who was cl

Kohl's might not be the first place you think of when shopping for gadgets, but the retailer's Black Friday ad scan shows some pretty sweet tech deals.
Amazon's new Echo Show 5 will be $49.99 ($40 off), for example, plus you get $15 in Kohl's Cash. In our review, we found it to be an affordable little smart display that brings Alexa voice commands to your desk, shelf, or nightstand, so this discount will make it even more enticing.
If the Google Assistant is your voice-based robot of choice, the

Ant-Man 3 is reportedly in development, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Peyton Reed, who also directed Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, will return to helm the third movie. There aren’t any additional details at this time.Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang was a key player in defeating Thanos, and the Reporter suggests Rudd will likely reprise his starring role. There are a number of Avengers characters who will receive new movies in Marvel’s Phase Four universe, too — that&rsq

Ping! It's time to get a mammogram. Now, if only your boss would give you time off.
Earlier this week, Facebook launched a new healthcare feature called Preventive Health for users in the U.S. When you search for Preventive Health in the Facebook mobile app, it will surface recommended screenings based on your age and sex, as well as other preventative health measures like flu shots. 
The tool gives recommendations for nearby Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), allows you to set app

Sony Pictures’ highly anticipated sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse will arrive on April 8th, 2022.The company tweeted out the announcement attached with a cool, glitchy video featuring a warped Spider-Man logo. It can be seen below.April 8, 2022 #SpiderVerse pic.twitter.com/FC5nVIuciB— Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (@SpiderVerse) November 1, 2019There’s never been a more important time for Miles Morales and the Spider-Man future at Sony Pictures. Mor

Imagine a hypersonic passenger aircraft that would cut the journey time between London and New York to around two hours. At Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, the aircraft would complete a trip across the Atlantic in around 120 minutes. Mach 5 is more than twice as fast as the cruising speed of Concorde and over 50% faster than the SR-71 Blackbird – the world’s fastest jet-engine powered aircraft. A flight across the Pacific would take roughly three hours. Fligh

Photo by Sam Mellish / In Pictures via Getty Images Images Amazon Marketplace sellers who deal in new, used, and refurbished Nintendo products woke up to a peculiar notice yesterday: without warning, Amazon was telling third-party sellers that they could no longer list Nintendo products of any kind without seeking approval. The policy change appeared to affect both Nintendo games and Nintendo hardware like 3DS handhelds. At first blush, it looked like two companies had stuck a so-called brand g

The husband and wife co-founders behind the direct-to-consumer cookware and dinnerware startup retailer OurPlace are big believers in the notion that the doorway to inclusive communities opens through the kitchen. 
Amir Tehrani, the company’s co-founder and chief executive spent, his life in the cookware and kitchen business, while his wife, Shiza Tehrani, is the co-founder of the Malala Fund,supporting educational initiatives for young women around the world, and Now Ventures, a

Instacart shoppers are, once again, fed up. 
In a scathing open letter directed at the company's founder and CEO, Apoorva Mehta, a coalition of independent contractors voiced their frustration both with Instacart's pay policies and its tipping structure. And they're doing more than just typing: The gig-economy workers are staging a three-day work stoppage to drive home their concerns. 
According to the letter, at the time of this writing signed by 212 shoppers, starting Sunday, Nov. 3,

Courtesy of @emdubbbb Every year, people scramble to find that one Halloween costume that best captures the zeitgeist of the previous 12 months. This year, we got a lot of people who dressed like the cat in the “woman yelling at cat” meme and so many baby sharks. I don’t know if electric scooters qualify as a meme or just a massive trend that’s still chugging away, but this person’s “busted e-scooter” costume strikes me as the best one I’ve seen y

Image: Tile Back in September, Tile — the company that helps you find your missing items by attaching Bluetooth-enabled tags — announced that you’d soon be able to ask Google Assistant to help you find your Tile-attached items without having to say “Hey Google, ask Tile” every time you make a request. That integration is now here, so we put together a short guide about how you can use it to find your items — and we’ve compiled some info about how to use

Inboard Technology, an electric skateboard startup from Santa Cruz, California, is working with a liquidation firm to sell off its intellectual property and assets, The Verge has learned. All 24 employees, most of whom were located at the company’s headquarters in Santa Cruz, California, have been laid off.The startup was one of the highest-profile competitors to top electric skateboard company Boosted, and last year announced plans to enter the electric scooter market — a push that

