Technology news

Disney’s live-action remakes are on a roll, and news of yet another project broke today: a version of the 1997 Hercules movie, produced (but not directed) by Joe and Anthony Russo of Marvel’s Avengers fame, via The Hollywood Reporter.Also attached to the project is Dave Callaham, who worked on The Expendables films, wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and worked as a co-writer on Wonder Woman 1984.The original 1997 movie is extremely loose

We knew it was going to be bad — but not necessarily “lowest level since 2013” bad. As Apple was busy reporting its earnings, Canalys just dropped some of its own figures — and they’re not pretty. After two quarters of much-needed growing, the global smartphone market just took a big hit. And you no doubt already know who the culprit is.The mobile industry joins countless others that have taken a massive hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with shipments dropping 13%

Record usage of grocery delivery services amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to delayed orders, fewer open delivery windows and, on occasion, an inability to even book a delivery time slot. Walmart now hopes to capitalize on the increased demand for speedier delivery with the introduction of a new service that allows consumers to pay to get to the front of the line. The retailer confirmed today it’s launching a new Walmart Grocery service called “Express,” which promises orders

Microsoft is opening up free registrations for its Build 2020 developer event. It’s typically one of Microsoft’s biggest events of the year, but the software maker is doing things differently this time around. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has forced Microsoft to entirely rethink the event, but instead of canceling, it’s bringing it online free for anyone to register.
That means developers will no longer have to pay the $2,395 entry fee that’s typically associated with

Microsofthas now opened registration for the virtual edition of its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, which will take place from May 19 to 20.
Typically, the event draws more than 6,000 developers, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s obviously not an option. In contrast to Google,which completely scrapped its I/O developer conference this year, Microsoft decided to go ahead with the virtual event. But this will be a very different kind of Build — and not only b

During the pandemic crisis, active users of Apple’s news platform hit an all-time high.
On an earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared that Apple News had reached 125 million monthly active users. Cook announced the number after revealing the company’s Q2 performance, which saw its Products revenue decline year-over-year while Services surged.
The company earned Services revenue of $13.35 billion in Q2, juicing the segment by about $1.9 billion since last year.
Apple launched a paid

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops for the quarter, as well.The company had already sounded the alarm bells for a weakened demand, due to the growing threat of COVID-19. Way back in February, Apple no

The coronavirus pandemic has laid low a lot of Americans, more than 62,000 of whom have already died since the beginning of March and 30 million more who are now out of work owing to the resultant shutdown of most businesses and public gathering places.
The ensuant crisis it has created is so massive that any type of coordinated effort is a challenge to pull together. Fortunately, that hasn’t stopped the American Bar Association and a justice tech company called Paladin that we introduced

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon expects to spend $4 billion or more — the predicted operating profit for the company’s entire coming quarter — just on COVID-19-related expenses. In a quarterly earnings release today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the expenses will come from spending on personal protective equipment (PPE), cleaning for facilities, “higher wages for hourly teams,” and expanding its own COVID-19 testing capabilities.
Many of the changes ha

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — the new viking-based iteration of the popular franchise — will support Microsoft’s upcoming Smart Delivery program for cross-generation games between the Xbox Series X and Xbox One, in one of the most encouraging signs of cross-generation gaming yet for the upcoming console.Smart Delivery is what Microsoft calls its free upgrade program for the Xbox Series X that automatically upgrades owners who own the Xbox One version of the game to the Xbox

Remember how Reddit announced just yesterday that it was introducing built-in subreddit chat rooms? Yeah, never mind on that.Alex Le, Reddit’s vice president of product and community, said on Thursday in multiple comments that the feature has been “rolled back 100%.” Le said that the platform “made several errors” in the process of releasing the function (called “Start Chatting”) and apologized for the confusion the rollout caused. One bug, in particular

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) sent a letter today to Google, YouTube, and Twitter urging the platforms to explicitly notify users when they’ve engaged with misinformation about the coronavirus.Schiff wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, saying it’s not enough to remove or downgrade harmful or misleading content about the pandemic, but that it’s critical to ensure that users who saw the con

