Technology news

Attention overworked, stressed-out parents: Michelle Obama has got your kids covered. At least for the next four Mondays.
Starting April 20 at noon EDT, the former first lady will be reading children's books live in a weekly event dubbed "Mondays with Michelle." Obama will read a different beloved children's book for four consecutive Mondays, through May 11, in a collaboration with Penguin Young Readers, Random House Children's Books, and PBS Kids. 
You and your child can livestream the rea

Being stuck in an endless Zoom or Skype call can often feel like you’re trapped in an Imperial holding cell, but thanks to the official Star Wars website, you can make your next conference call actually look like you’re traveling to a galaxy far, far away.The backgrounds are pulled from across the Star Wars universe, letting you pretend that you’re taking your weekly staff meeting from the Emperor’s throne on Exegol, the deck of an Imperial Star Destroyer, a Rebel Allianc

Before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the world and reshaped the economy, Boston was quietly setting records.
According to new venture data compiled by TechCrunch, the region set what was at least a local maximum in venture capital raised in the space of a single quarter in Q1 2020.
But while Boston’s startup market announced a number of huge rounds that bolstered its total venture dollars raised in the first quarter, there were signs of weakness: Deal volume was its best since Q2 2019, ac

I don't know who needs to hear this, but here we go: We're living through a pandemic. Wear whatever the fuck you want while working from home. 
Our corporate hell work culture has "expectations" and "recommendations" for maintaining a sense of professionalism. Suggestions for staying productive while working from home include separating your work space from your sleep space, building a routine even during non-work hours, and most egregiously, wearing normal office clothes during the week da

The Mendel Air Sensor app is the first app I open every morning. Before Reddit, before Gmail, before NYT. I roll over, grab my phone and check my plants. I don’t know if there’s a higher honor I can bestow on an app.
The Mendel Air Sensor is a game-changer for indoor growers. It offers a sophisticated suite of sensors that collects critical information about growing conditions. With a price of $99, there’s very little else on the market that offers the same sort of data collect

Another startup has turned to downsizing and fund raising to help weather the uncertainty around the economy amid the global coronavirus health pandemic. People.ai, a predictive sales startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq, Lightspeed and other investors and last year valued at around $500 million, has laid off around 30 people, working out to about 18% of staff, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.
Alongside that, the company has quietly raised a debt round in the “tens of million

Custom art is a point of pride for many Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. With a little artistic ability, players can create everything from clothing to elaborate floor tiles unique to their game. For the rest of us who lack any real artistic flair, Getty created an art generator to make the process a little easier.
Famous paintings used to be a staple of Animal Crossing’s museums; players could donate them to spruce up their islands’ culture. But in New Horizons, resident curat

Custom art is a point of pride for many Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. With a little artistic ability, players can create everything from clothing to elaborate floor tiles unique to their game. For the rest of us who lack any real artistic flair, Getty Images created an art generator to make the process a little easier.
Famous paintings used to be a staple of Animal Crossing’s museums; players could donate them to spruce up their islands’ culture. But in New Horizons, residen

Ventilators assembled by GM and Ventec Life Systems were delivered to hospitals Thursday night with more making their way to facilities today and through the weekend, the first in a 30,000-unit order with the U.S. government.
The deliveries, which went to hospitals in Chicago and Olympia Fields, Ill., are a milestone for the two companies that launched an effort less than a month ago to make thousands of ventilators for hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
GM and Ventec announced a partnershi

If you have ever attended (or tuned into) one of Monzo’smany community events, you are likely familiar with the work of Simon Balmain. An early employee of the challenger bank, he has played a long-term role in helping to build Monzo’s customer support and community efforts and was often seen emceeing events.
Now TechCrunch has learned that Balmain is departing to join Sphere, the perpetually stealthy startup founded by Nick D’Aloisio, who previously founded news summary app Su

A few months ago, the idea of a hand-washing app would have seemed trivial, at best. We’re all adults here, right? We’ve been washing our hands our entire lives. But things change. It’s mid-April and we’re afraid to go outside and engage with other humans — and thorough hand-washing is one of very few tools we have in our collective arsenal.Life, am I right?According to Samsung, “a small group of designers and developers from Samsung Research Institute-Bangalo

