Technology news

If you’ve got kids with you through this stay-at-home stretch, there’s a good chance you’re running low on new ways to keep them entertained. All the coloring pages have been colored in; the freeze dances frozen; the stickers stuck.
Good news! Your iPhone is now a cat (congratulations!)
You need to help your new cat friend find somewhere to hide. Then everyone else in your house – like the toddler who somehow has an incredible amount of energy going into this 17th week of

To this day, the Roomba remains the one successful mainstream home robotic. It was a feat iRobot achieved after a decade or so of throwing concepts against the wall, ultimately achieving success through a combination of outward-facing simplicity and under-the-hood sophistication.That other robots haven’t achieved those heights isn’t for lack of trying. The field has been littered with promising, high-profile failures. Notable recent additions to the dust bin of social home robotics h

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge Samsung’s new Galaxy Book laptops are now available for purchase in the United States.All three laptops — the Galaxy Book Flex, Flex Alpha, and Ion — are equipped with the latest 10th Gen chips from Intel. The Flex and Ion are also certified as part of Intel’s Project Athena program. That means if you purchase one of these two models, you should get up to nine hours of battery life, which is ideal if you are a professional working fr

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Verizon has its own exclusive version of the OnePlus 8, the “OnePlus 8 5G UW,” designed specifically for its network with additional mmWave radio features to support Verizon’s 5G network (which only operates in the mmWave band). But as discovered by Reddit user /u/bud-dho, the changes to the phone to fit the additional radio technology mean that the Verizon version has its volume buttons moved lower than the unlocked and T-Mobile models, so st

Building a brand new spacecraft means knowing when to innovate and when to stick to flight-proven methods, and for Crew Dragon, SpaceXdecided to ditch the buttons and dials and go full touchscreen. The astronauts who will fly it later this month have had likewise to ditch years of training and muscle memory — but it’s not all bad, they say.
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two astronauts soon to launch to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon capsule, will be the first to a

API-powered startups are having a good year, with Plaid’s mega-exit to Visa still fresh in mind. And digital video-powered startups are also having a good year, as the world stays home more than before and work shifts to a more remote-friendly landscape. What about a company that does both?
Well, they’d probably raise money and see their usage spike, right? That’s precisely the case with Daily.co, a startup that has both raised new capital this year and has seen usage of its pr

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Hi readers. Welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the future (and present) of transportation. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.
While COVID-related stay-at-home orders have been extended in places like the San Francisco Bay area, officials in other co

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple’s seventh-generation iPad with 32GB of storage is $80 off at a couple of retailers, including Best Buy and Amazon. This price drop puts it at $250 instead of $330. This model has seen a discount like this before, but it’s a rare enough discount that you might want to know about it. Cyber Monday 2019 had a slightly better deal for $230, but given that this is just a regular day in May, it’s a fantastic time to buy.
This version of the iPa

Uberis planning to require drivers and riders to wear face masks as it prepares to ramp its ride-hailing business back up after being hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
CNN was first to report that executives approved a new policy that would require drivers and riders to wear face masks or coverings in some markets, including the U.S. TechCrunch confirmed Monday that Uber has developed a policy for certain markets.
Uber still faces one considerable challenge: securing enough face masks and other

A newly built concrete seawall in Kesennuma, Japan, one of the towns hit by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Researchers think that parks may offer an alternative to walls like this. | Photo by Carl Court / Getty Images When a tsunami slams into a coast, parks with rolling hills could provide about as much protection as towering seawalls, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.These tsunami mitigation parks, as the

Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images In a move that seems utterly obvious as soon as it was announced, Nicholas Cage will be playing the eccentric zookeeper Joe Exotic in a new TV series, via Variety. Look, this was bound to happen.As soon as Netflix’s Tiger King true-crime documentary series exploded into popularity, Hollywood began turning the almost impossibly outlandish story of the bombastic Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin, and their tiger-fueled feuding into a scripted series.
And now Cage hi

With today’s announcement of a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple has finally stopped trying to fix one of the most controversial and problematic hardware designs in its history: the butterfly switch mechanism on its laptop keyboards. After five years of applying bandages to the butterfly keyboard, Apple has switched over its entire laptop line to the scissor-switch-based Magic Keyboard in the span of six months.
Switching the entire product lineup over to a new keyboard in the span of six mon

Lyft has slimmed down its internship program from 12 weeks to eight weeks, cut some intern salaries by half and rescinded its housing stipend, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed that it has shortened the internship and that it only cut some intern salaries. It did not define which roles and departments were specifically affected.
The internship change comes after Lyftcut nearly 1,000 employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic last week. Uber, which reportedly is doing layoffs as well, dec

GoogleMeet — the video call service formerly known as Hangouts Meet, which itself was an offshoot from Hangouts, not to be confused with Google Chat, Duo, Allo or any of the company’s other communications products — is finally making its debut on Gmail accounts, where it probably should have been since 2010.
Everyone with a Google account has access to Meet as of a few days ago, when Google removed most of the restrictions that made the product a go-to for many business custome