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple today reported its second quarter earnings, which showed resilient growth for the company despite the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on its supply chain and retail business. Apple posted revenue of $58.3 billion — good for a 1 percent increase over this time last year — and earnings per share of $2.55. Analysts had expected revenue of $53.8 billion and earnings per share of $2.23, according to Bloomberg.“Despite COVID-19&rsqu

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we’re talking about, is called “VITAL” (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its design is being offered for free, licensed use for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.
The JPL-

Appledelivered a rough Q2 earnings report Thursday, besting investor expectations but showing a significant growth slowdown as the coronavirus pandemic deeply impacted the company’s business with year-over-year declines in iPhone, iPad and Mac sales.
Apple’s stock was largely unchanged in after-hours trading.
The company shared that in Q2 it earned $58.30 billion in revenue, better than the $54.54 billion investors were expecting. The figure represents 1% year-over-year revenue growt

AWS, the cloud arm of Amazon,would be a pretty successful business on its own. Today, the company announced it has passed $10 billion for the quarter, putting the cloud business on an impressive run rate of more than $40 billion.
It was a bright spot for the company in an earnings report that saw it report net income of $2.5 billion, down $1 billion from a year ago.
Still, most companies would take that for the entire business, but AWS, which started off as kind of a side hustle for Amazon back

NASA has chosen SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics to design and build three lunar landing systems that can take humans to the surface of the Moon. The three companies will work on their designs over the next year, and eventually, NASA will select one lander to take the first woman and the next man to the lunar surface.
These landers are a critical part of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency’s initiative to send humans back to the Moon by 2024. Last year, Vice President Mike Pence chal

illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge GDC Summer, an event scheduled after the conference’s cancellation in March, will take place as a fully digital event, organizers announced today. “As so many game developers embrace remote working arrangements and online collaboration, we’re inspired to adapt and deliver GDC in a digital format that will be available to everyone with an internet connection, and will work hard to deliver the high-quality content and networking opportunit

AI-generated music is a fascinating new field, and deep-pocketed research outfit OpenAIhas hit new heights in it, creating recreations of songs in the style of Elvis, 2Pac and others. The results are convincing, but fall squarely in the unnerving “uncanny valley” of audio, sounding rather like good, but drunk, karaoke heard through a haze of drugs.
Jukebox, the organization’s new music-generating system, was detailed in a blog post and paper published today. OpenAI produced som

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways to stay entertained. But it can also be a source of major frustration when you find yourself unable to book slots for deliveries, or are facing an army of sellers trying to price gouge you for hot items like masks or toilet pa

We are not slowing down the pace of our Extra Crunch Live discussions.
Fresh off our chat with Mark Cuban, we’re already gearing up for next week, which will bring us an investor from Sequoia, and, later in the week, Hunter Walk of Homebrew.
Homebrewis a seed-stage venture capital fund that has invested in startups like Plaid, Cheddar and Managed by Q, all of which sold for nine and 10-figure sums. Hunter is one of the firm’s investing partners along with Satya Patel.
TechCrunch&rsqu

When former Red HatCEO Jim Whitehurst moved on to become president at parent company IBM earlier this month, the logical person to take his place was long-time executive Paul Cormier. As he takes over in the most turbulent of times, he still sees a company that is in the right place to help customers modernize their approach to development as they move more workloads to the cloud.
We spoke to Cormier yesterday via video conference, and he appeared to be a man comfortable in his new position. We

By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.
Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista,a smart lifestyle assistant.
When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a spec

Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images The Fortnite World Cup is the latest event to be canceled because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Epic Games revealed the upcoming roadmap for competitive Fortnite, and unfortunately, that included news that all events will be held online for the foreseeable future. “Due to the limitations of cross-region online competition, there will not be a Fortnite World Cup in 2020,” the developer wrote in a tweet.
Given the uncertainty around the pand

Following an explosive report about the dark past of its founder and CEO Damien Patton, Utah-based company Banjo is facing a backlash in its own backyard. After revelations of Patton’s former ties to a branch of the KKK came to light, Utah’s attorney general and the University of Utah froze their relationships with the company. Now, the company will suspend all of its contracts in the state.
Following the actions by the state AG’s office, Banjoannounced that it would suspend al

