Technology news

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s new Nest Aware pricing model is rolling out starting this week, the company announced today. The new model means that a single subscription now covers all of your Nest devices, rather than asking you to pay on a per-device basis. It’s available in each of the 19 markets where Nest Aware is available, including the US, UK, Australia, France, and Germany.
The new Nest Aware subscription now costs $6 a month or $60 a year to cover all of your

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Hot on the heels of updating the foldable Razr to Android 10, Motorola has announced that the soon-to-be-released Edge Plus will also get at least two future Android OS updates, ensuring that the new flagship will run both the pending Android 11 and next year’s Android 12 (assuming Google sticks with its naming scheme).The Motorola Edge Plus is set to ship with Android 10 when it releases on May 14th. While the promise of two software updates isn’t

Photo by Graeme Jennings-Pool / Getty Images On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled their latest coronavirus response bill, including a number of measures to keep families and businesses online through the duration of the pandemic.
“With schools closed and millions out of work, Congress must use its powers to keep Americans connected,” Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) said in a joint statement. “We’re hopeful that this legislation will garner strong, bi

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge After years of drama with the SEC, Telegram is calling it quits on its crypto-focused subsidiary, Telegram Open Network (TON).“Telegram’s active involvement with TON is over,” wrote Pavel Durov, founder and CEO, in an announcement on his channel. “You may see – or may have already seen – sites using my name or the Telegram brand or the ‘TON’ abbreviation to promote their projects. Don’t trust them with your mo

A new high-resolution scan of The Night Watch lets you zoom in close enough to see all its small details: brushstrokes, small cracks around the eyes and noses, and even the facial expressions of every character.The Night Watch was painted in 1642 by Rembrandt van Rijn. The painting itself is famous for a few reasons, including its large size, measuring at 11.91 feet x 14.34 feet, and its use of light and shadow to emphasize specific characters in the painting.
This new scan was published by the

Global investment firm KKRis betting on the pizza business — it just led a $43 million Series C investment in Slice.
Formerly known as MyPizza, Slice has created a mobile app and website where diners can order a custom pizza delivery from their local, independent pizzeria.
And for those pizzerias, CEO Ilir Sela said Slicehelps to digitize their whole business by also creating a website, improving their SEO and even allowing them to benefit from the “economies of scale” of the l

Image: Belkin Computer and phone accessory maker Belkin is developing an emergency ventilator in partnership with the University of Illinois to be used to treat COVID-19 patients, the two organizations announced today. Called the FlexVent, the gas-operated ventilator is a “single-use, emergency ventilator that can provide constant-flow, pressure-cycled ventilation automatically to patients in respiratory distress.”
The FlexVent is currently under review by the Food and Drug Administ

There’s a new iPad-related case in town from Pad & Quill: a case for Apple’s newly released Magic Keyboard, which is itself a $350 case for your iPad Pro. It’s called the Copertina, and it retails for $99.95. It looks a little bit like the hard cover of a book; it is made, apparently, from archival-quality buckram linen, which is also used in bookbinding. It is undeniably beautiful.And yet, its existence troubles me. Not all cases are created equally; we hold that particula

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work.Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1

Later this month, SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft will take its first human passengers to the International Space Station — and now you can get a firsthand view of what they’ll be seeing when they approach the orbiting lab. Today, SpaceX released a new online simulator that allows users to try their hand at manually docking with the ISS using the Crew Dragon’s controls. Spoiler alert: it’s actually pretty hard!The simulator begins with your Crew Dragon vehicle r

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Internet Archive is alerting users when they’ve clicked on some stories that were debunked or taken down on the live web, following reports that people were spreading false coronavirus information through its Wayback Machine.
As NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny noted on Twitter, the site includes a bright banner on one popular Medium post that was removed as misinformation. Its video archive also creates friction by making users log in to see some v

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter will now let its employees work from home indefinitely, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News. CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly informed employees of the new policy in an email sent on Tuesday.
“If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “If not, our offices will be th

Waymo’s first external fundraising round, initially expected to bring in $2.25 billion for the self-driving company, just grew to $3 billion, thanks to the addition of some new investors.On March 2nd, Waymo announced its first outside investment round, with investors including Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mubadala Investment Company, Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, and Waymo’s parent company Alphabet.That round was extended to include a new

Twobird is a new email application from Ginger Labs, the company behind popular note-taking application Notability, that wants to make email simpler and more powerful. Today, it’s launching fully after an early access beta that began in September last year.The “powerful-yet-simple” philosophy in Twobird manifests in two ways. The “simple” part lies in things like the slimmed-down UI that cuts out a lot of the cruft from emails like repeated signatures or complex for

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On our Vergecast interview series, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton spoke with Alex Stamos, former chief security officer for Facebook and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Stamos recently co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post about Chinese propaganda around the novel coronavirus on US social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On the show, he discusses how these companies still a

