Techflier

To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations. The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle just published a new list of brutalities that paints a picture of discontent inside Apple, that’s responsible for “eroding the product magic” created by the union of Apple’s genius CEO and genius designer . The WSJ report follows a similar piece published by Bloomberg last week. Both reports describe an Apple design team, led by Jony Ive, increasingly frustrated by his absence after the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. They tell the story of a company that once put design at... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2XgL95Q via IFTTT

Japan’s trade ministry said today that it will restrict the export of some tech materials to South Korea, including polyimides used in flexible displays made by companies like Samsung Electronics. The new rules come as the two countries argue over compensation for South Koreans forced to work in Japanese factories during World War II. The list of restricted supplies, expected to go into effect on July 4, includes polyimides used in smartphone and flexible organic LED displays, and etching gas and resist used to make semiconductors. That means Japanese suppliers who wish to sell those materials to South Korean tech companies such as Samsung, LG and SK Hynix will need to submit each contract for approval. Japan’s government may also remove South Korea from its list of countries that have fewer restrictions on trading technology that might have national security implications, reports Nikkei Asian Review. Earlier this year, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled several Japanese companies ,...

Another Neil Gaiman property is being adapted for the small screen. The Hollywood Reporter says that Netflix is closing in on a deal with Warner Bros. to adapt the author’s acclaimed comic series Sandman into a live-action TV show, in what is being described as “the most expensive TV series that DC entertainment has ever done.” Wonder Woman screenwriter Allan Heinberg will act as writer, producer, and showrunner for the series, with Neil Gaiman and David Goyer acting as executive producers. THR notes that a final deal hasn’t been finalized, and but indicates that the project is headed for a straight-to-series pickup. Sources told the publication that Warner Bros. (which has the rights to the show), opted to sell the series to another... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2XcUATS via IFTTT

Facebook’s second progress report pertaining to the civil rights audit conducted by former ACLU Washington Director Laura Murphy is here. Over the last six months, Facebook has made changes around enforcing against hate, fighting discrimination in ads and protecting against misinformation and suppression in the upcoming U.S. presidential election and 2020 Census, according to the progress report. While Facebook has made changes in some of these areas — Facebook banned white supremacy in March — auditors say Facebook’s policy is still “too narrow.” That’s because it solely prohibits explicit praise, support or representation of the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism,” but does not technically prohibit references to those terms and ideologies. “The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist,'” the report states. “As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitt...

After detecting an unusual spike in energy consumption, Iranian authorities seized nearly a thousand computers being used to mine cryptocurrency, according to the country’s state media . Authorities discovered two bitcoin farms operating in abandoned factories in Yazd province, which caused a seven percent spike in the country’s power consumption this month. Iran’s central bank banned cryptocurrencies last year, citing concerns over money laundering. According to RadioFreeEurope , officials have said that the practice is making the local power grid “unstable,” and warned that people engaging in the practice could be cut off. Cryptocurrency is “mined” as high-powered computers solve mathematical problems, a task that requires... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2FJbG5R via IFTTT

Amazon is making it easier for users to find live television on its Fire TV units. The company says that it will soon roll out a “Live” tab that collects all of the various live programming across apps that users might have installed. Amazon describes the tab as a “single destination” that “brings together your live sports, news, and channels from select OTT services, streaming apps (e.g. PlayStation Vue), paid subscriptions, and over-the-air antennas into one consolidated view.” The tab is located on the TV’s main navigation menus, and the section will group the channels that you’ve recently viewed. It’ll also show off lists of other channels “which share similar programming,” like sports or breaking news. The tab isn’t quite live... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2ROxTEv via IFTTT

Apple’s head of services and programming says that the company has adopted a quality-over-quantity mindset when it comes to its forthcoming Apple TV Plus service. This weekend, The Sunday Times released an interview with Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, in which he talks about what to expect from the service forthcoming service, which is expected to launch later this fall. The revelation is a rebuke to Netflix programming model: releasing as much original content as it can to attract viewers. In the interview, Cue says that Apple won’t be “creating the most” original content for users, but will be “creating the best.” When asked about Netflix’s model, he notes that there’s “nothing wrong with... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2FFvMOj via IFTTT

