Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, will be giving employees the week of August 10th off to “disconnect, recharge, and reboot,” the studio announced in a blog post published Tuesday.Riot has recently expanded beyond its global smash hit League of Legends, including releasing auto battler Teamfight Tactics, Hearthstone-like card game Legends of Runeterra (which are both set in the League of Legends universe), and Valora

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, will be giving employees the week of August 10th off to “disconnect, recharge, and reboot,” the studio announced in a blog post published Tuesday.Riot has recently expanded beyond its global smash hit League of Legends, including releasing auto battler Teamfight Tactics, Hearthstone-like card game Legends of Runeterra (which are both set in the League of Legends universe), and Valora

Image: Disney Disney’s live-action adaptation of Mulan will be released on Disney+ on September 4th for $29.99 the company announced today.Disney executives walked through the new plan for Mulan’s release during an earnings call with analysts today.
“We thought it was important to find alternative ways to bring [Mulan] in a timely manner,” Chapek added. In countries where Disney Plus is not available, Disney is releasing Mulan in theaters on the same date. The new releas

Image: Samsung Russia Samsung’s Unpacked event tomorrow will be the official showcase for the heavily rumored and much-leaked Galaxy Note 20. For those who wanted yet another look at the phone in full before it’s unveiling, an AT&T promotional video pretty much shows off every inch of the device and even details its most important specs and new features.The video, which popped up on Twitter courtesy of South American tech blogger Karlos Peru, appears to have been prepped as a pi

Photo: Film Frame / Marvel Studios Disney continues to face financial woes in just about every part of its business, but one year after Avengers: Endgame came out, it’s clear just how much the pandemic has affected its studios division.Disney didn’t release any major films last quarter, and the third quarter earnings report shows how much that impacted the company. Studio revenues decreased 55 percent in the quarter to $1.7 billion, the company announced. That means Disney made $1.7

Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images Virgin Atlantic Airways has filed for bankruptcy protection for its United States business, as it tries to nail down a $1.6 billion rescue plan announced last month. It’s the second of Richard Branson’s airlines to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic, after Virgin Australia filed for “administration” — a form of bankruptcy in countries like Australia and England — earlier this year.Virgin Atlantic filed for Chapter 15 bank

Photo by Blake Nissen for The Boston Globe via Getty Images The pharmaceutical company Moderna started the last, longest step in the process of testing its COVID-19 vaccine candidate at the end of July — a Phase 3 clinical trial. It’s an enormous undertaking: their goal is to recruit 30,000 people, inject some of them with an experimental vaccine and then follow each and every one of them to see how many contract the coronavirus and how many do not. This will take months, even with

You might have missed it, but amidst the current political-M&A-pandemic-election-disinformation news cycle we find ourselves in this week, SaaS and cloud companies reached new public market records.
Yesterday, the Bessemer-Nasdaq cloud index closed at 2,035.54, a new record finish for the basket of software companies. And, today, the index broached the 2,040 mark before ceding some ground.The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Samsung’s next midrange phone to get 5G connectivity is the Galaxy A51. Originally launched back in April, the A51 costs $400 normally and sits comfortably in the zone occupied by the now-discounted Pixel 3A and newly announced Pixel 4A (of which there is also a 5G version coming). But the new 5G version of the A51 will go for $500 and work on T-Mobile and Verizon’s 5G networks, Samsung says.Samsung originally announced that its Galaxy A-series line

Photo by SUSAN WALSH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) says President Donald Trump’s recent handling of Federal Communications Commission nominations is a “disaster.” Earlier this week, the Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Republican FCC commissioner Michael O’Rielly, shortly after O’Rielly criticized an executive order demanding that the agency unilaterally revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In an interview with The

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Honda is recalling 608,000 vans and SUVs because of faulty software that can, among other things, cause the backup camera to fail and the driver display to malfunction or reboot. The recalls will begin on September 23rd.Certain 2018-2020 Odysseys, 2019-2020 Passports, and 2019-2021 Pilots were outfitted with “[i]ncorrect instrument panel control module software” that can cause the display to not show critical information like speed, engine