Directly taking on Google and Amazon generally seems to be an ill-advised strategy for a young startup. It’s even more complicated when you’re competing on the home assistants front, a technically complex, capital-intensive future platform into which both tech giants have dumped substantial sums.
Over the past few years, the small smart home startup Josh.ai has attempted to do just that, capitalizing on public distrust of the big voice platforms to sell an intelligent assistant to us

Two years ago, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz(a16z) took the wraps off a dedicated crypto fund from a subset of its limited partners, who’d provided the firm with $300 million in capital commitments. Now, the firm says it has closed a second fund in the same vein, this time with $515 million in capital commitments.
As general partner Chris Dixon— who leads the fund with general partner Katie Haun — tells Fortune: “It’s very rare that major, new computing parad

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Stadia now runs on the new OnePlus 8 series of smartphones, Google said today in a blog post. Google has slowly made more Android smartphones compatible with Stadia since the service’s launch late last year, and you can now use it on the Pixel 2, 3, and 4 lines of phones; many Samsung Galaxy phones, including the recently-released Galaxy S20 series; Asus’ ROG Phone and ROG Phone II; and the Razer Phone and Razer Phone II.Google has al

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a result. Since the outbreak, 35% of U.S. smart speakers owners say they’re listening to more news and information through their device, and 36% say they&rsq

Photo: OpenAI Artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI today debuted a new generative model that’s able to make music called Jukebox. It’s technologically impressive, even if the results sound like mushy versions of songs that might feel familiar. According to the post on OpenAI’s blog, the researchers chose to work on music because it’s hard. And even if they’re not exactly what I’d call music, the results the researchers got were impressive; there

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) just went through a major leadership change, with executive director Abby Kearns stepping down after five years (and becoming a CTO at Puppet) and the CFF’s CTO Chip Childers stepping into the top leadership role in the organization. For the most part, though, these changes are only accelerating some of the strategic moves the organization already made in the last few years.
If you’re unfamiliar with the open-source Cloud Foundry project, it’s

Blue Originwas among the companies selected by NASA to develop and build a human lander system for its Artemis missions, which include delivering the next man and first woman to the surface of the Moon in 2024. The Jeff Bezos -founded space company chose to deliver a bid that included a space industry “dream team” of subcontractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, and its Artemis Human Landing System will use the expertise of all three.
The Blue Origin bid wa

Today is April 30th, which means in the modern Gregorian calendar system — and in the immortal, misquoted words of NSYNC member Justin Timberlake — it’s gonna be May tomorrow. And to celebrate the occasion, NSYNC appears to have taken the extra step of changing the name of the band’s hit song “It’s Gonna Be Me,” from their 2000 album No Strings Attached to “It’s Gonna Be May” across streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music (via B

Dan Seifert / The Verge Microsoft delayed its new Surface Earbuds from a 2019 release to spring 2020 in November, and although we’re still waiting to hear exactly when they’ll finally come out, the user manual for the earbuds has hit the FCC. That indicates the wireless earbuds could be coming out soon.
What’s interesting in the manual are the details about the swipe gestures for the big circular touch pads on the Surface Earbuds:Image: FCC
And if you were curious about what t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Quibi has posted the first full episodes of three of its original series — Most Dangerous Game, The Stranger, and Dummy — to watch for free on YouTube for anyone looking to try out the new mobile-focused streaming service before signing up, via CNET.The timing isn’t a coincidence: today is also the last day that interested customers can sign up for Quibi and receive the full 90-day trial. Starting on May 1st, any new sign-ups will get tw

For a little while it seemed as if Fortnite had lost some of its luster. Following the impressive black hole event that kicked off a new chapter for the game last September, the pace of change slowed significantly, while many of Fortnite’s top players expressed frustration with the lagging competitive scene. Meanwhile, other games — most notably Riot’s new team shooter Valorant and Call of Duty’s battle royale competitor Warzone — filled the void and began dominatin