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, will officially go to trial in San Jose next year, according to the US District Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California. Federal prosecutors indicted Holmes and the company’s former president and COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani last summer, charging the pair with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. The pair face 20 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. According to TechCrunch , the trial will begin in August 2020, with jury selection beginning on July 28th, 2020. The Wall Street Journal also reports that prosecutors have collected millions of pages of documents, and that the... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2ZRUqTM via IFTTT

The US Army will soon be equipping some units in the field with tiny personal drones, reports Stars & Stripes . The 1st Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment will begin using the devices next month in Afghanistan as the military works to figure out the best way to use them. FLIR Systems has been testing the Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System with a variety of units — the US Army began testing the drone back in 2016 and 2017, and the company picked up a trio of big contracts with the American , British , and French militaries this year. At the end of April, the 82nd Airborne’s 3rd Combat Brigade began training with the drones, playing out a variety of scenarios in which the devices could be... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2xjkqet via IFTTT

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend. Gato Roboto opens with what has to be the worst possible outcome of a cat stepping on a keyboard: the misstep causes a spaceship to crash into a mysterious abandoned planet. For players, though, it’s a great outcome, because you get to play a streamlined Metroid game as a cat in a mech suit. After crashing, Kiki the cat’s owner and partner Gary is pinned down on their ship. Unable to do anything except communicate with Kiki, he sends her off to find a way for them to get off the planet. What Kiki finds is a dilapidated,... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2RI6xjt via IFTTT

Synthesizers are mysterious and intimidating boxes to me, but electronic music company Ableton is setting out to explain and demystify the instrument. The company has created an interactive browser game called Learning Synths that teaches users the basics of synthesizers. The friendly tool is thoughtfully designed with fun illustrations and widgets that make it perfect for beginners to tinker around with. Learning Synths starts out with a lesson on amplitude and pitch, but if you want to skip ahead to synth concepts, you can click on the hamburger menu on the top left corner to learn about envelopes, LFOs, and oscillators. The lessons culminate in the Playground, seen above, where users can play with presets and sequences. The site works... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2RMiEvD via IFTTT

“How Will The Movies Survive The Next Ten Years?” demands the New York Times , in a series of interviews with 24 major Hollywood figures. Good question! I’ve been asking it myself , here , for six years now . Very unlike music, television , books , and home video, the theatrical movie experience has proved remarkably resistant to online disruption… …so far. I’ve argued before that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have many parallels: VCs are like studios, angel investors are like individual producers, founders are like directors, etcetera. However, they also have some striking differences. For most of the last 25 years, the cost to launch a groundbreaking, potentially world-shaking startup has decreased — though that may well be changing — whereas the total cost to make , market , and distribute a theatrical release has decidedly not . Furthermore, movie theaters, built around repeat screening of 90-to-180-minute self-contained films, face new direct-to-streaming-services competitio...

French startup Cozycozy.com wants to make it easier to search for accommodation across a wide range of services. This isn’t the first aggregator in the space and probably not the last one. But this time, it isn’t just about hotels. When you plan a trip with multiple stops, chances are you end up with a dozen tabs of different services — on Airbnb to look at listings, on a hotel review platform and on a hotel booking platform. Each service displays different prices and has a different inventory. While there are a ton of services out there, most of them belong to just three companies: Booking Holdings (Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, Agoda…), Expedia Group (Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago…) and TripAdvisor (TripAdvisor, HouseTrip, Oyster…). They all operate many different services in order to address as many markets and as many segments as possible. Cozycozy.com wants to simplify that process by aggregating a ton of services in a single interface — you can find hotels, Airbn...

Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week , I talked about how YouTube was letting its commenting system turn from a festering wasted opportunity into a liability. The big story Plenty happened this week, though most of the news signified something larger looming on the horizon, more on that in a bit. One undoubtedly meaty news item was that Jony Ive, Apple’s most iconic executive persona, announced that he was leaving the company this year. Ive has undoubtedly been a powerhouse of industrial design who has helped craft some of the most iconic products from one of the most influential tech companies. The issue is perhaps what Apple’s vision of industrial design transformed into in his final years at the helm. Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a ne...

