Technology news

You’ve been busy. I’ve been busy. But people are talking about Slackall over Twitter, so let me catch us both up.
All the ruckus concerning Slack and its publicly traded stock appeared to kick off with a Business Insider story, which had the following headline:
Slack just scored its biggest customer deal ever, as IBM moves all 350,000 of its employees to the chat app
Given the context of the simmering Slack versus Teams battle, having Slack win what appeared to be a huge, new contrac

If LG‘s flagships have had one consistent issue over the past few iterations, its been battery life. While other manufacturers had moved onto massive batteries proportionate to ever-larger screens, LG typically maintained batteries smaller than the competition. That seems to be the case no more: The upcoming LG V60 packs a massive 5,000 mAh battery, putting it ahead of almost every existing flagship-class phone on the market. And oh yeah, it still has a headphone jack. The source of the l

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge IBM has picked Slack to power its chat communications companywide for its more than 350,000 employees, according to Business Insider. In what can only be seen as a big win for Slack over rival Microsoft Teams, the report reveals that IBM has been experimenting with Slack and is now rolling it out to all employees.
It’s a big test for Slack, but it has been one the pair has been working toward in recent years. Internal teams at IBM reportedly started

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a letter sent Friday, US senators called on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to reform its safety practices and improve its treatment of workers, according to a letter first published by Reveal writer Will Evans and signed by Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, among others.“Any practice that puts profits before worker safety is unacceptable,” the letter reads. “We urge you to take immediate steps to protect your em

Photo credit should read ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump’s budget proposal for 2021 earmarks $1.2 billion for nuclear energy research and development and related programs. That’s significantly more than the $824 million Trump proposed in his budget the previous year. Even with the sizable increase in requested funds, the amount is less than the $1.5 billion that Congress allocated for nuclear energy last year.
Trump sold the bump in funding as a way to pr

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Apple and Google are still struggling to come close to Amazon’s enormous share of the home smart speaker market, and that trend will continue through 2021, a new eMarketer report predicts. Some 70 percent of US smart speaker users will use an Amazon Echo in 2020, close to last year’s 72.9 percent. By next year, that number may drop slightly to about 68.2 percent, according to the report. So Amazon’s lead is slowly falling, but it still holds a

The venture capital world is investing more capital into software-as-a-service companies (SaaS), despite cutting the number of deals it executes within the startup category, according to Crunchbase data. The results echo other venture data we’ve explored recently, including a look into early-stage dealmaking that shows a rise in invested venture dollars inversely correlating with a boost to the number of total deals recorded.
More capital and fewer deals means larger venture-backed investm

Image: Electronicos Fantasticos Every so often, a tweet goes viral showing someone making a beat by wielding two barcode scanners in front of a sheet of assorted line patterns. It’s like cyberpunk grocery checkout with a dash of Aphex Twin, and over the years, these videos have racked up millions of views, shared by the likes of artists like Shawn Wasabi and club culture tastemaker outlet Boiler Room. But I’m always shocked that the clips largely stay constrained to the circles of s

Sprint Sprint is the latest company to introduce a smartwatch for kids, complete with GPS tracking. The WatchMeGo device is designed for children ages four to 12 who may not be quite ready for their own smartphones, the company says. In addition to tracking a child’s location, the watches can send and receive voice and text messages to a parent’s smartphone app.Parents can set up alerts to notify them if a child wearing the WatchMeGo leaves a “defined safety zone,” like

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A US appeals court has rejected a request from Apple to reconsider a split decision ruling that found it infringed on patents owned by notorious patent troll VirnetX, Reuters reports. It’s the latest step in a convoluted multiyear legal battle between the two companies that dates back to 2010.
In April 2018, a federal court in Texas ordered Apple to pay $502.6 million to VirnetX for violating four patents relating to internet-based communications, w

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Nio, China’s top EV startup, said Monday that the coronavirus outbreak contributed to a dip in the company’s sales last month. Nio sold just 1,598 vehicles in January, which is nearly half the amount the company sold in December, and down 11.5 percent from January 2019.
The comparison to January 2019 is particularly stark because Nio was only selling one vehicle at that time last year: the relatively expensive seven-seater ES8 electric SUV. Nio lau

The core of NASA’s Space Launch System, which was recently completed earlier this year | Image: NASA President Trump is requesting a 12 percent increase to NASA’s budget for next year to help ensure the agency sends humans back to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The administration’s proposed budget, released today, provides NASA with $25.2 billion for fiscal year 2021, a major increase over the $22.6 billion the agency received this year.
If enacted as is, the budget would be

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) today brought espionage charges against the four Chinese military hackers allegedly responsible for the 2017 Equifax data breach. Widely considered one of the largest data breaches in US history, the 2017 attack exposed the personal data of nearly 150 million people. Equifax was fined more than $700 million for its role – investigators concluded that it was lackadaisical security practices on the part of Equifax employees that allowed China’s spies