Image: ILMxLAB Vader Immortal — the formerly Oculus-exclusive VR Star Wars experience from ILMxLAB — is coming to PlayStation VR this summer. The three episodes of the series are set to be bundled together into a single collected purchase for the port.Designed as an episodic narrative virtual reality experience, Vader Immortal puts players into the digital shoes of a smuggler who gets drawn into a larger scheme from the infamous villain. The story sees players work with — and,

Intel moved deeper into the world of smart mobility and autonomous driving by announcing Monday its plan to acquire Israel-based urban transit data startup Moovit for $900 million.Moovit’s principle product is an urban mobility app with a particular focus on public transportation, which is used by hundreds of millions of customers. It uses public transit data to provide route planning in the vein of Google’s and Apple’s mapping apps, as well as scooter- and bike-sharing service

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge People are doing a lot more video conferencing now that they’re stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These sessions can be a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, conduct business with colleagues, and keep up with schoolwork. Sometimes, though, you may want to save a recording of the meeting so you can revisit it later. That could let you listen to a teacher’s lecture again, use the audio for a podcast, or even relive the annou

Last week was a fairly busy week in space news, but the dominating story was preparation for the first-ever Commercial Crew launch that will actually carry human astronauts to space. This is, in many ways, the culmination of years of work and billions of dollars spent by partners NASA and SpaceXon their part of the Commercial Crew Program.
On May 27, SpaceX will launch two NASA astronauts on a demonstration mission to the International Space Station, and this week saw a flurry of activity to get

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service .
Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) can be a legal requirement in instances where there are high rights risks related to the processing of people’s information.
Last m

AWS today announced the launch of the Elemental Link, a small hardware device that makes it easy to connect a live video source to the AWS Elemental Media Live service for broadcast-grade live video processing in the cloud. The $995 Link, which weighs in at less than a pound, is meant to allow Media Live users to connect a camera or video production setup to the AWS cloud.
The fanless Link has an Ethernet port and inputs for either an HD-SDI or HDMI cable. In the AWS Management Console, it&rsquo

Careem,the Dubai-based ride-hailing and delivery company that was acquired by Uberlast year, is cutting its workforce by 31% and suspending its mass transportation business due to affects from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The layoffs will affect more than 530 employees. Employees who are laid off will receive at least three months’ severance pay, one month of equity vesting and, where relevant, extended visa and medical insurance through the end of the year, according to the company’s blog

The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch.
If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016.
For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a lot riding on the digital finance company’s IPO. After e-commerce venture Jumia, it would be

Music streaming service Soundcloud is capitalizing on consumer demand for live entertainment amid the COVID-19 quarantine with the launch of its own slate of originally produced live programming. The company today announced its plans for a new Twitch channel where it will air live chat series and other panel conversations, plus music sets and shows focused on music discovery. The programming will feature artists, producers and other industry experts in an effort to appeal to both music creators

As expected, Robinhood has closed a new round of capital. The late-stage, consumer investing app announced today that it has closed a $280 million Series F funding at an $8.3 billion valuation. This closely tracks prior coverage that the firm was hunting for a nine-figure round at a valuation of around $8 billion.
Robinhood raised capital several times in 2019, including a $323 million mid-year Series E that valued the firm at around $7.6 billion, counting the value of the investment. 
The

Photo by Toni Anne Barson / WireImage Taika Waititi will direct and co-write a new Star Wars movie for theatrical release, Disney announced today. It won’t be Waititi’s first brush with the Star Wars universe; he directed the season finale of The Mandalorian. He also earned an Academy Award for his screenplay for Jojo Rabbit and directed Thor: Ragnarok. Rumors of a Waititi-helmed Star Wars movie first surfaced in January, though it’s unclear if this movie is the one that Marve

PewDiePie/YouTube Felix Kjellberg, the YouTuber better known as PewDiePie, has signed an exclusive livestreaming deal with YouTube. The move comes almost exactly one year after Kjellberg announced that he was streaming exclusively on DLive, a small blockchain-based livestreaming site.
According to the press release, Kjellberg is excited to head back to his home pastures.“Live streaming is something I’m focusing a lot on in 2020 and beyond, so to be able to partner with YouTube and b

PewDiePie/YouTube Felix Kjellberg, the YouTuber better known as PewDiePie, has signed an exclusive live-streaming deal with YouTube. The move comes almost exactly one year after Kjellberg announced that he was streaming exclusively on DLive, a small blockchain-based live-streaming site.
According to the press release, Kjellberg is excited to head back to his home pastures.“Live streaming is something I’m focusing a lot on in 2020 and beyond, so to be able to partner with YouTube and