Image: Take-Two Interactive The companies that sell video games are all staying relatively quiet about whether they plan to universally hike game prices from $60 to $70 with the launch of next-gen consoles later this year. But of the more vocal ones, massive publisher Take-Two Interactive has flip-flopped in its public statements of late, causing a bit of confusion in the process.After initially becoming the first company to say it would hike the price of next-gen versions of NBA 2K20, CEO Stra

Game developers are in a nonstop battle with cheaters, and now some developers are getting an extra hand from an anti-cheat vigilante frustrated with people who give themselves an unfair advantage.
Motherboard staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai profiled Mohamed “GamerDoc” Al-Sharifi, a 24-year-old who has spent a significant amount of time and energy hunting down cheaters in both Overwatch and Valorant. Al-Sharifi says he despises cheaters and feels games are “ruined&rd

Apple’s longtime marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is stepping into a slightly smaller role after decades with the company. Schiller is dropping his role as senior vice president of worldwide marketing, but he’ll remain in charge of the App Store and Apple Events. Greg Joswiak, previously the head of product marketing, will take over Schiller’s former position as Apple’s overall marketing leader.
Marketing is a huge role inside of Apple that goes beyond simply advertising p

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has six weeks to close one of the strangest deals in tech industry history. On Sunday, the company publicly announced it was in talks with President Trump to buy portions of TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. For months, Trump has been raising national security concerns about TikTok, even threatening to ban the app, and now he’s presenting a sale to Microsoft as a last chance effort to save it. If the deal goes through, it w

Qualified, a startup co-founded by former Salesforce executives Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
Swensrud (Qualified’s CEO) said the startup is meant to solve a problem that he faced when he was CMO at Salesforce. Apparently he’d complain about being “blind,” because he knew so little about who was visiting the Salesforce website.
“There could be 10 or 100 or 100,000 people on my website right now, and I don’t know

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Today, Google shared a detailed timeline for Google Play Music’s shutdown. Access will be revoked in September for users in New Zealand and South Africa and for users in all other regions in October. Come December, the service will shut down completely, after which you won’t be able to transfer your content. Additionally, starting later this month Google will no longer accept purchases for music within its Play Store.
Google is making these big moves

Image: Motorola Motorola announced today that it’s bringing the previously international-only One Fusion Plus to the US, where the pop-up camera smartphone will cost $399 starting on August 5th.
The US version of the One Fusion Plus is identical to the international model. It features a 6.5-inch FHD+ display with a pop-up 16-megapixel camera, along with four additional sensors on the back of the device: a main 64-megapixel sensor, a wide-angle 8-megapixel camera, a 5-megapixel macro camer

Rigetti Computing, the quantum computing startup that is challenging industry heavyweights like IBM, Microsoft and D-Wave, today announced that it has closed a $79 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Alumni Ventures Group, DCVC, EDBI, Morpheus Ventures and Northgate Capital.
Bessemer’s Tomer Diari and Veritas Software’s former CEO Mark Leslie will join the company’s board of directors.
Earli

It will finally be slightly easier to share files, images, links, and other content between Android devices. Google is launching a new Android feature called “Nearby Share” that enables direct sharing between any device running Android 6 and up. Nearby Share is already available on some Pixel and Samsung phones, and Google says it’ll arrive on other devices “over the next few weeks.”
Nearby Share works very much like Apple’s AirDrop feature for the iPhone: you

Image: T-Mobile T-Mobile says that it has officially switched on “the world’s first standalone 5G network,” allowing the company to maximize the use of its 600MHz 5G spectrum. Previously, that 600MHz footprint was directly tied to the carrier’s LTE coverage map and thus limited in reach. “With today’s launch, 600MHz 5G can go beyond the mid-band signal, covering hundreds of square miles from a single tower and going deeper into buildings than before,” T