Images: Nikola Motor Company Nikola Corporation, an Arizona-based startup that’s working on zero-emission big rigs, just announced that it’s following Tesla, Rivian, Ford, and General Motors into the electric pickup market with a truck called the Badger.
The Badger is a fuel cell vehicle first and foremost, meaning it takes hydrogen from a refillable tank and converts it into electricity to power the motors. But the Badger will also come with an onboard auxiliary battery pack Nikola

It was a roller coaster ride — a short one.
Brandless, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company that made and sold an assortment of “cruelty-free” products in beauty and personal care, household, baby and pet categories, has shut its doors less than three years after officially opening them in July 2017.
In a statement provided to the news outlet Protocol, the company cited a “fiercely competitive” retail market. As part of its shut-down, the company will reportedly

There are few things more soul-crushing than the dull white hue of fluorescent office lighting. Unfortunately, natural lighting isn’t always an option for offices stuck in the center of a large building, but Mistubishi thinks it’s now able to create a convincing facsimile with a cleverly designed LED skylight that simulates daylight patterns. Of course, Mitsubishi isn’t the first to try to emulate daylight with what is essentially a big LED screen, but there are a few things t

Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space.
Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent, including an acqui-hire of NLP startup Bloosbury AI in 2018, and most recently, acquiring Scape Technologies, a British company using computer vision to offer more accurate loc

A new AI prototype could transform how earthquake aftermaths are managed, by predicting the safest routes that families can take to find their loved ones. The idea first emerged in the ImpactHub Istanbul, a social innovation centre in a city where a future earthquake is all but inevitable. The last time a devastating earthquake had struck Turkey was in 1999, around 150-200 kilometers from Istanbul. Official records put the death toll at 18,373 people.  Scientists believe that the

Image: Xiaomi Xiaomi has announced that it will launch its new Mi 10 smartphones on February 13th in China with a global launch to follow on February 23rd, the day before Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona, Spain (via Android Authority).
The company announced the Chinese launch on the Chinese social network Weibo and the global launch on Twitter. The two models, which will reportedly be named the Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro, look to have four back cameras and, as is increasingly common, the c

Image: BioWare The team behind BioWare’s Anthem will be pausing development on short-term updates and expansions to focus on a much broader “longer-term redesign,” the EA-owned studio’s general manager, Casey Hudson, said today in a blog post. The game is not yet even a year old, but BioWare appears to recognize that its online shooter, modeled after games like Bungie’s Destiny and Ubisoft’s The Division, has been a failure both in its design and its financia

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, one of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers, is collaborating with Chinese startup AutoX to deploy robot taxis in China later this year, the companies announced. It’s the latest move by FCA to cast a wide net for autonomous vehicle suppliers as it seeks to catch up to its crosstown rivals.AutoX, which is based in Hong Kong, says it will integrate its self-driving hardware and software in a fleet of Chrysler Pacifica minivans, which is also the vehic

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last week, I featured a $599 deal from Best Buy on a Microsoft Surface Go bundled with a Type Cover keyboard. The tablet alone usually costs $549, so it was a great deal. But if you waited, there’s an even better deal happening now at B&H Photo and Best Buy. The high-end Surface Go configuration with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD is $399 at B&H Photo, and you’ll find the link below. Note that this deal is just for the tablet, so you’ll ne

The United States is likely to have missed out on around $1.7 billion by auctioning off seized Bitcoin way too soon. Using back-dated market rates, cryptocurrency enthusiast Jameson Lopp built a handy portal to estimate the amount of money those sales have generated since 2014. Introducing the US Marshals Bitcoin Auction realtime schadenfreude tracker. As of today, the Marshals have missed out on over 1.7 billion dollars by selling early.https://t.co/jn6hAMbj1I — Jameson Lo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Monday morning, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of four members of China’s military in connection with the 2017 hack of credit reporting agency Equifax, which exposed sensitive information for some 150 million Americans in 2017.
According to the indictment, the group hacked into Equifax’s systems in Alpharetta, Georgia, starting in May 2017, exploiting a vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework used by Equifax. The ma

Image: Abode Smart home security company Abode has added HomeKit compatibility to its Smart Security kit, the company announced today. This is the second system in the Abode portfolio to receive HomeKit support, integrating its sensors with Apple’s smart home system. Its Iota system was the first self-installed home security system to be added to HomeKit back in November.
Now, both Smart Security and Iota can be controlled via Apple’s Home app and Siri on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Wa

Motorola Motorola confirmed today that its much-hyped folding Razr is going to come in a second color: blush gold. The option will be available this spring. The color previously leaked last week, so we had a hunch that it might be coming. The Razr is currently only available in black on Verizon for $1,499, with new orders delivering by March 3rd. Motorola hasn’t said how much the gold version will cost, but it’s unlikely to tack on an added premium over the black option.Presumably,