Reminder: Extra Crunch discount on Sessions: Enterprise tickets Come and watch TechCrunch interview enterprise titans and rising founders at the premier of TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco on September 5th. Join 1000+ enterprise enthusiasts for a day of talks, demos, startups, and networking. Book your $249 Early Bird tickets today and save an extra 20% as an Extra Crunch annual subscriber. Just contact extracrunch@techcrunch.com to snag your discounted tickets. Startups at the speed of light: Lidar CEOs put their industry in perspective Our science and AI correspondent Devin Coldewey has a blockbuster look at the current state of affairs in the lidar industry . What started as those gyrating “spinners” on top of partially autonomous cars has evolved into a variety of mechanisms like metameterials, all the while VCs have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars on to new ventures. The big challenge today though is to move from curios in the lab to production-re...

MONET Technologies, a joint venture launched by Softbank and Toyota to provide on-demand mobility services eventually with an autonomous module bus, has five new partners. Five Japanese automakers including Isuzu Motors, Suzuki Motor Corp., Subaru, Daihatsu and Mazda will each invest 2% in the venture. Softbank and Toyota each own 35% of the company. Honda and Toyota’s truck-making unit Hino each have 10% ownership. The venture launched in September aims to launch an on-demand mobility service with buses and cars in Japan next year. Toyota’s autonomous vehicles — based on its e-palette vehicle that debuted at CES 2018 — will eventually become a central piece of the service. The e-Palette electric vehicle has a modular interior that is designed to allow for it to be used for a variety of services including shuttling people, packages, even mobile food preparation. The venture involves more than simply investing capital. The automakers are also sharing data. Datasets are essentia...

It’s a good time to be an indie developer making games for the Nintendo Switch, and the most recent title to prove that point is My Friend Pedro . From developer DeadToast Entertainment, the formal entity by sole designer Victor Agren, and renowned indie publisher Devolver Digital, My Friend Pedro is an evolution of Agren’s Flash experience fans of Adult Swim web games might have played a half decade ago. Now as a full-fledged console title, it’s easily one of the most stylish and aesthetically distinctive games I’ve played in quite a while. Even as a $20 indie game meant to be played over just a few sittings, what makes the game truly shine is both its replay value and how it pushes you to engage with its perfection-demanding higher... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2xuLVlz via IFTTT

I love industrial design and have for as long as I can remember. As a child, I broke my dad’s Braun electric razor playing with the dial that raised and lowered the blades because the action was so cool and “clicky.” At school, I dreamed of being either a product designer or an architect. Those dreams were dashed when I flunked technical drawing (I was off by over 4cm and the tolerance of the test was less than 0.5cm) and failed my physics and maths exams, both of which are somewhat vital to designing beautiful buildings that don’t fall down. So for the past 30 years my inner industrial designer has lived vicariously through the career of my contemporary (he’s only a few years younger than me) and fellow Brit, Sir Jony Ive. Ive made... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2J1kmqB via IFTTT

I watched (most of) the new Bob Dylan documentary that Martin Scorsese made for Netflix the other week. It has some really relaxed and quirky behind-the-scenes footage of Dylan and the (often famous) people around him, along with some great performances. But there’s one thing about the documentary that is completely bizarre: portions of it are fake . Scorsese introduces viewers to a handful of talking heads who say they played a key role in documenting or creating the tour Dylan is embarking on, but in reality, they’re just actors. It’s not really clear why Scorsese did this (maybe it would be clearer if I had finished the film, but reviewers seem to say otherwise). It’s sort of just a prank, one you could seemingly go without finding out... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2Xi885y via IFTTT

A sketch on Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” doesn’t just settle for one funny idea. As soon as you start to get comfortable and assume that you know where things are going, there’s usually a wild left turn, and sometimes a third and fourth for good measure. We review the new comedy series on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast , highlighting our favorite sketches and the ones that didn’t work for us — sometimes things stretch out for too long, or the idea can seem more bizarre than funny. Still, the hit rate feels remarkably high, provoking frequent, disbelieving laughter, with co-creator and star Robinson continually mining new shades of deranged behavior. It helps that there are only six episodes of around 20 minutes each, so “I Think You Should Leave” definitely doesn’t wear out its welcome. In addition to our review, we follow-up last week’s discussion of “When They See Us” by noting that the show has supposedly been viewed by more than 23 ...

