Technology news

Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images Tourists to Niagara Falls can now ride all-electric ferries past the iconic waterfalls. The two ferries made their debut in New York on October 6th, fueled by locally generated hydropower. Their batteries can recharge in just seven minutes as passengers climb on and off the vessels.The first vessels of their kind
The new boats, operated by Maid of the Mist, are among the first vessels of their kind to navigate US waterways. The first all-electr

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you prefer buying older PlayStation games over the web or on mobile, you may not be able to do that for much longer. Sony has informed developers that it plans to revamp its digital storefront for those versions later this month, removing users’ options to purchase games and DLC released initially on the PS3, PSP, and Vita from a mobile device or PC, Planète Vita reports.
Effective October 19th, the PlayStation web store will remove that o

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week Natasha was on vacation, so Danny and your humble servant had to endeavor alone. She’s back next week, so we’ll be back to full strength as a collective soon enough.
But even with a depleted hosting crew, we had a mountain of news to get through. And to joke about, as Danny was in the mood for a laugh. Here’s t

Everyone is familiar with carrier pigeons, but what about carrier moths? This research project uses the nocturnal insects as a delivery service for tiny electronic packages that weigh less than a hundredth of an ounce.
The system was created by graduate students at the University of Washingtonand its prolific tiny gadget creator Shyam Gollakota.Bumblebees bearing high-tech backpacks act as a living data collection platform“This is the first time anyone has shown that sensors can be release

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Android phones can now notify you when they detect certain sounds, which could notify people who are deaf or hard of hearing about important sounds nearby.If you turn on the feature, called Sound Notifications, you can have your Android phone inform you about some sounds via a push notification, a flash from your camera light, or by making your phone vibrate. Other devices support Sound Notifications as well, including Wear OS devices, which can send Soun

Photo by Jake Kastrenakes / The Verge Google is getting ready to release a new $129 Nest thermostat that will apparently switch out some of the touch-based controls found on other Nest thermostats for hand gestures, according to a new Bloomberg report. Bloomberg gave the example of a user swiping their hand up and down near the thermostat to adjust the temperature.
That tech sounds a lot like the motion controls you could activate with the Project Soli radar sensor in the now discontinued Pixel

Image: Sony Sony’s PlayStation 5 will launch on November 12th in the US starting at $399.99. That price will get you the digital edition of the console that doesn’t have a Blu-ray disc drive. If you want a disc drive for playing disc-based PS5 games, 4K Blu-ray movies, and PS4 games that may end up being compatible, there’s a larger version of the console that has that for $499.
Preorders are now available, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find one. The stoc

Photo by Brennan King / The Verg Google is expanding the phones that it sells directly to use with its Google Fi network, with the company now offering six of Samsung’s latest 5G phones: the Galaxy Note 20, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, the Galaxy S20, the Galaxy S20 Plus, the Galaxy S20 Ultra, and the Galaxy A71 5G.Fi customers have been able to use Samsung’s Android phones — which are practically the face of Android as a whole, despite Google’s own efforts with its Pixel l

Image: Apple Apple is extending Apple TV Plus subscribers’ free period to February 2021, according to TechCrunch.
The free trial period that came with the purchase of a new Apple product last year was set to expire for many customers on November 1st — the one-year anniversary of Apple TV Plus’ launch. Instead, Apple will now extend it through the end of January 2021. TechCrunch also reports that if customers “signed up for yearly subs without a new device purchase during

TuSimpleand Waymo are in the lead in the emerging sector of autonomous trucking; TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymotrucking head Boris Sofman had an in-depth discussion of their industry and the tech they’re building at TC Mobility 2020. Interestingly, while they’re solving for the same problems, they have very different backgrounds and approaches.
Hou and Sofman started out by talking about why they were pursuing the trucking market in the first place. (Quotes have been lightly

The pandemic has affected just about every business in the world, but tech has also geared up to fight back in its own way, as we found out from speakers at Disrupt 2020. But technology has opted to take a back seat to frontline workers and find ways to support them rather than attempt to “solve” the issues at hand.
The founders of tech-forward healthcare startups Colorand Carbon Health explained their approach in one panel, emphasizing that the startup mindset is a resilient and ada

