18 July - Next Web / Tech Crunch / The Verge

The Next Web

Rolls-Royce unveils its concept for a hybrid flying taxi 2 days ago  –  The race to launch flying taxis hotted up over the weekend, as Rolls-Royce revealed its interest in designing one. Fun fact: it’s not the luxury car brand from the UK that you’re thinking of. It’s actually the parent company that shares the same name that made the announcement. Besides owning a c...

Dear Elon Musk, delete your Twitter account 2 days ago  –  Right, we’re done here. Elon Musk has gone off the deep end and called British diver Vern Unsworth – who was instrumental in recently rescuing a Thai boys’ soccer team trapped in a cave – a pedophile, after Unsworth balked at the billionaire’s idea of using a small “submarine” to help bring the b...

The web alienates non-English speakers — and we need to change that

How to check the security of your Google Chrome extensions

A course package that’ll make you a professional-grade photographer, and you name your price

The car industry needs to embrace open source

Data shows people want serious long-form content — and brands need to take note

Car dealers don’t want you to have electric vehicles

Quick guide to understand the hype around ‘deep learning’

The fact that we want blockchain to solve every problem is a problem

Chinese authorities are sampling sewage to flush out drug users 2 days ago  –  The Chinese government is analyzing urine and feces from sewage as part of a sweeping national crackdown on illegal drug use. China isn’t the first country to sift through sewage in order to collect data on illegal drug use, but as far as we know it’s the first to implement the technique in actua...

An Uncharted fan film starring Nathan Fillion just dropped on YouTube 2 days ago  –  Nathan Fillion just released an Uncharted fan film to YouTube, and hot diggity this Monday just got a whole lot better. The fifteen-minute slice of fun was directed by Allan Ungar — a huge fan of the series, according to IGN — and stars Fillion as the wisecracking treasure hunter. Stephen Lang an...

Shillingham United XI: A dream team of footballers backing crappy cryptocurrencies

This app allows you to send rejected emoji to your friends

Scrum will put your project management career on track — learn how for only $39

This startup is the perfect example of Korea’s vibrant crypto market

This device lets you grow weed while literally doing nothing

Apple, dwindling, sells less than a million iPhones in India in 2018

UK’s first spaceport gets £2.5m funding to launch satellites

Japanese chat giant Line launches its cryptocurrency exchange – but not in

Skype finally gets call recording feature 20 hours ago  –  It’s been almost 15 years since Skype launched and soon you’ll be able record calls on the app. What a time to be alive. Skype used to be the monarch of video calls, but it has fallen behind its competitors in recent years. One reason for this is the shoddy updates and lack of features we now tak...

Google has a handy new job search tool for UK users 20 hours ago  –  Google isn’t just about websites. The world’s largest search engine now shows everything from cinema times to flight statuses, and in the UK, is about to get even more useful with the introduction of job openings. Here’s how it works: next time you’re looking for a new job, you can just ask Googl...

Kodak has quietly canceled its stupid (and very expensive) Bitcoin miner

Virgin Orbit will launch the first-ever flights to space from British soil

Cuba rolls out mobile internet at last

Samsung Galaxy S10 will reportedly come in 3 sizes to trump the iPhone in 2019

Jeff Bezos plans to charge upwards of $300,000 for a ticket to space

Watch: iPhone survives 450 foot fall from amusement park ride

Paralyzed man invents hands-free instrument. Now he wants to play the anthem at a MLB game

Here are the 70 new emoji coming to iOS

Google Assistant’s new visual overlay answers questions before you ask 15 hours ago  –  Google is rolling out a new visual overlay for Assistant that provides a snapshot of your day. It’ll proactively feed you information relevant to your schedule, location, habits, and more. It’s like a personal search engine that answers questions before you ask them. Back in May, at its I/O confe...

Google Assistant’s new visual overlay answers questions before you ask 15 hours ago  –  Google is rolling out a new visual overlay for Assistant that provides a snapshot of your day. It’ll proactively feed you information relevant to your schedule, location, habits, and more. It’s like a personal search engine that answers questions before you ask them. Back in May, at its I/O confe...

Apple’s emojified execs sure look awful as humans 16 hours ago  –  Today’s World Emoji Day. To celebrate this stupid holiday I turned Apple’s executive staff – who had some poor corporate artist turn them into emoji – back into humans. Why? Maybe to protest the both the creation of idiotic holidays and the subsequent corporate takeover of said events. Or maybe b...