The LG G8X from 2019 | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Just a few weeks ahead of Mobile World Congress 2020, two marketing images of the LG V60 ThinQ have leaked. Each one appears to show off a prominent hardware feature, and it’s good news all around if you like phones with big batteries, lots of cameras, and a headphone jack. Both images come from Evan Blass on Twitter (via GSMArena) who is a leaker with a reliable track record.
According to one of these images, LG’s 2

Apple Arcade’s latest hit started out as a joke. The developers at Singapore-based Mighty Bear Games had already pitched an idea to Apple for its new subscription service, but two days before CEO Simon Davis was set to fly to California to iron out the details, someone on the team came up with a pun so powerful it derailed everything. That pun was “butter royale,” and it got the studio thinking about ways to make the ever-popular battle royale genre more approachable. It’

Photo by Leigh Vogel for The Verge On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) published a new plan to remake the Federal Trade Commission with an eye toward reining in big tech companies.
“The FTC has stood by as major corporations have consolidated their power and stifled competition,” Hawley writes in the paper. “The agency as presently constituted is in no shape to ensure competition in today’s markets, let alone tomorrow’s.”
Tasked with protecting consumers, the

Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images Frustrated tweets led scientists to believe that tidal floods along the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the US are more annoying than official tide gauges suggest. Half a million geotagged tweets showed researchers that people were talking about disruptively high waters even when government gauges hadn’t recorded tide levels high enough to be considered a flood.Capturing these reactions on social media can help authorities better understand and address the

The Galaxy S10 5G | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Samsung is about to launch the Galaxy S20, its newest flagship phone and — if past history is anything to go by — what will largely be the standard that the rest of 2020’s top phones is measured up against. Millions of people will buy the S20, which will almost certainly be one of the most popular phones sold in the United States this year.But it’s also going to be the first real test for 5G networks in the US, one t

Edge AI is one of the biggest trends in chip technology. These are chips that run AI processing on the edge — or, in other words, on a device without a cloud connection. Apple recently bought a company that specializes in it, Google’s Coral initiative is meant to make it easier, and chipmaker ARM has already been working on it for years. Now, ARM is expanding its efforts in the field with two new chip designs: the Arm Cortex-M55 and the Ethos-U55, a neural processing unit meant to pa

Image: @h0x0d A new promotional trailer for Samsung’s foldable Galaxy Z Flip has leaked online, confirming a fashion-focused Thom Browne Edition of the device. The ad, which was posted to Twitter by @h0x0d, shows the device with the brand’s signature red, white, and blue stripe down its rear, but doesn’t list any spec differences between it and the regular Z Flip. Despite finding the time to spend 90 seconds showing a model slowly walking towards camera, there’s also no

Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised another £60 million from its existing investors Merian Global Investors and Harry McPike’s JTC.
The investment brings the total raised by Starling to £323 million and follows two funding rounds of £105 million in aggregate led by Merian in 2019.
Boden told the FT that the bank’s two main backers — who own the majority of shares — are committed to further

Image: Samsung A whole host of images, videos, and screenshots of Samsung’s Galaxy Home Mini have been posted online by XDA-Developers’ Max Weinbach, giving us our most detailed look yet at Samsung’s unreleased smart speaker. In a page that was subsequently taken down, Samsung previously said the device will be released on February 12th, one day after its Galaxy S20 launch event.
In particular, the leak details the speaker’s IR blaster functionality, which can be used to

Microsoft first unveiled its new dual-screen Surface Duo last year, but the company wouldn’t let anyone touch the Android software powering the device. We recently got a closer look at how Android will run on the Surface Duo thanks to an emulator, but now one of Microsoft’s dual-screen devices has appeared in the wild. Spotted on Vancouver’s SkyTrain, the Surface Duo hardware looks identical to what Microsoft showed back in October, although there’s some speculation it ma

Image: Roland Quandt Samsung’s upcoming true wireless earbuds, the Galaxy Buds Plus, have leaked again, this time in a hands-on video from WinFuture’s Roland Quandt. As well as confirming the specs that leaked last week, the video and follow-up tweets give an idea of how the earbuds perform in the real world; offering details on battery life, sound quality, and call quality. The source of the leak was a European retailer who shipped the Galaxy Buds Plus to Quandt early, seemingly un

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony and Amazon are the latest companies to cancel their presence at Mobile World Congress 2020 due to the new coronavirus outbreak. LG, ZTE, Nvidia, and Ericsson have already cancelled various events that were set to take place at MWC in Barcelona, which is the biggest mobile technology trade show on the annual calendar.“Sony has been closely monitoring the evolving situation following the novel coronavirus outbreak, which was declared a global emergency