Technology news

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge To say that Quibi is off to a disastrous start would be an understatement. Co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg attributes “everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” he told The New York Times in a new interview published on Monday. But Katzenberg is hopeful that rolling out new features will help, including giving subscribers the ability to share content from Quibi shows on social media.When Quibi launched at the beginning of April, the a

Motorola is rolling out the Android 10 update for the foldable Razr and adding a host of new features for the external “Quick View” display and some new visual customization options for icons.The bulk of the changes are in new features for the external display, which can now display Google Maps directions even when the phone is closed, do video calls using the main camera (which is still not great, but is better than the internal one), and respond to text messages with a full keyboar

Makena Kelly No one knows exactly what the Democratic National Convention will look like this year, with social distancing restrictions still in place in Wisconsin and across the country. It’s already been moved to the end of the summer, and top Democrats like Nancy Pelosi have suggested holding it in a gigantic empty stadium to curb the spread of disease. But Monday, Lis Smith, former advisor for the Pete Buttigieg campaign, touted a new idea that I’m quite fond of: replicating Tra

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that he’s reopening his company’s car factory in California in violation of a local shelter-in-place order, as The Verge previously reported. Musk said he’ll be on the company’s production line this week. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me,” he wrote.Musk spent parts of the weekend railing against the order, which was put in place in mid-March by Alameda County officials in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-1

Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the global gaming obsession du jour, is not commercially available in China at the moment, and official versions of the Nintendo Switch sold in the country won’t play it. But gamers, with characteristic determination, are finding ways around that. The stringent requirements of the Chinese gaming authorities mean that it can sometimes take a while for games to be officially approved, if they ever are. Animal Crossing New Horizons was never approved,

Photo by Marie De Jesus for The Verge Doug Monahan, the creator of the failed iBackPack crowdfunding project, is settling with the Federal Trade Commission and has agreed to never crowdfund again. The agreement, filed today, comes after more than a year of back-and-forth between the agency and Monahan, who served as his own lawyer in the case. The FTC sued Monahan over claims that he misused the nearly $800,000 he raised on Kickstarter and Indiegogo to bring the backpacks to life and instead sp

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Tesla began making cars again at its Fremont, California plant over the weekend despite an ongoing battle with local officials about whether it should remain closed during the pandemic, The Verge has learned. The company called back some of its workers and has completed around 200 cars Model Y and Model 3 vehicles, according to two current employees. This all happened as CEO Elon Musk threatened on Twitter to move Tesla’s operations out of state and sued

Photo by David Allio/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images PepsiCo, the insanely big multinational food and beverage giant, wants in on the direct-to-consumer action: they’ve bought the (incredibly good) domain Snacks.com and the (fine) domain PantryShop.com to sell you things faster.As Fast Company reported, the company saw a 10 percent bump in its earnings last month because people were stocking up during the pandemic. Concurrently, however, the situation has meant a lot of shopping is now m

Sunday morning, I woke up feeling productive and decided to pull the hose out and give the house a good wash, cleaning the gunk and grime that littered the front porch and blasting away dirt stains that had changed the color of the roof. It was relaxing, particularly because I was not doing this hard labor myself — I was in front of my gaming PC, playing a demo of PowerWash Simulator by FuturLab.
The game has you assume the role of a professional with your own power washing business. You&r

Image: Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm Ltd. With production shut down on sets around the world, studios like Disney are being asked about upcoming seasons of highly anticipated shows and release dates for films. One show that won’t be affected is The Mandalorian, according to Disney’s CEO.
Like Black Widow, filming on The Mandalorian was finished before shelter-at-home orders went into place and shut down production, Chapek told CNBC. Post-production is able to continue a

A new AI diagnostic tool trained on crowdsourced symptom data can predict whether someone likely has COVID-19 without testing. The model was trained on data from more than 2.5 million users of the COVID Symptom Study app developed at King’s College London, which anyone can download to report their daily health status. Around a third of the users had logged symptoms associated with COVID-19. Some 18,374 reported having had a test for coronavirus, 7,178 of whom had tested positive

For former NASA astronaut Garret Reisman, SpaceX’s May 27 launch of the company’s first human passengers to space is going to be a very personal moment. Reisman worked at SpaceX for years, helping the company win NASA contracts and overseeing operations of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft — both the new crewed version, and its predecessor, which brought cargo to the International Space Station.Reisman left SpaceX in 2018 to become a professor at the University of Southern Calif

Ever since Facebook bought WhatsApp back in 2014, the company has managed to keep the the mega-popular chat app quite separate from its other services. But every now and then, we’re reminded that WhatsApp is, in fact, owned by Facebook. Case in point: an upcoming feature test spotted by WABetaInfo would redirect you towards Messenger Rooms in order to make video calls with large groups. Though WhatsApp recently added support for up to eight people in a video call, that number pales in com

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is introducing new labels to mark tweets with COVID-19-related misinformation, the company announced today. The labels should make it easier tell if a tweet has a misleading or unverified claim and point you toward resources about COVID-19.
The new labels will link to a page curated by Twitter or to an “external trusted source” that can provide information about the claims made in the tweet, according to Twitter. Here’s what the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is launching a dedicated new app, Family Safety, designed for managing kids’ screen time and app usage. The app is available now in preview form on both Android and iOS, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. To access it, you have to fill out a form here and specify how many family members you intend to have on the same preview account. The app was first announced at the end of March as an extension of the company’s existin