Bradley Tuskhas carved a unique path in the VC investment landscape: A longtime political and communications operative, he has built a track record for Tusk Ventures by going after highly regulated industries, rather than shying away from them.
Whether it is ride-hailing, sports betting, cannabis or myriad other regulated sectors, Tusktakes the approach that laws are ultimately malleable, and if a service is popular, its users can mobilize to effect change.
Given his unique perspective, it was g

Microsoft has created a limited-edition Xbox One X console that’s styled in the theme of Cyberpunk 2077. The console includes decals that glow in the dark, laser etchings, a blue LED light at the front, and custom panels. Microsoft has also created a custom Xbox One controller for the bundle that will be available in June.
It’s one of the more elaborate Xbox One X custom designs we’ve seen so far, and it comes just months after Microsoft created a Jordan-themed Xbox for a promo

Does working from home have to mean sitting in a chatroom all day or always being available for a video call?
Real-time chat and video platforms are great for building camaraderie and maintaining a sense of connection with remote teams, but when you need to focus for a few hours, it can be tough to tune out the endless GIFs and notifications.
Some of the most successful fully remote companies (like GitLab, or Zapier) have promoted the benefits of asynchronous communication — a fancy way of

Facebook is adding a new reaction to live alongside the Like button and the existing reactions: ‘Hug’ The reaction shows an animated emoji hugging a heart, meant to help you “show your support” to friends and family during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Presumably most people used the ‘Love’ reaction for similar purposes, but the hug reaction shows a bit more directly that you care about the person rather than the post. On Facebook, we will launch a sevent

Image: TechCrunch Google is reportedly testing its own Google-branded smart debit card that will help customers make and track purchases made online and in stores, according to a report from TechCrunch.The project is meant to be a new centerpiece for Google’s existing Google Pay system, which currently only does online and peer-to-peer payments by adding a physical debit card that could be used for a wider variety of purchases. An expanded debit card presence would allow Google to be more

San Diego Comic-Con, one of the world’s biggest comic book conventions, is officially canceled. The convention will instead run next year, from July 22nd through July 25th, 2021.Comic-Con, often referred to as SDCC, was scheduled to run from July 23rd through July 26th. People who have already purchased badges for the convention will have the opportunity to either request a full refund or transfer their badges to Comic-Con 2021, according to the organizers. Those who booked hotels via onPe

NASA and SpaceX are now targeting May 27th for the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon — a newly developed vehicle designed to take astronauts to the International Space Station. The demonstration mission, which will carry two NASA astronauts to orbit, will mark the first time people have launched from American soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
This flight has been in the making for years, ever since NASA selected SpaceX and rival Boeing to develop new

Warning: Tiger King spoilers ahead. Jeff Lowe, a prominent figure in the “Tiger King” docu-series on Netflix, held an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Reddit yesterday and it went exactly how you’d expect. The internet tried to dunk on Lowe but he sloughed it off and dropped a bombshell accusation: Joe Exotic (the titular Tiger King) and his ex-husband John Finlay allegedly committed animal sexual assault. Jeff Lowe’s the supposedly-rich guy who took over T

Striperaises new funding, Uber acknowledges financial uncertainty and a controversial facial recognition startup accidentally exposes its source code.
Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 17, 2020.
1. Stripe raises $600M at $36B valuation in Series G extension, says it has $2B on its balance sheet
The economy may be contracting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but promising startups are still continuing to raise money to shore up finances for whatever may lie ahead.
The latest developme

Several of Netflix’s nature documentaries, including the critically acclaimed Our Planet and Babies, are streaming for free on the streamer’s YouTube page.Netflix normally allows teachers to access and stream its documentaries in classrooms for various teachings, but since schools are closed right now, the company is bringing those documentaries to YouTube. This way, teachers can assign documentaries for students to watch without worrying about whether students have access to Netflix