This afternoon Affirm,a startup focused on providing point-of-sale credit to consumers making online purchases, announced that it has filed to go public.
The filing is confidential, so there’s little to be gleaned about the company’s performance from the news. That Affirm was exploring a public offering was reported by the Wall Street Journal back in July. In the aftermath of that news, TechCrunch tried to understand the valuation that Affirm was said to be targeting in its debut, wh

Krystina Rubino ContributorShare on Twitter Krystina Rubino is a marketing executive who leads the offline growth marketing practice at Right Side Up. More posts by this contributorPodcast advertising has a business intelligence gap Grant Durando Contributor Grant Durando is a growth marketing leader, currently consulting on podcast and offline advertising at Right Side Up. More posts by this contributorPodcast advertising has a business intelligence gap
Podcast advertising growth is inhibited b

Krystina Rubino ContributorShare on Twitter Krystina Rubino is a marketing executive who leads the offline growth marketing practice at Right Side Up. More posts by this contributorPodcast advertising has a business intelligence gap Grant Durando Contributor Grant Durando is a growth marketing leader, currently consulting on podcast and offline advertising at Right Side Up. More posts by this contributorPodcast advertising has a business intelligence gap
There are sizable, meaningful gaps in the

A group of Black Atlanta businessmen, politicians and entertainers — including former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young,the entertainer Michael Render (better known as Killer Mike) and Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover — have launched a new digital bank focused on developing and promoting local communities and cultivating Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Named Greenwood in an homage to the thriving Tulsa, Oklahoma, business community known as “Black Wall Street”

Apple told me today that it will be extending Apple TV+ subscriptions that are set to end November 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021 through their billing date in February of 2021.
The basic situation is that Apple gave away a free year of Apple TV+ to new device purchasers last year and those are all set to end in November. Apple knows everyone is still looking at a tough winter ahead filled with COVID-related restrictions so it’s bumping those subs out to February.
Monthly users whose sub

Googletoday announced it’s making it possible to use the voice command “Hey Google” to not just open but also perform specific tasks within Android apps. The feature will be rolled out to all Google Assistant-enabled Android phones, allowing users to launch apps with their voice as well as search inside apps or perform specific tasks — like ordering food, playing music, posting to social media, hailing a ride and more.
For example, users could say something like, “H

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Tuesday, Congress revealed whether it thinks Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are sitting on monopolies. In some cases, the answer was yes.But also, one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Tuesday, Congress revealed whether it thinks Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are sitting on monopolies. In some cases, the answer was yes.But also, one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev

Image: Western Digital Western Digital has announced its first PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs, the WD Black SN850s, and they’ll offer fast read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s that should help reduce load times on your PC and in games.Those speeds are a notable increase from the SN750’s 3,100MB/s and 1,600MB/s read / write speeds, and on par (with a slightly faster write speed) with Samsung’s recently announced PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs.Because they’re standard M.2 NVMe

AMD just announced its new Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, but CEO Lisa Su didn’t stop there, ending her presentation with a preview of AMD’s other big PC announcement: the company’s upcoming RX 6000 “Big Navi” GPUs, which it’s set to announce on October 28th.While full details on the upcoming lineup of graphics cards won’t come until later in October, Su is setting expectations high, promising that the RX 6000 lineup offers “by far the most

Illustration by William Joel / T Facebook has removed a group of fake accounts tied to Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization caught coordinating a “troll farm”-style social media campaign last month. The company’s latest report on coordinated inauthentic behavior says it banned 200 Facebook accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts linked to Turning Point and a marketing firm called Rally Forge, which is now banned from Facebook.
Facebook says it began its

Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images Back in April, Apple and Google announced that they were teaming up to develop a Bluetooth Low Energy-based contact tracing system to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Last week — five months later — New York, where I live, launched an app called COVID Alert NY that uses the system. After months of following news of its development and watching the rollout of apps in other states, I was excited to have the option to use it myself. I downloade

Kyle S. Gibson ContributorShare on Twitter Kyle S. Gibson is a writer and videographer in Boston, currently focused on robotics and industrial internet of things. Kyle has worked for publishers AmericanInno and MIT Technology Review, sales automation developer Pegasystems, and blockchain strategy group New Alchemy. He is currently writing for MIT Horizon, an emerging technology education platform. His work is supported by a regional awareness initiative of the New England Venture Capital Associa