Image: Instagram Instagram is launching and testing multiple new features starting today that are aimed at making the platform a more positive space. The company says it’s rolling out the ability to delete up to 25 comments at once and also block or restrict multiple accounts at the same time. The company says it’s been testing these features and found that they especially helped people with larger followings maintain a “positive environment.”
The company’s also no

A view of Google office in Chelsea New York City | Photo by John Nacion/NurPhoto via Getty Images Google is bringing its Grow with Google courses online for everyone in the US and Canada.Grow with Google, launched in 2017, is an initiative through which Google partners with libraries, schools, and other organizations to provide digital literacy workshops and one-on-one coaching. Google says it works with more than 7,000 partner organizations and has trained more than 4 million Americans.
The wo

You’ll be able to shred as Tony Hawk and friends again very soon. Today, Activision announced a new remastered collection that brings together the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games in one modern package, with new features like online play and a more robust course builder. It’ll be coming to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC (via the Epic Games Store) on September 4th.
First, here are the basics. The remastered collection will feature updated visuals; all of the original levels, ch

The Moment Rugged Camera Sling in 6L and 10L capacities. | Photo: Moment Moment built its brand on making photographic accessories for smartphones, but over the past couple of years, the company has expanded its product line to include lenses and filters for drones and larger mirrorless or DSLR cameras. Today, the company is announcing its first bags designed specifically for interchangeable lens cameras: the new 6-liter (6L) and 10-liter (10L) Rugged Camera Sling.Both bags are available for pr

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge Facebook on Monday released a new report detailing how it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human fact-checkers and moderators to enforce its community standards. The report — called the Community Standards Enforcement Report, which usually encompasses data and findings from the prior three months — has a large focus on AI this time around.That’s because Facebook is relying more on the technology to help moderate its pl

Uber has made an offer to buy Grubhub, with the potential for a deal to be reached as early as this month, according to a report from Bloomberg. The offer is said to be an all-stock takeover that would see Grubhub — currently valued at $4.5 billion — be absorbed into Uber’s larger operation.Uber already operates its own food delivery service, Uber Eats, which is already a rival to Grubhub — an October 2019 report had Uber Eats with roughly 20 percent of the delivery app m

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google is taking one of its biggest steps yet toward permanently phasing out Google Play Music in favor of the company’s newer YouTube Music service. Beginning today, you can finally transfer your entire Google Play Music library — artists, albums, songs, playlists, purchased music, personal uploads, and recommendations — over to YouTube Music with just a few taps. This is a crucial process that some subscribers of Google Play Music have been w

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Play Music is going away at the end of the year, leaving YouTube Music as Google’s only streaming music service. But before that happens, you’ve got the chance to transfer over your music library, recommendations, purchased songs, and personal uploads to YouTube Music with just a few taps. This will ensure that you won’t lose any content when Google Play Music is eventually shut down.The transfer process can be done with an Androi

Image: Apple Apple released a big update to Logic Pro X today, adding Live Loops, a beat sequencer, a revamped sampling tool, and more. Apple calls it the app’s “biggest update” since the music production software launched under its current name, Logic Pro X, in 2013. The new tools are particularly focused on electronic music, hip-hop, and beat making.
The update adds in a pair of music creation tools that have been in GarageBand for several years now that let users quickly st

Atlassian announced today that it was acquiring Halp, an early-stage startup that enables companies to build integrated help desk ticketing and automated answers inside Slack. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.
It was a big day for Halp,which also announced its second product today, called Halp Answers. The new tool will work hand in glove with its previous entry Halp Tickets, which lets Slack users easily create a Help Desk ticket without leaving the tool.
“Halp Answers en

Image: RavPower RavPower is extending a deep discount on its 61W USB-C wall charger to readers of The Verge. Normally $30, it’s just $21 for a limited time. To get this price, you have to clip the $2 coupon (located directly beneath the price on the Amazon product page), then enter the offer code VERGE8MF at checkout. This is the lowest price that we’ve seen this charger go for, and if you have a Nintendo Switch, MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, a phone, and any other tech that cha

Sony has announced a new PlayStation Studios brand that it’ll be using for its first-party exclusives going forward as a way to let customers know that a game comes from one of Sony’s in-house development teams.Sony’s various studios already technically exist under the Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios organization (which has its own logo), but the new branding is simpler and more focused on the PlayStation brand. It can also help Sony easily highlight exclusive

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high.
Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite t

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge Huawei is rereleasing its flagship phone from last year as the P30 Pro “New Edition.” The device now ships with Android 10 preinstalled, and it’s got a new silver color option that was previously only available on the P40 Pro. Otherwise, this is an identical device to last year’s phone, meaning it has a 6.47-inch OLED display, four rear cameras, and, crucially, comes with a full suite of Google’s apps and services.Emphasizing its com