As autonomous cars and robots loom over the landscapes of cities and jobs alike, the technologies that empower them are forming sub-industries of their own. One of those is lidar, which has become an indispensable tool to autonomy, spawning dozens of companies and attracting hundreds of millions in venture funding. But like all industries built on top of fast-moving technologies, lidar and the sensing business is by definition built somewhat upon a foundation of shifting sands. New research appears weekly advancing the art, and no less frequently are new partnerships minted, as car manufacturers like Audi and BMW scramble to keep ahead of their peers in the emerging autonomy economy. To compete in the lidar industry means not just to create and follow through on difficult research and engineering, but to be prepared to react with agility as the market shifts in response to trends, regulations, and disasters. I talked with several CEOs and investors in the lidar space to find out how...

BMW unveiled some of its plans for electric vehicles earlier this week, saying that it would debut 25 electric vehicles by 2023 , as some nifty concepts, like its Motorrad Vision DC Roadster motorcycle and the sleek BMW Vision M NEXT concept sports car. The company decided to launch a website (via TechCrunch ) to have some fun with its futuristic-looking EV, which included getting Blade Runner 2049 composer Hans Zimmer to develop a science fiction-like sound for it. The car does look like something out of a cyberpunk movie or video game, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it pops up as part of a product placement deal with some Hollywood studio in the next couple of years. EVs don’t produce any engine noise, so companies have been... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2NgsG9J via IFTTT

For four months in 2018, U.S. prosecutors in Texas collected more than 9.2 million messages under a single court-authorized wiretap order, newly released figures show. The wiretap, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas, was granted as part of a narcotics investigation and became the federal wiretap with the most intercepts in 2018, according to the government’s annual wiretap report. Little is known about the case, except that 149 individuals involved in the case were targeted by the wiretap.  The wiretap expired last year, allowing the judiciary to disclose the case. To date, no arrests have been made Trailing behind it was another narcotics investigation in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania saw police obtain a three-month wiretap that collected 9.1 million text message from 45 individuals. No arrests were made either. The two cases represent the largest wiretap cases seen in years. Wiretaps are some of the most invasive kinds of lawful surveillance...

Prices tend to drop around each major US holiday, and with July 4th around the corner, we’re seeing that start to happen. And then there’s Amazon Prime Day 2019 , a shopping holiday that will begin on July 15th, though we expect to see a few early bird sales before then. We’ll be keeping you in the know about any good deals coming up, but these are the best deals that we’ve seen this week. Phones Sony’s Xperia 1 is now available for preorder. The price is $949.99, which is admittedly not cheap for a phone, but if you order before July 12th, you’ll receive a free set of Sony’s 1000X M3 wireless noise-canceling headphones with your purchase. Those usually cost around $300 or more, which is a great incentive if you were tossing around the... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/31Xuubj via IFTTT

The G20 Summit wrapped up today in Japan, during which US President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Following their meeting, Trump announced that the two countries would resume trade talks and that the US would hold off on implementing new tariffs indefinitely. He also indicated that US companies would be permitted to resume sales to Huawei, although it’s unclear when or how that will happen. In May, Trump signed an executive order that allowed the US government to block sales by US companies to foreign firms deemed a security risk. It’s not immediately clear what — or if any — steps have been taken to lift the restriction on sales to the beleaguered Chinese technology company. According to The Washington Post ,... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2Ymxyv4 via IFTTT