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Assistant is getting much more integrated with third-party apps on Android phones. Google is rolling out the ability to search apps and even use voice commands for popular tasks like sending messages, starting runs, or browsing your shopping cart.While Assistant has supported opening apps through voice commands for some time, starting today, users will also be able to search within any app they have installed on Android directly from Google Assista

When Blissfully launched in 2016, it was focused on helping companies understand their SaaS usage inside their organizations, but over time the company has seen that there is a wider need, especially in midmarket companies, and today it announced it was expanding into broader IT management.
Company co-founder and CEO Ariel Diazsays that the startup began helping to track SaaS usage, eventually expanding into employee onboarding and exiting, and today they are expanding into a broader set of IT s

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, announced it will be opening up its fully driverless vehicles to all customers of its ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona. Previously, the company only allowed a select few people. Now, over a thousand people will get to ride in a Waymo vehicle without a human safety driver in the front seat.Waymo has been testing its vehicles in the Phoenix area since early 2017. Its self-driving cars operate in an approximately 1

When she posted a TikTok in March, Chelsea Gilliland wasn’t thinking about anything other than how dumb coronavirus conspiracy theories could get. Taking on the persona of someone who believed the conspiracies, Gilliland recorded herself talking about how the coronavirus could be a cover-up for a much bigger issue — a conspiracy theory she had seen going around social media. She thought it was a clever joke, and that the point would be obvious to anyone following her.
But when she sa

A new startup called Tradeswell said it’s using artificial intelligence to help direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands build healthier businesses.
The company is led by Paul Palmieri,who previously took mobile advertising company Millennial Media public and then sold it to TechCrunch’s corporate parent AOL (now Verizon Media). Afterwards, Palmieri founded Grit Capital Partners, but he told me he decided to join Tradeswell as a co-founder and CEO because he was so excited about the

Instacartannounced today that it has raised $200 million in a new funding round featuring prior investors. D1 Capital and Valiant Peregrine Fund led the investment. Instacart is now worth $17.7 billion, post-money, or $17.5 billion pre-money. The plan is to use the funding to focus on introducing new features and tools to improve the customer experience, and further support Instacart’s enterprise and ads businesses, according to a blog post.
Previously in 2020, Instacart raised $100 millio

Image: Devolver Digital Two months after the release of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Mediatonic has released a season 2 for its colorful battle royale platformer. The second season adds new content and features to the game, including a lot of fantasy-themed costumes and games.
Season 2 of Fall Guys adds four fun-looking medieval games into the rotation, such as one level that has you scaling a castle-themed arena as you find a way to the end goal. Mediatonic says that more rounds are “on

Waymo,the Googleself-driving-project-turned-Alphabet unit, is beginning to open up its driverless ride-hailing service to the public.
The company said that starting today, members of its Waymo One service will be able to take family and friends along on their fully driverless rides in the Phoenix area. Existing Waymo One members will have the first access to the driverless rides — terminology that means no human behind the wheel. However, the company said that in the next several weeks mor

AMD just announced its new lineup of Ryzen 5000 series processors for desktops, which are also the first chips from the company set to feature its next-gen Zen 3 architecture and represent the biggest jump for AMD’s desktop chips yet.AMD is also setting expectations high, promising that the new Ryzen 5900X is nothing short of “the world’s best gaming CPU.” The new chips will be available starting at $299 for the entry-level Ryzen 5 5600X model on November 5th.Like last ye

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is making some firm commitments to the future of app stores on Windows today. The software giant has published 10 principles it’s adopting as promises to app developers, including that it won’t block competing stores on the platform or block specific business models an app may use to make money.The principles also cover Microsoft holding its own apps to the same standards as competing apps and a commitment to “charge reasonable fees&r

Veritonic is announcing that it has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft, with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Amazon-owned audiobook service Audible.
CEO Scott Simonelli,who founded the New York startup with COO Andrew Eisner and CTO Kevin Marshall, told me that his goal is to create a new category of “audio intelligence” — namely, measuring and predicting the effectiveness of any piece of audio content or advertising.
The company is focused on marketi