Meet, in Gmail Google has wasted no time integrating its Meet videoconferencing into Gmail, with some users already seeing a link to launch Meet in the left sidebar of the Gmail interface. Formerly available only to its enterprise and education customers via G Suite, the company said last week that it was making Meet free to anyone with a Google account and allow meetings of up to 100 people with no time limits.
Putting Meet front and center is Google’s latest attempt to go head-to-head w

Photo by Jose Perez / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is dealing with record-low ridership on subways and buses, is trying to shed some light on its coronavirus problem.According to the New York Daily News, the agency will begin using powerful ultraviolet light as part of its beefed-up sanitization program on subways and buses. The effort is part of a partnership with Columbia University, which theorizes that UV light can be used to k

Today, Apple and Google shared more information on their automatic exposure notification system, including sample interface designs for potential apps and restrictions on how the system will ultimately be used.First introduced on April 10th, Apple and Google’s system tracks potential cases of COVID-19 through Bluetooth Low Energy signals, allowing for retroactive exposure notifications while using encrypted keys to preserve non-exposed users’ privacy. The companies have pledged to di

Windows 10X running on the Surface Neo. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft is confirming today that it’s planning to refocus Windows 10X on single-screen devices. “The world is a very different place than it was last October when we shared our vision for a new category of dual-screen Windows devices,” explains Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Windows and devices chief. “With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us

Lucasfilm It’s May 4th, which means that there are plenty of Star Wars-themed deals out there today. We’ve settled on covering just a few discounts on acclaimed video games and movies, though, of course, there’s also some merchandise you can score if you’re in the mood. My colleague Kim Lyons wrote about Disney’s new four-pack of Star Wars face masks that are available for preorder. While somewhat costly to preorder at $20, they ensure that you’re covered up

Google today rolled out the new Privacy Screen feature for Google Drive on iOS and iPadOS, which allows you to require Face ID or Touch ID authentication whenever anyone tries to open the app on your device. That way, your important work documents or sensitive personal files will be kept away from snooping eyes.You can choose to have Privacy Screen activate immediately as soon as you switch to another app — the Face ID or Touch ID screen will pop when you return to Drive — or delay i

Icebreaker claims to be Finland’s most active pre-seed VC. The firm, which also invests in Estoniaand Sweden, has backed 38 companies in the last three years out of its first fund, with a 65% success rate so far for companies that have been able to raise follow-on funding.
Two weeks ago, Icebreaker announced the launch of Fund II, with an initial close of €50 million. That’s more than twice the size of its first fund, which topped out at €20 million.
Its remit remains large

Apart from burning through VC money and educating the public on how frighteningly large emperor penguins are, what is augmented reality actually good for? Here’s one answer: real-life copy and paste.As this awesome demo from developer Cyril Diagne demonstrates, AR can be the perfect tool to quickly grab visuals from the real world and paste them into digital documents. Just point your phone at what you want to copy, and drag it over to your desktop. No fiddling around emailing images to yo

Photo by Sam Greenwood / Getty Images Carnival has announced that it will resume some of its cruises on August 1st. Trips will resume on eight ships leaving from Miami and Port Canaveral, Florida, and Galveston, Texas, according to Reuters.
All other cruises in North America and Australia will remain suspended through at least August 31st, Carnival said. Customers who had booked cruises that are impacted by cancellation will receive an email with instructions for how to claim a refund or other

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO between 2001 and 2011 and served on its board until last year, has reinvented himself as a technology adviser and investor in the US defense community. The New York Times has published a new profile on Schmidt’s work since leaving the company where he made his name, and it’s well worth a read if you’re curious about how the ex-CEO now spends his time.Schmidt has long advocated the use of technology and AI

Tim Bray, a senior engineer and vice president at Amazon Web Services, has quit his job because he was “dismayed” that the company fired whistleblowers who were trying to draw attention to the dire straits of Amazon warehouse workers, he wrote in a blog post.“Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” Bray said. “So I resigned. The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Cour

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge SoundCloud is joining Twitch. The popular music streaming service is set to launch a slate of original live programming on Wednesday, May 6th, that includes shows about the industry populated by insiders, execs, and influencers. SoundCloud is the latest music service to join Twitch since concerts and tours across the globe have been canceled due to the pandemic.The slate of shows the site is launching with is eclectic. “Studio Sessions with Soul

Image: Apple Apple announced a new version of its popular 13-inch MacBook Pro, replacing the much-maligned butterfly switch keyboard with its new “Magic Keyboard” that’s used on the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air. With today’s release, all of Apple’s current lineup of laptops have the improved keyboard.There are other changes, too, like that each model now has twice the amount of storage. The base model has 256GB of storage by default, while the middle

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week.
Equity had a busy last few days, so to help you catch up: Friday’s episode was a lot of fun (Duolingo, Figma, OMERS, and aquafaba), and we also dropped an Equity Shot on Saturday, digging into the first major technology earnings week.
But this morning we were busy digging through what’s happened over the last few days, and what’s to come. Here’s the rundown:Silver Lake is f