Technology news

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While consumer tech has matured as a startup category in recent years, many investors continue to be bullish on specific trends like online gaming, voice, and the unbundling of platforms in favor of focused social networks. That’s the key takeaway from a survey that Josh Constine and Arman Tabatabai did this week with 16 of the most active investors i

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Later this year Samsung will finally kill off its S Voice assistant, which never really caught up to Apple’s Siri. A note on Samsung’s support page says S Voice will no longer be available from June 1, as first reported by SamMobile.
Samsung’s first attempt at a voice assistant, S Voice was introduced in 2012 in the Galaxy S III, but was buggy and slow. As 9to5 Google notes, S Voice could set reminders and make calls but wasn’t abl

Healthcare workers are likely to be in contact with many COVID-19 patients every day. Being in contact with more people with the disease means that, in theory, they will be exposed to higher doses of the coronavirus over time. Does that mean they are at greater risk of contracting the disease, as reports from some countries suggest? We know for some diseases that the dose of virus a person is exposed to will directly correlate with how severe the disease is. A good example of this is influenza.

Photography by Becca Farsace / The Verge Research firm Canalys has released its quarterly estimates on global PC shipments for Q1, and despite a surge in demand, “severe delays in production and logistical issues,” meant an 8 percent drop in shipments year-over-year. Both the demand and the delays are related to the coronavirus pandemic; while many people are working remotely and students are engaged in distance learning because of stay-at-home directives, disruptions to the supply

As workers moved from office to home and students moved to being educated online, demand for new PCs surged in Q1, but Canalys found that shipments actually dropped 8% in spite of this, due to COVID-19 related supply chain problems.
The 8% drop was the worst since 2016 when shipments dropped 12%, according to the firm. Companies were looking to get new machines into the hands of employees who normally worked on desktop machines in the office, while parents were buying machines for children sudde

Another week in quarantine.
As the world adjusts to working from home under mandatory stay-at-home orders, hackers are keeping busy. Microsoft said this week that coronavirus-related attacks are on the rise but still make up just a fraction of the overall malicious activity. Cybersecurity companies seem to be faring mostly well — in part thanks to the uptick of attacks, but also the challenges of securing the workforce as hundreds of millions work from home.
But as coronavirus dominates th

Emily de La Bruyère ContributorShare on Twitter Emily de La Bruyère is co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a strategy consultancy focused on documenting the military, economic, and technological implications of China’s approach to global competition.Nathan Picarsic Contributor Nathan Picarsic is co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a strategy consultancy focused on documenting the military, economic, and technological implications of China’s approach to global competition.SpaceX

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hou

The Apollo 13 astronauts | Photo by Time Life Pictures/NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 13 mission that never made it to the moon, the one where Commander Jim Lovell uttered the phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”NASA calls the mission a “successful failure,” because even though an explosion crippled the primary spacecraft two days in, Lovell and fellow crewmembers Fred Haise and Jack Swi

The Arctic is predicted to warm faster than anywhere else in the world this century, perhaps by as much as 7°C. These rising temperatures threaten one of the largest long-term stores of carbon on land: permafrost. Permafrost is permanently frozen soil. The generally cold temperatures in the Arctic keep soils there frozen year-on-year. Plants grow in the uppermost soil layers during the short summers and then decay into the soil, which freezes when the winter snow arrives. Over thousands of

Around here we say that The Interface comes out Monday through Thursday, and on particularly newsy Fridays. Well, today was a particularly newsy Friday. Here’s your emergency newsletter ...
On Thursday evening I wrote about some of the limitations in using the Bluetooth chip in your smartphone to track the spread of COVID-19. Naturally, on Friday morning Apple and Google announced what might be the most significant collaboration in the history of both companies — a joint effort to us

Did you know TNW Conference has a track fully dedicated to exploring new design trends this year? Check out the full ‘Sprint’ program here. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Noble Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly to losses than it does to gains. Or, as Wikipedia

Image: Square Payments platform Square is now suggesting users deposit their COVID-19 stimulus payments through its Cash App for faster and easier access to the funds, in the event someone doesn’t have access to a traditional bank account. The app has started showing users a pop-up explaining how to go about getting the payment deposited without having to wait for a paper check in the mail, and a Square spokesperson told The Verge that the company is attempting to make its deposits featur

Image: Leica Camera makers Leica and Olympus have announced initiatives to offer free courses and talks for photographers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies that cater to creative fields have opened up resources for those currently stuck at home, and last week Nikon made its entire curriculum of online photography classes free until the end of April.
For its part, Olympus has launched “Home With Olympus Sessions” to connect people with Olympus technical experts. Photographer

Teslastarted Friday to furlough its sales and delivery workforce — with the least experienced employees bearing the brunt of the action — days after a companywide email announced salary cuts and reductions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Several employees, who work in sales and delivery and spoke to TechCrunchon condition of anonymity, reported they were on corporate calls in which more details of the furloughs were explained. Performance is less of a factor. Instead, experience and po

The mass die-off of coral reefs is a catastrophe of global proportions, but the sheer scale of their success as organisms has lessons for science. Case in point: these 3D-printed “bionic corals” from Cambridge researchers that are more than scaffolds for fragile microorganisms — they’re built out of them.
If 3D-printed corals sound familiar, that’s because a couple of years ago some other researchers suggested using structures printed to resemble the complex shapes

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Earlier today, Apple and Google announced a Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contact tracing platform that could alert people if they’ve been exposed to the novel coronavirus. Contact tracing is a huge component in ending mass pandemic “stay-at-home” orders, and while phone tracking can’t replace traditional methods like interviews, it can supplement them.
Google and Apple are using Bluetooth LE signals for contact tracing. When two pe

Instagram today revealed it’s rolling out web-based DMs to everyone. So finally, after several years of only being able to access your messages on the app, you can look at them in your browser. *Sliding into your DMs* Now you can get and send Instagram Direct messages on desktop, no matter where you are in the world 👍 pic.twitter.com/CT2SwuxHTv — Instagram (@instagram) April 10, 2020 The site’s been testing web DMs for several months, and rolled out DMs to a test group

VOX Space, the Virgin space subsidiary dedicated to government launches, has scored a valuable new contract with the U.S. Space Force and is about to move from testing to full operations, the company announced today.
The Space Force contract is for three launches and is valued at $35 million. The company will be launching payloads for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program-S28, a set of technology demonstrations in low Earth orbit. More than 36 satellites will be launched, “enab

As the U.S. and much of the world hunkers down to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, some virus-related conspiracy theories are having a heyday. Specifically, a conspiratorial false claim that 5G technology is linked to COVID-19 gained ground, accelerating from obscurity into the rattled mainstream by way of conspiracy theorists who’d been chattering about 5G conspiracies for years.
While there is scientific consensus around the basic medical realities of COVID-19, researchers are s

Instacart is adding more support roles to help its shoppers, customers and retail partners as the company faces unprecedented demand for its grocery delivery services due to COVID-19 shelter in place orders.
Today Instacartannounced that it has doubled its Care team, from 1,200 agents to 3,000 agents. Care team employees will work on answering questions about how Instacart works, delivery issues, address mishaps and other general woes.
The hiring news comes after Instacart shoppers organized a s