Technology news

The Anker PowerCore Play 6K is one of many controllers without buttons you’ll find on Amazon | Anker Ask almost anyone you know and they’ll probably agree: all good controllers have at least one button. Who might disagree with that? No one you should trust — plus the several manufacturers, including well-known brands like Anker and HyperX, that have started making controllers for your phone that don’t have any buttons at all.These strange new gadgets won’t make con

Photo by Christopher Polk/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images A new analysis by Bloomberg finds that the net worth of Apple CEO Tim Cook has passed the $1 billion mark, officially making him a billionaire. It’s certainly an impressive number, but assuming it’s just over $1 billion, he’s got a long way to go before he catches up to the other CEOs on the Bloomberg Billionaires list. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, tops the list at $187 billion, followed by former Microsoft CEO Bill

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images A California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees in a stunning preliminary injunction issued Monday afternoon. The injunction is stayed for 10 days, however, giving Uber and Lyft an opportunity to appeal the decision. Uber said it planned to file an immediate emergency appeal to block the ruling from going into effect.Uber and Lyft are under increasing pressure to fundamentally alter their business models in California

In-flight internet provider Gogo is trying to sell its commercial airline business as it continues to lose money during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced on Monday. CEO Oakleigh Thorne said on a conference call that the company has had “extensive discussions with multiple parties” and that he “feel[s] optimistic that a deal may happen.”A sale would be a huge change of course for Gogo, which pioneered in-flight connectivity. But the attempted sale comes as Gogo,

Microsoft is allowing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to try its new game streaming feature (xCloud) early tomorrow, August 11th. The software giant will launch a new version of the Xbox Game Pass beta app for Android, which includes game streaming. While the game streaming feature, known previously as xCloud, will be officially available on September 15th, anyone can grab the beta app from the Google Play Store and try it early from tomorrow onward.
“As we approach the launch of cloud

Microsoft is allowing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to try its new game streaming feature (xCloud) early tomorrow, August 11th. The software giant will launch a new version of the Xbox Game Pass beta app for Android, which includes game streaming. While the game streaming feature, known previously as xCloud, will be officially available on September 15th, anyone can grab the beta app from the Google Play Store and try it early from tomorrow onward.
“As we approach the launch of cloud

Disney’s recently acquired 20th Century Fox TV studio is the latest to have the “Fox” name dropped, with the company announcing today that it’ll be rebranding the studio to just 20th Television, as part of a larger rebrand for all of Disney’s TV studios.
Additionally, Fox 21 Television Studios is getting renamed to Touchstone Television (a TV brand that Disney stopped using in 2007), as the company works to remove the last traces of the Fox name from its assets. Dis

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg The Google Pixel 4 is discontinued, but Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo each apparently had enough stock left to launch a coordinated sale, bringing the 64GB and 128GB models each down $250 off their original prices. Both Best Buy and B&H Photo have the unlocked Pixel 4 with 64GB of storage in “just black” and “clearly white” for $549. Amazon is currently offering the deal for the black phone only. For $100 more, you can get the 1

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg The Google Pixel 4 is discontinued, but Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo each apparently had enough stock left to launch a coordinated sale, bringing the 64GB and 128GB models each down $250 off their original prices. Both Best Buy and B&H Photo have the unlocked Pixel 4 with 64GB of storage in “just black” and “clearly white” for $549. Amazon is currently offering the deal for the black phone only. For $100 more, you can get the 1

Photo by Brooks Kraft/ Getty Images Some of the US’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, are speaking out against Trump’s suspension of guest worker visas. In an amicus brief filed Monday, the companies argue the new restrictions could dramatically affect how the country’s economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.
“The President’s suspension of nonimmigrant visa programs, supposedly to ‘protect’ American work

David DobrikTikTok announced the first wave of recipients for its new Creators Fund, a $200 million venture that will pay popular personalities for their content.There are 19 creators in total, including David Dobrik, Brittany Tomlinson, Cheyenne Jaz Wise, Justice Alexander, Michael Le, Marissa Ren, and Ross Smith. While many of the recipients already came from full-time entertainment backgrounds — including Dobrik and Smith, who are popular YouTube creators — many of the selected T

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is making watchOS 7 available via public beta starting today. It’s the first time that Apple has released a public beta for its smartwatches that you can try out before the final release. It joins a couple other operating systems that Apple currently has in public preview, including iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur.We’re going to walk you through getting the new software on your Apple Watch.
What to know about watchOS 7 before installing t

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg Apple has already launched beta releases for its next big updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS. And today, it’s adding watchOS to the public beta mix for the first time.The watchOS 7 update includes new watchfaces, plus easier ways of sharing them between friends and downloading custom layouts from the web. But the biggest addition this year, and this one’s worthy of a finally, is sleep tracking. watchOS 7 comes with a new Sleep app that’ll

If you’re curious about MasterClass but don’t want to pay $180 and spend dozens of hours watching videos, a new website can help you out. A number of MasterClass courses have been ripped off and turned into ugly, short-form WikiHow-style articles for the website MasterWiki. You can learn Spike Lee’s methods for making an independent film in 12 quick steps or have Anna Wintour teach you how to be a creative leader in under a dozen, all illustrated with remarkably bad cartoons.
T

Image: Matt Stroshane / Disney All four theme parks at Walt Disney World will start scaling back their hours of operation in September.Starting on Tuesday, September 8th, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, and Magic Kingdom will all close an hour early, while Epcot will close two hours early. The new park hours can be viewed on Disney World’s website.
Disneyland and Disney World were closed in March due to the coronavirus
Disney declined to comment on why it is shortening t