Googlehas been working on autonomous vehicles — one of the biggest challenges in AI — for more than a decade, but it’s learning that the hardest part might just be getting people to enjoy the ride.
“This is an experience that you can’t really learn from someone else,” Waymo’sDirector of Product Saswat Panigrahi told TechCrunch, while explaining the work he oversees around driverless development. “This is truly new.”
The sheer novelty of desig

Kim Kardashian West is known for Getting The Shot. 
Whether it's squeezing into a latex dress for the Met Gala or the breaking the internet with her butt, Kim will go to hell and back to get a good photograph. Her kids, though, are another story. 
Kardashian West shared family photos of herself, her husband Kanye West, and her kids dressed as characters from The Flinstones for Halloween on Friday. But something was a little... off. Flintstones 🦴 pic.twitter.com/8pqmUkhQYV

After inking what sources said was a nine-figure deal with the world’s leading supplier of collagen proteins, Gelita, the cell-based collagen maker Geltor is in the market for at least $50 million in new funding, TechCrunch has learned.
According to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, the new funding could range from $50 million to as much as $100 million.
The money would be used to scale up the company’s collagen manufacturing capacity as it preps for the long-term G

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is buying Fitbit and the reasons why are both simple and complicated. It’s the kind of big acquisition Google has done before (more money than YouTube, less than Nest or DoubleClick), but this one seems to have struck a particular nerve. My Twitter replies are currently filled with Fitbit customers promising to go buy Apple Watches right now. Whatever happens in the immediate aftermath, Google is going to have a big new team, a big new se

AmazonBasics AA battery | Amazon AmazonBasics, Amazon’s store brand, launched over 10 years ago, and we know as little about it now as we do about Amazon as a whole. Like most details about Amazon, the origins of AmazonBasics products are a mystery.
In an article for OneZero, Sarah Emerson uncovered the origins of one of Amazon’s best-selling products: the AmazonBasics AA battery. She traces the battery straight to the source and works her way to the end of the product’s life

In January 2014, Google announced plans to acquire Nest for $3.2 billion; the acquisition was completed the following day, but since then, Nest’s integration has been a controlled burn. Initially, the company existed as a subsidiary of the newly-formed Alphabet Inc., but in early 2018, Google tightened its grip and integrated it directly into its hardware division.Over the next year and a half, Nest became the face and name of Google’s smart home offering, a division that’s gro

Googlehas reached into parent company Alphabet’s $121 billion cash reserves to spend $2.1 billion on Fitbit, a move into the key consumer health market that places them in more direct competition with rival Apple.
For more than a year, Ftibit and Google have partnered on healthcare applications; last April, Fitbitannounced that it would work with Google’s application programming interface to connect data with electronic medical records via Google’s Cloud Healthcare API. That mo

The mobile version of Nintendo’siconic racing franchise, Mario Kart Tour, will soon support multiplayer races, bringing the game closer to its competitive roots. A limited multiplayer beta test is planned for December, just in time for holiday laziness, but only for paying subscribers — the rest of us will have to wait.
Mario Kart has had a focus on multiplayer since its first (and best, in my opinion) appearance on the SNES, with multiple modes available pitting players together in

Image: Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment today announced that its virtual card game Hearthstone would be getting a brand-new game mode called Battlegrounds. The mode is based on the popular auto battler genre that arose from the PC mod community earlier this year. Battlegrounds will feature eight-player combat that combines traditional Hearthstone cards and heroes with a customizable game board instead of a deck of cards. You can read a full rundown of how it works here.Auto battler

Blizzard has just announced Overwatch 2, the sequel to its popular team shooter Overwatch, onstage at Blizzcon 2019.
The original Overwatch was released over three years ago, and while Blizzard has continued to expand the game with new heroes, maps, and game modes, it hasn’t gotten a major update like this in the lifetime of the game.
By adding an actual story mode, the sequel will look to expand on the lore that Blizzard has slowly been building for the Overwatch universe over the past fe

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. Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion
Googlewill pay $7.35 per share for the wearables company — an all-cash deal that values Fitbit at $2.1 billion.
While Google has invested plenty in its own in-house development, buying Fitbitrepresents a step-change, and the opportunity to take

Sébastien Matos has built a fantastic interactive trip through the history of one of the most important UI elements we encounter every day: the scroll bar. He’s recreated, as faithfully as possible, 30 years of scroll bars from some of the top desktop platforms of their day, from Xerox Star to Windows 10.
Take a minute out of your busy day to enjoy the zen of playing with old UI design. Then come back here and read The Verge’s very serious review of scroll bars through history