Artificial light is harmful to animals, but thanks to this tool it doesn’t have to be

Redheads finally get recognition with ginger emoji

IBM and Columbia University are tag-teaming the blockchain

Jeff Bezos must spend his $150B helping humanity otherwise he’s a scumbag

JavaScript runs the Web — so learn to run JavaScript with training under $15

How Hotstar streams cricket matches to 10 million passionate fans at once

EOS rumored for new wave of investments from Bitmain and billionaire Peter Thiel

Mozilla wants to localize the most popular Firefox add-ons

Walmart is reportedly building a video streaming service to take on Netflix an hour ago  –  The Information reports that retail giant Walmart is thinking about getting into the streaming video business with a new platform – and edge out the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video with cheaper subscriptions. The company is said to be considering offering plans at under $8 a month, along ...

Rolls-Royce is working on a robotic cockroach that can fix plane engines 7 hours ago  –  Rolls-Royce, a company perhaps best known for airplane engines and fine automobiles, is now creating tiny cockroaches that can crawl inside tight spaces to spot potential problems and perform routine maintenance. These roaches aren’t of the household variety, however; they’re robots. Rolls-Royce‘...

Rolls-Royce is working on a robotic cockroach that can fix plane engines 7 hours ago  –  Rolls-Royce, a company perhaps best known for airplane engines and fine automobiles, is now creating tiny cockroaches that can crawl inside tight spaces to spot potential problems and perform routine maintenance. These roaches aren’t of the household variety, however; they’re robots. Rolls-Royce‘...

A beginner’s guide to AI: Computer vision and image recognition

Fans pay homage to Drake by hurling themselves from moving cars

The Daily Caller’s doxxing of Sleeping Giants was a dick move

How location data is used to manipulate airfare and car rental prices

These are the Twitch games Amazon users get for free on Prime Day

The internet has become information chaos

This visualization of Venmo’s public data is terrifying

Child suicides prompt game bans in Saudi Arabia

Tech Crunch

• Ubisoft now auto-bans Rainbow Six Siege players who use toxic language 17 hours ago  –  Ubisoft has implemented a new system in Rainbow Six Siege that bans players for using toxic language in the text chat, according to PC Gamer. Yesterday, a number of players started whining about being temporarily banned from the game after using a racist or homophobic slur in the text chat. The f...
• Amazon Prime Day U.S. sales bigger than last year, despite site issues 18 hours ago  –  Despite the massive glitches that prevented online shoppers from being able to browse and buy from Amazon’s Prime Day sale yesterday, the retailer is this morning claiming its Prime Day sales in the U.S. are “bigger than ever,” and grew faster than last year’s Prime Day within the first ten hours...
• An app that uses AI to help you improve your basketball shot just raised $4 million 19 hours ago  –  Let’s be real: you are most certainly never going to be as good as Steve Nash, Chris Paul, James Harden — or really any professional NBA player. But it probably won’t stop you from trying to practice or model your game around your favorite players, and spend hours upon hours figuring out how to g...
• Connie Chan breaks the mold at Andreessen Horowitz, becoming the first general partner to be promoted from within
• The 21st Century Internet Act aims to enshrine net neutrality in law
• Standard Cognition raises another $5.5M to create a cashier-less checkout experience
• Certify acquires real-time expense management startup and YC alum Abacus
• Dialpad dials up $50M Series D led by Iconiq
• It’s official: Brexit campaign broke the law — with social media’s help
• Travel giant Booking invests $500M in Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing

• Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances 15 hours ago  –  It’s a big day for Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service today. Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) wit...
• IBM’s Dario Gil will showcase quantum computing progress at Disrupt SF 16 hours ago  –  After a few quiet years, the hype around quantum computing is reaching a new crescendo. Quantum supremacy now feels like an achievable goal. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab —  has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed ...
• Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Nanette’ takes aim at straight white men and comedy clichés 16 hours ago  –  This is the first time we’ve done an in-depth review of a comedy special on the Original Content podcast, but Nanette (which Netflix released last month) isn’t a typical stand-up show. Hannah Gadsby starts off with some light, funny jokes about growing up as a lesbian in Tasmania, where being hom...
• With its Snowball Edge, AWS now lets you run EC2 on your factory floor
• Ocean Solutions Accelerator names its first wave of conservation startups
• Walmart enlists Microsoft cloud in battle against Amazon
• Acorns co-founder nabs another $5 million for Blast, a startup that saves while you game
• House rep suggests converting Google, Facebook, Twitter into public utilities
• Founder and investor Elad Gil has a new book that aims to help startups with their later-stage challenges — before they get to that point
• Tinder tests Bitmoji integration using the recently launched Snap Kit