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Nvidia is teasing a mysterious announcement for August 31st. The graphics card maker is hinting a potential event on Twitter today, with a post that simply says “#UltimateCountdown,” accompanied by a video of a star going supernova. Nvidia has also updated its GeForce Twitter account header image with another teaser that mentions “21 days. 21 years.”
The supernova tease makes it clear that whatever Nvidia is planning to announce, it’

Image: Sony Sony is bringing back some of the rarer and more beloved DualShock 4 controller color options starting this month, the company announced Monday morning in a blog post. So in the event you’re in need of a new PlayStation 4 gamepad and weren’t planning on getting a PlayStation 5 at launch — Sony has confirmed these controllers won’t work with PS5 game— you can at the very least get one of the more stylish options available.“The DualShock 4 wireless

Tech stocks retain their highs as the second quarter’s earnings season begins to fade into the rearview mirror, and there are still a number of companies looking to go public while the times are good. It looks like a smart move, as public investors are hungry for growth-oriented shares — which is just what tech and venture-backed companies have in spades.
The companies currently looking to go public are diverse. China-based real-estate giant KE Holdings — a hybrid listings comp

This morning, Mux, a startup that provides API-based video streaming tooling and analytics, announced that it has closed a $37 million Series C round of capital.
Andreessen Horowitzled the round, which included participation from Accel and Cobalt. Prior to this funding round, Muxmost recently raised a roughly $20 million round in mid-2019. In total, the company had raised a hair under $32 million before its Series C, according to PitchBook data.
The Mux round lands amidst a number of trends that

Google Maps has finally been updated to work with Apple’s CarPlay dashboard mode, which allows users to display their current mapping directions side by side with music controls.The dashboard mode was first introduced with iOS 13 last year, but it was limited to only work with Apple Maps at the time. Apple eventually released iOS 13.4 earlier this year, which introduced the option for third-party companies to add support for the dashboard mode on their own mapping apps, but it’s take

Presley Ann/Getty Images for WarnerMedia As disputes between Amazon and WarnerMedia over HBO Max continue, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar is putting pressure on the tech giant to make an agreement by the holidays.In a long interview with Bloomberg, one of several Kilar did following a massive reorganization at WarnerMedia last week, Kilar spoke about Amazon’s business model. He argued that the company’s issues with HBO Max that seem contradictory to Amazon’s principle belief. If

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is rebranding Twitch Prime, which gives Amazon Prime subscribers perks on the company’s live streaming platform, by dropping the Twitch name and emphasizing the Prime part of the brand. The service will now be known as Prime Gaming.
Even though the name is changing, Prime Gaming will still offer the same benefits you might be used to if you’ve ever signed up for Twitch Prime. Those include exclusive in-game content, free games that are

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings’ Radar tracking technology, which gives advertisers access to anonymized mobile phone data about people who pass by billboards, is launching in Europe next month, the Financial Times reported. The outdoor ad-tracking program has been in the US for four years, but Clear Channel waited to launch in Europe so it could meet the EU’s stricter privacy regulations.
William Eccleshare, CEO of Clear Channel’s intern

A worker in a bucket truck addresses downed power lines along Bread and Cheese Hollow Road in Fort Salonga, New York after a tree knocked them out following tropical storm Isaias | Photo by Steve Pfost/Newsday via Getty Images Massive power outages in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias could be just a taste of challenges ahead for already vulnerable utilities during an especially bad hurricane season. Isaias revealed how urgently changes need to be made to prevent more blackouts.Isaias knocked o

Entrepreneurial creators have to do a lot with limited time. They need to, well, create, but then they also need to build their marketing funnels, convert users to their paid products, and manage business operations. Yet, perhaps the most important task they face is keeping their existing fans engaged, because ultimately, that engagement ties directly to the health of their brand long-term.
Social tools are abysmal on platforms like YouTubeand Instagram,particularly when it comes to creators own

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Almost every model in Amazon’s Fire lineup of budget-friendly tablets is discounted. The Fire HD 8 is a good value at $60 (usually $90), and even the Fire HD 8 Plus with slightly more RAM and wireless charging support is $30 off; instead of costing $110, it’s down to $80. If you want to step up to a bigger 10-inch screen with 1080p resolution instead of sub-FHD screen, the Fire HD 10 is a better bet. It’s $50 off its usual price, down to $100.

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper said 2020 has been a year of rapid growth — even before the pandemic forced large swaths of the population to stay home and turn to online learning for entertainment and enrichment.
Cooper (who became CEO in 2017) told me that the company decided last year to “focus on our strength,” leading to a “brand relaunch” in January 2020 to emphasize the richness of its creativity-themed content. At the same time, Cooper said the company defines cr

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.
This mornin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Trump administration has escalated its threats to ban Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat within the US, issuing executive orders last week sanctioning them. The orders will ban “transactions” between US entities and the parent companies of TikTok and WeChat (respectively ByteDance and Tencent). They leave a lot of unanswered questions, but they’re a threatening development for the companies, thanks to presidents’ broad

Welcome to SHIFT Basics, a collection of tips, explainers, guides, and advice to keep you up to speed with mobility tech. In the early days of motoring, cars didn’t have the standardized three pedals, steering wheel, and gear shifter controls that most of us will know. Take the Ford Model T for example: to drive it in reverse you depress the middle pedal, its brake pedal is where a modern accelerator should be, and its throttle is on a lever on the steering column. It’s confusing to