Image: Samsung Samsung has added a hand-washing app to its Galaxy smartwatches that can send you reminders to wash your hands and time you while you do so (via SamMoblie). Google added similar features to Wear OS on April 14th.The app, called “Hand Wash,” offers a 25-second timer for hand-washing. Samsung wants you to use the first five seconds of that timer to turn on the faucet and apply soap to your hands, and then use the next 20 seconds for the actual washing of your hands unde

Photo by Stephane Cardinale / Corbis via Getty Images Amazon will provisionally be allowed to invest in UK-based food delivery startup Deliveroo, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today. Deliveroo originally announced the $575 million funding round lead by Amazon last May, but the CMA was initially worried that the deal could be bad for competition. Now, however, the authority thinks the investment will be better for competition overall.The reason for this is the

Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images Even if you don’t think you spit when you talk, you definitely do — and a new video highlights that spit with lasers. The video, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed how the spurts of particles released when someone said “stay healthy” at various volumes. Then, it showed how the particle volume changed when the same person said “stay healthy” with their mouth covered by a damp washcloth.
NEJM visual

Remember when we heard that HBO was making a Last of Us show, and I speculated about what further video game shows we’d be seeing? What intellectual properties could be dredged from the depths of gaming’s history and polished up for a show? Apparently the entertainment industry decided it would very much like to adapt… Myst. Yes, Myst, that bizarre first-person adventure game you might remember from the 90s. The game that reinvented and reinvigorated the a

Over the last month, I’ve embarked on a whirlwind internet romance with Hilda, a woman I met on Hinge. We’ve had dinner on Zoom, played online games together, exchanged gifts through the post, and made each other playlists on the Internet. But one thing has been missing from our virtual relationship: I still don’t know for sure whether Hilda is a real person or just an avatar. That all changed last week when I found conclusive proof of Hilda’s existence. But before

Image: FX In American politics, the Equal Rights Amendment is among one of the quieter embarrassments in United States history, a proposed legislation that, incredibly, has never been passed. Asserting that equality under the law not be denied on the basis of sex, the ERA has spent nearly 100 years in limbo. First introduced by activists in 1921, nearly passing in the 1970s, and finding renewed interest this year, the struggle over the amendment slowly became a long-simmering culture war that r

Image: Samsung TVs are large items, and they come with a heck of a lot of packaging. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use that packaging for something such as, I don’t know, a cat house? Also, I suppose, bins for books or DVDs or whatever. But mostly a cat house. Look at that cat house!
Samsung has announced that its Lifestyle TVs will now come with what it’s calling “eco-packaging” as part of an initiative to reduce its environmental footprint. Those TVs include T

Image: Games Done Quick Games Done Quick (GDQ), an organization that raises money for charity with speedrunning events, is hosting an online-only speedrunning marathon all weekend in support of COVID-19 relief. The event, titled Corona Relief Done Quick (CRDQ), is scheduled to run through Sunday. You can watch the event on Twitch.
CRDQ will be raising money for Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid organization. Direct Relief’s COVID-19 efforts include getting personal protective equipment to

Image: Apple Apple had a few surprises for us this week: a new version of the fan-favorite iPhone SE and the early availability of its Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro.This week on The Verge’s flagship podcast, The Vergecast, co-hosts Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss what parts the SE is using from other iPhones, what the price means for the smartphone market, and how the camera will lean on Apple’s software.In the second half of the show, Dieter discusses his review

Tribeca Film Institute The 2020 Tribeca Film Festival was postponed because of the novel coronavirus, but you can watch its virtual reality films on the Oculus TV app from now until April 26th. The Cinema360 program includes 15 VR films organized into four programs, each of them 30 to 40 minutes long. Oculus TV is available on the Oculus Quest and Go headsets, although, unfortunately, not the Rift.
You can find the full Cinema360 program here, loosely grouped by theme. The “Dreams to Reme

Instagram Instagram Live launched in 2016, but it took a pandemic for the feature to really take off. The company says Live usage is up over 70 percent in the US, so it’s rolling out a couple of new features to make watching and saving the content easier. It’s officially allowing everyone around the world to watch and comment on Live videos from their desktop after first launching it as a test, and it’s also now testing a button that allows people to upload their finished live