• Peelable circuits make it easy to Internet all the things 13 hours ago  –  Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Virginia are now able to create “tiny, thin-film electronic circuits peelable from a surface,” the first step in creating an unobtrusive Internet-of-Things solution. The peelable stickers can sit flush to an object’s surface and be used as se...
• UPS is testing an Amazon Key-style delivery program in New York 14 hours ago  –  UPS has been quietly testing a  program that lets the shipping service deliver packages inside multi-unit homes while occupants are out. The service utilizes smart locks created by Latch, a New York-based smart lock startup that teamed with Jet late last year. The move is clearly an attempt for U...
• Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman moves into chairman role 14 hours ago  –  Scott Heiferman, Meetup CEO and co-founder, is today moving into the chairman role at the community-building startup. Meetup launched in 2003 with a simple goal: to give communities an easy way to meet up in real life. The company has since grown to 40 million members, with 320,000 Meetup groups ...
• BMW’s ReachNow adds ride hailing to its car-sharing app
• The Sonos Beam soundbar is now available
• Ultimate Software is acquiring PeopleDoc for $300 million
• CrunchMatch at Disrupt SF 2018 opening soon for founders and investors
• Google’s new ‘Grab and Go’ project helps business loan Chromebooks to their employees
• The Google Assistant app will walk you through your day
• Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France

• Self-driving car startup Zoox is raising $500 million at a $3.2 billion valuation 11 hours ago  –  Zoox, a once-secretive self-driving car startup, is closing a $500 million raise at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Prior to the deal, Zoox was valued at $2.7 billion, Zoox confirmed to TechCrunch. The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings...
• Tax robots and Universal Basic Income 12 hours ago  –  Technological innovation is moving at an ever-accelerating pace, and this comes with vast benefits and inevitable changes. One downside is that machine learning and automation are already replacing jobs. It also has the potential to replace much of that income with Universal Basic Income.
• This insane fighting robot can be yours now for $1,600 12 hours ago  –  Pilot Labs’ Zeus Battle Robot captured our hearts at CES back in January, because, well, just look at this crazy thing: Seemingly against all odds, the ‘bot is now available for purchase through Amazon. And the price tag is as insane as the rest of it: $1,600 for the kit and $1,700 for a pre-asse...
• Slack acquires Missions to help users automate work tasks inside chat
• No Man’s Sky Next seeks to right the game’s wrongs
• Sharecuts is creating a community for sharing Siri Shortcuts
• Twitch streamers can now let viewers react with GIFs
• This $20 DIY kit makes your NES, SNES or Mega Drive controller wireless
• Oculus starts selling $299 Go business bundle
• Dems and GOP unite, slamming Facebook for allowing violent Pages

• Apple’s iCloud user data in China is now handled by a state-owned mobile operator 2 hours ago  –  If you’re an Apple customer living in China who didn’t already opt out of having your iCloud data stored locally, here’s a good reason to do so now. That information, the data belonging to China-based iCloud users which includes emails and text messages, is now being stored by a division of China...
• Google launches its first WeChat mini program as its China experiments continue 3 hours ago  –  Google is continuing to test new strategies in China after the U.S. search giant released its first mini program for WeChat, the country’s hugely popular messaging app. WeChat is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese people daily for services that stretch beyond chat to include mobile payments,...
• Kindly Care scores $5.4 million to vet and place caregivers, then help families pay them correctly 4 hours ago  –  There are roughly 45 million unpaid eldercare providers in the United States, according to the 2016 U.S. Census Bureau. It’s tough on these family caregivers, many of whom are working women who are also raising their own children. There are alternatives. For example, there’s no shortage of agenci...
• Amazon’s Show Mode Dock makes the Echo Show mostly unnecessary
• Undercover report shows the Facebook moderation sausage being made
• Niantic acquires Seismic Games
• Nest’s CEO is stepping down
• Twitter is holding off on fixing verification policy to focus on election integrity
• Instagram is building non-SMS 2-factor auth to thwart SIM hackers
• Bitcoin price passes $7K bringing all 100 top coins up with it