For just over a month, Twitch has been trying to track down a group of anonymous trolls who spammed the platform with violent footage of the Christchurch shooting in the wake of the attack. That hunt kicked off in earnest when Twitch filed suit against the trolls earlier in June, but new filings show the company has more clues to the perpetrators’ identity than anyone suspected, including specific email addresses for at least three people and Discord logs where the attack was organized. The evidence was submitted in an ex parte filing on Thursday, which included a deposition from an incident response engineer at Twitch . According to the filings, Twitch has identified a specific user it believes to be responsible for coordinating the... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2Xya5dt via IFTTT

The "Jetson" system uses a laser to measure a person's heartbeat, which is apparently almost as distinctive as other biometric indicators.  The post The Pentagon Developed a Laser That Identifies People by Their Heartbeat appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://ift.tt/2Xh4b13 via IFTTT

Despite some new improvements to user privacy , Google’s popular Chrome browser has recently been lambasted in some quarters as problematical when it comes to privacy issues . These same articles suggest that if you’re concerned about the security of your data, you should try an alternative browser, such as Firefox, Safari, or Brave. Of course, anyone who has used a browser for any length of time will have built up a considerable library of bookmarks, preferences, and saved passwords. If you do move to a new browser, you won’t have to sacrifice your bookmarks; you can easily import them from Chrome into your new browser. Here’s how to do it. If you’re moving to Firefox : After you’ve installed Firefox, click on the “Library” icon to the... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2YnWti6 via IFTTT

Private rocket launch startup Rocket Lab has succeeded in launching its ‘Make It Rain’ mission, which took off yesterday from the company’s private Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. On board Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket (its seventh to launch so far) were multiple satellites flow for various clients in a rideshare arrangement brokered by Rocket Lab client Spaceflight. Payloads for the launch included a satellite for Spaceflight subsidiary BlackSky, which will join its existing orbital imaging constellation. There was also a CubeSat operated by the Melbourne Space Program, and two Prometheus satellites launched for the U.S. Special Operations Command. Rocket Lab had to delay launch a couple of times earlier in the week owing to suboptimal launch conditions, but yesterday’s mission went off without a hitch at 12:30 AM EDT/4:30 PM NZST. After successfully lifting off and achieving orbit, Rocket Lab’s Electron also delayed all of its payloads to their target orbits as planned. Later th...

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups & venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about scooter companies struggling to raise cash . Before that, I noted my key takeaways from Recode + Vox’s Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here . I’m sure you’re familiar with the co-working behemoth WeWork at this point but if not, here’s a quick primer: The real estate business posing as a “tech startup” offers office spaces to individuals and companies across thousands of co-working spots scattered across the globe. Led by an eclectic chief executive by the name of Adam Neumann, WeWork made headlines this week after announcing its acquisition of building access app Waltz . The deal...

U.S. President Donald Trump has handed Huawei a lifeline after he said that U.S. companies are permitted to sell goods to the embattled Chinese tech firm following more than a month of uncertainty. It’s been a pretty dismal past month for Huawei since the American government added it and 70 of its affiliates to an “entity list” which forbids U.S. companies from doing business with it. The ramifications of the move were huge across Huawei’s networking and consumer devices businesses.  A range of chip companies reportedly forced to sever ties while Google, which provides Android for Huawei devices, also froze its relationship . Speaking this month. All told, Huawei founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said recently that the ban would cost the Chinese tech firm — the world’s third-larger seller of smartphones — some $30 billion in lost revenue of the next two years. Now, however, the Trump administration has provided a reprieve, at least based on the President’s comments fol...

Independent restaurant owners may be doomed, and perhaps grocery stores, too. Such is the conclusion of a growing chorus of observers who’ve been closely watching a new and powerful trend gain strength: that of cloud kitchens, or fully equipped shared spaces for restaurant owners, most of them quick-serve operations. While viewed peripherally as an interesting and, for some companies, lucrative development, the movement may well transform our lives in ways that enrich a small set of companies while zapping jobs and otherwise taking a toll on our neighborhoods. Renowned VC Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital seemed to warn about this very thing in a Financial Times column that appeared last month, titled “The cloud kitchen brews a storm for local restaurants.” Moritz begins by pointing to the runaway success of Deliveroo , the London-based delivery service that relies on low-paid, self-employed delivery riders who delivery local restaurant food to customers — including from shared ki...