The new Family Bell feature on Google Assistant smart displays and speakers. | Image: Google Google is expanding the capabilities of its Assistant on smart displays and speakers today to make it easier for families that are homeschooling their children during the pandemic.Leading the way is the new Family Bell feature, an alarm-like reminder that can be broadcast from a Nest Home smart display or speaker at a set time. Google is pitching the Family Bell as a way for families to announce when it

The 2020 iMac | Apple Apple is announcing updates for both the 27-inch and 21.5-inch iMacs. It’s updating the processors inside to Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake processors and also switching out the webcam to a higher-resolution 1080p HD sensor instead of the low-res 720p found in other Macs. SSDs are now standard across the line, and there will be a bunch of new configuration options — including a “nano-texture” version with less reflective matte glass.
The 27-inch

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple says it’s not interested in acquiring TikTok, despite an Axios report that named the company as a potential buyer for the embattled social network. The company tells The Verge that there are no talks at present to acquire TikTok, and it has no plans to pursue such a deal.
Notably, Axios sourced the information to figures outside of Apple, who reportedly had knowledge of ongoing talks.
Microsoft announced on Sunday that it was in talks to buy T

Radish is announcing that it has raised $63.2 million in new funding.
Breaking up book-length stories into smaller chapters that are released over days or weeks is an idea that was popularized in the 19th century, and startups have been trying to revive it for at least the past decade. Still, this round represents a major step up in funding, not just for Radish (which only raised around $5 million previously), but also compared to other startups in a relatively nascent market. (Digital fiction s

Today AgentSync announced that it has closed a $4.4 million seed round, co-led by Elad Gil and Caffeinated Capital. Other well-known names from the Silicon Valley scene took part in its funding round, including Affirm’s Max Levchin and the podcaster turned VC Harry Stebbings, among others.
The round caught our eye because AgentSyncis working in a space that has seen a notable wave of venture interest in 2020 — insurtech, which we’ve covered somewhat extensively — and beca

Fitbit’s health-tracking business was losing money when Google swooped in to buy it.The European Commission is launching a full investigation into Google’s acquisition of Fitbit. EU regulators are worried that the deal will entrench Google’s position as a market leader in online advertising by giving the search giant access to data collected from Fitbit’s health tracking hardware that can be used for personalized advertisements.“The data collected via wrist-worn we

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Ford CEO Jim Hackett is retiring, the company announced on Tuesday, and he will be replaced by current chief operating officer Jim Farley. Hackett will stay with Ford until October to help with the transition.
Hackett was installed as CEO in 2017 and spent the last three years leading a massive, company-wide restructuring effort. He had previously been the CEO of Ford Smart Mobility, the company’s new technologies wing, but was tasked with running th

Razer Razer has made a variant of its shape-shifting Nintendo Switch-esque Kishi controller that’s ready for xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming service that will let you play Xbox games on demand with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The cloud service launches on September 15th, but this controller releases today for $99.99.
This new version has the same design as the standard Kishi that I reviewed a few months ago, and it’s still made just for Android devices. (Razer’s

PowerA Gaming peripheral maker PowerA has debuted a few controllers designed with Microsoft’s new xCloud cloud gaming service in mind. The first is the MOGA XP5-X, a $69.99 wireless controller that will launch in September alongside the service’s integration into Game Pass Ultimate.
You could just use Microsoft’s cheaper Xbox One Bluetooth controller (which this model looks very similar to) and pick up a cheap phone clip separately, but this pricier model might be worth it if

Microsoft will launch its game streaming service, known as Project xCloud, on September 15th exclusively on Android devices. Project xCloud will be bundled as part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, priced at $14.99 per month, with a promise of more than 100 games available on Android tablets and phones. Game streaming will be limited initially to Android; iPhone and iPad users will have to wait.“It’s our ambition to scale cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass available on al