The Verge

• Google revives blobs, its correct emoji, as sticker packs on Gboard and Android Messages 19 hours ago  –  You’re going to see a lot of emoji today now that the web has declared it the international holiday for celebrating them. But only one set of emoji is worth remotely caring about, and it’s the return of the blobmoji on Google. Yes, technically the blobs live on via Allo, but since the messaging a...
• Keith Ellison slams ‘disturbing’ neo-Nazi merchandise on Amazon in letter to Bezos
• Microsoft and Walmart team up to take on Amazon
• Samsung’s Galaxy S10 might come in three sizes, with an in-display fingerprint sensor
• Amazon’s Nintendo Switch Prime Day deal bundles a 64GB microSD and $20 eShop gift card for $299.99
• Uber’s gender discrimination problems are the focus of a federal investigation
• The best 4K TV deals from Amazon Prime Day
• Lyft will offer discounts to people who use bikes and scooters to connect to transit
• Apple won’t replace faulty MacBook Pro keyboards with third-gen components
• The story behind Ant-Man and the Wasp’s hilarious (and heartbreaking) post-credits scenes
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• These $20 DIY kits make classic controllers wireless 17 hours ago  –  8bitdo is known for making some of the best wireless retro game controllers around, and now, the company wants you to start making your own. Today, it’s launching a new line of DIY mod kits so you can turn existing classic controllers into wireless ones. Each kit costs $19.99, and there are three...

  These $20 DIY kits make classic controllers wireless 17 hours ago  –  8bitdo is known for making some of the best wireless retro game controllers around, and now, the company wants you to start making your own. Today, it’s launching a new line of DIY mod kits so you can turn existing classic controllers into wireless ones. Each kit costs $19.99, and there are three...
• T-Mobile now offers $5 day passes to bump international plan to 512MB of LTE
• Google expands job search features in the UK
• Humans are making wildfires worse, but here’s what we can do about it
• Asus Strix Scar II laptop review: lights, camo, action
• Astronomers have found a new crop of moons around Jupiter, and one of them is a weirdo
• Girl Scouts unveils 30 new STEM-related badges, including space exploration and cybersecurity
• Apple replaced its executive portraits with Memoji
• Tinder tests letting users send Bitmoji because you can’t send real photos
• GOP congressman introduces bill to reinstate net neutrality rules

• Seeing Ubisoft ban jerks in Rainbow Six is now my favorite part of the game 14 hours ago  –  Toxicity in online video games has been out of control for a long time — and curbing it has seemed like a hopeless enterprise. But Ubisoft’s rampage against racist trolls in the past week in Rainbow Six: Siege has given me hope that game developers are finally demonstrating the courage to change ...
• Netflix announces its first Mark Millar titles
• Amazon Prime Day 2018: the best deals
• Your first look at No Man’s Sky’s big multiplayer update in action
• Netflix’s Fast.com now measures upload speeds
• The best wireless charger is almost 50 percent off for Verge readers
• Symptoms of ADHD in teens linked to heavy screen time
• San Diego Comic-Con 2018: all the best panels, news, and trailers to look for
• Sonos Beam soundbar is now available for $399
• Making Alto’s Adventure free on Android helped it reach a whole new audience

• Mophie rolls out iPhone battery packs that charge by a Lightning cable 11 hours ago  –  Mophie, a best-selling manufacturer of stylish battery cases, just announced a range of battery packs specifically built for use with different iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods. Its new Powerstation battery packs all charge via Apple’s Lightning connector — meaning the cord yo...

  Mophie rolls out iPhone battery packs that charge by a Lightning cable 11 hours ago  –  Mophie, a best-selling manufacturer of stylish battery cases, just announced a range of battery packs specifically built for use with different iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods. Its new Powerstation battery packs all charge via Apple’s Lightning connector — meaning the cord yo...
• Twitch broadcasts are getting GIFs
• Ready or not, the world’s first VR water slide is here
• Sprint quietly increased the cost of its admin fee for all customers earlier this year
• Spotify no longer deletes your downloads when you clear your cache
• BMW is testing an Uber competitor in Seattle
• The best anti-Prime Day deals from eBay, Best Buy, and more
• Congress pressures tech companies to ban more accounts
• Verizon has stopped activating phones that don’t support LTE on its network
• Now you can use Google Assistant to map out your day

• Elon Musk, DeepMind founders, and others sign pledge to not develop lethal AI weapon systems 3 hours ago  –  Tech leaders, including Elon Musk and the three co-founders of Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind, have signed a pledge promising to not develop “lethal autonomous weapons.” It’s the latest move from an unofficial and global coalition of researchers and executives that’s opposed to the propagation ...
• Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles is headed to Hulu
• Instagram will upgrade two-factor authentication to guard against SIM hacking
• Twitter says it doesn’t ‘have the bandwidth’ to fix verification right now
• The next generation of VR headsets will connect over a single USB-C cable
• Nest CEO steps down as division is brought under the Google Home team
• The US government has trouble keeping track of radioactive material
• Undercover Facebook moderator was instructed not to remove fringe groups or hate speech
• A major election software maker allowed remote access on its systems for years
• Instagram is testing feature that allows public accounts to remove followers