Lenovo has released the Duet Chromebook, a 10-inch 2-in-1 that runs Chrome OS. The base model, which has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a MediaTek processor, costs $279, but only the $299 model, which has 128GB of storage, appears to be listed at Best Buy right now.That’s an attractive price, especially when other highly anticipated Chromebook releases this year have asked over $700. We have the Duet’s size (10 inches is pretty small) and underpowered processor to thank for that. B

If you take out The Office’s physical interactions between characters, and try to tell the same jokes over Slack, does The Office still work?
It’s a question that creative collective MSCHF set to find out, recreating all 201 episodes of the series over Slack. Viewers will join a live Slack, where different channels dedicated to various departments, including accounting, warehouse, and a general office room. Viewers are requested to avoid posting in the “company” channels,

In an effort to ease lockdown restrictions, the UK government is considering issuing immunity passports that show someone can return to work. Supporters of the idea argue that it will help restart the economy, but health experts believe it’s fraught with risks. Chief among their concerns is the testing for immunity. Immunity passports would rely on antibody tests that show someone has recovered from the infection. But scientists still don’t know how long someone remai

Consumer fintechstartups were massively successful in 2019, attracting millions of new users and disrupting traditional retail banks and financial services with mobile-first, consumer-oriented products. Despite the economic downturn in public markets and the massive wave of cuts at public and private companies in recent weeks, fintech startups have been raising a ton of money.
It feels like they’re all building a war chest to survive the economic winter as traditional banks continue to ite

Can you imagine what it would’ve been if Dunder Mifflin had Slack? If Michael Scott was to fake-fire you in a public channel? If Jim was to impersonate Dwight by stealing his profile pic and handle? If this maggot Toby was to passive-aggressively warn you about PDA over DM? It truly is one of the world’s greatest what-ifs. And we’re finally getting an answer to it. Starting today, you can plug into the the The Office universe like you never have before — d

In the past few years, retail-streaming has become a rapidly growing ecommerce channel in China, with all manners of salespeople directly selling goods to consumers on an ecommerce livestream. While influencers and celebrities are the most familiar faces seen on retail-streams, recently, executives of major Chinese corporations have also appeared in front of the live camera.  Some of these efforts yielded lucrative results — Li Jing, president of the home accessories business Me

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Spotify is giving premium users a new feature that’ll allow them to share DJ duties with anyone in their immediate vicinity. Group Sessions, as Spotify is calling the feature, is rolling out in beta today and only works between premium users.A host can share a scannable Spotify code from their app with whomever they want to share playback control, meaning that the host and guests can pause, play, skip, and select tracks in the queue, and add the

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. If you’re regularly working with data, but lack the interest, financial means, or need for a fancy data management platform, there’s no need to panic. As we’ve shown throughout this series of articles, good old Google Sheets is capable of a lot more than you might realize. However, knowing all of Google Sheets’ neat formulas is one thi

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Last Friday something very odd happened: the public debut of Kingsoft Cloud, a company that we’ve covered before. I’m nigh-incredulous about this IPO for the host of issues that we discussed when the company first filed. Since then, IPOs have only gotten only stranger.
Kingsoft is not the only company looking to tap the public markets. Vroom, which has raised over $7

Whether scrolling Instagram or browsing our email inboxes, the current crisis has us tuned in to what brands do and say. In stride, our personal values are running close to the surface: is that letter from the CEO out of touch, or appropriately optimistic? Marketing campaigns that don’t skip a beat while the world is rapidly changing can feel brash, and tone-deaf sentiments can quickly spur an unsubscribe. But it’s not all blunders and missteps! Brands that assert a strong mission a

What started out as a private legal case between Google and its former head of self-driving technology, Anthony Levandowski, that no one really batted an eyelid over, evolved into a public nightmare for all involved. With most cases against Levandowski having been settled, the former Google engineer and his most recent employer, Uber no less, are now left pointing fingers over who would pick up the $180 million bill. During a case between two of Levandowski’s former employers, Google and

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week.
Another weekend at home, another week’s starting from the same spot. How are you holding up? Do you miss your commute yet? Just want to get some breakfast from a kitchen other than your own? I feel you.
But it is Monday all the same and that means it’s time for Equity, so let’s get to it. You can hit play above and following along with notes:Kingsoft

Photo by Albert L. Ortega/WireImage Chris Parnell is a normcore comedy assassin. After a career in improv,two stints on Saturday Night Live, and countless roles on sitcoms like 30 Rock and animated shows like Rick and Morty, Parnell has perfected the art of using his extremely average appearance — and voice — to deliver disarmingly strange, ridiculous and deadpan comedy. Few are better at making the act of looking like a relatively normal dude and keeping a straight face so funny (&

Hunter Walk thinks your TAM slide is stupid.
That’s one viewpoint that the seed-stage investor shared with TechCrunch that made us laugh during our recent conversation. Walk joined us for an Extra Crunch Live chat late last week that was a mix of advice and insight about what the seed-stage Homebrew partner looks for in founders and companies to invest in.
In the case of founders, “attitude matters as much as aptitude sometimes,” Walk said, adding that “grit” and &l