Technology

During its Q2 earnings call, dating app conglomerate Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and more than 43 other online dating services, announced it will be rolling out video chat, group live video, and other live streaming technologies to several of its brands within the next two years. Match Group has recently acquired South Korean social platform company, Hyperconnect, for $1.73 billion USD, and hopes to use its tech assets to power new social features. Hyperconnect’s primary offerings are Azar and Hakuna Live. Azar is a mobile app that aims to connect people around the world through video chats and instantly translated voice and text messages. Hakuna Live is a live streaming app that connects groups through live video and audio broadcasts with significant adoption in Sout...

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is reopening ticket sales for its SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, the space tourism firm announced Thursday in its second-quarter earnings release. The price: $450,000, an expected increase from the roughly $200,000 price point the company had years ago, before it closed sales. The ticket reopening comes on the heels of Branson’s successful flight to the edge of space aboard SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s flagship space tourism vehicle that can carry four passengers some 53 miles high for a few minutes of weightlessness. That mission, called Unity 22, was a key milestone test of the rocket-plane before Virgin starts flying individual customers sometime next year. “Leveraging the surge in consumer interest following the Unity 22 flight, we are excited to announce...

A former Tesla employee won a $1 million award from the automaker after an arbitrator found the company failed to prevent his supervisors from calling him a racial slur, Bloomberg Law reported. Melvin Berry, who is Black, was hired at Tesla’s plant in Alameda, California in 2015. He said a supervisor called him the N-word, then retaliated by forcing him to work longer hours and do more physically demanding work when Berry confronted him. Tesla has denied the allegations. Arbitrator Elaine Rushing said in a May 12th ruling that Tesla was liable for the harassment Berry described, according to Bloomberg. “Case law is clear that one instance of a supervisor directing the N-word at a subordinate is sufficient to constitute severe harassment,” Rushing wrote. And, she wrote, a supervisor who wro...

Bill Gates said that spending time with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was “a huge mistake” in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. The interview covered Gates’ relationship with Epstein, which he says was an attempt to get “billions for philanthropy,” as well as Gates’ alleged workplace misbehavior at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates’ story regarding his relationship with Epstein hasn’t changed much since their meetings came to light. In 2019, he told The Wall Street Journal that he had met Epstein, but “didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” A month later, The New York Times quoted a spokesperson for Gates, who said that Gates “regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so.” The statemen...

Amazon’s free streaming service IMDb TV now has its own dedicated app for the iPhone, iPad, and Android after launching on other major platforms earlier this year. IMDb TV is a dedicated hub for free, ad-supported movies and series as well as its own dedicated originals produced by Amazon Studios. Previously, you could find IMDb TV’s content slate in the primary IMDb app, but a standalone streaming app for the service was not available for iOS and Android. A spokesperson told The Verge the content is still available to stream through IMDb, but the new IMDb TV app was “designed for the streaming experience.” IMDb TV’s content slate is quite good, even if its originals have struggled to make as much of a splash as titles from larger premium services. But if you don’t mind ads, there’s a ton ...

Ridesharing app Lyft is adding an annual plan to its Lyft Pink membership program. Designed for riders who take two to three rides per week or more, the program already offers a monthly subscription for $19.99 USD, providing a 15 percent discount on car rides and three free 30-minute rides on its bikes or scooters each month, as well as free food delivery via its partner Grubhub+. Announced by the company today, the addition of an annual plan is aimed at giving long term users more flexibility and options for their travels. Should they opt to pedal to their destinations, the new plan encompasses the perks of the monthly one, and then ups the ante with unlimited 45-minute rides on many of its bikeshare programs across the country, such as Citi Bike in New York, Divvy in Chicago and Bay Whee...

NASA’s Mars Ingenuity Helicopter has documented geological features on the Mars that suggest the it may have had water on its surface at one point in time — a potentially promising sign of Mars’ ability to sustain life. Shared by NASA on its website, the aerial images were taken during the helicopter’s tenth mission in July. After taking off from an airfield, the helicopter flew 40 feet (12 meters) upwards, snapped 10 photos of the surface of Jezero Crater with its camera and landed at a different airfield. NASA’s team then combined two of the images to create a 3D rendering of an area of the planet they call the “Raised Ridges.” “In 3D it almost feels like you can reach out and touch the Raised Ridges,” said Kevin Hand, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But along with its ...

Facebook wants to make using virtual reality (VR) less socially isolating by projecting a user’s eyes onto the front of a VR headset. Pioneered by the Facebook Reality Labs, “reverse passthrough VR” is the subject of a new paper that introduces how a 3D view of a headset wearer’s eyes can be presented to outside viewers in a perspective-accurate manner. Going off of the lab’s prototype, the result is a grainy virtual rendering of eyeballs on the two front screens of the headset. An abstract for the paper posits that this approach “enables more seamless interactions between people with and without headsets in social or professional contexts.” Research scientist Nathan Matsuda was provoked to experiment with VR headsets when, after a day of wearing one around the office, his colleagues said ...

Steve Jobs’ renowned biographer Walter Isaacson is writing a book about Elon Musk. “If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday. He followed up with a few more details, writing that Isaacson has been shadowing him at work and that he “particularly liked his biography of Ben Franklin.” Isaacson has penned biographies on American innovators throughout history. Along with the acclaimed Steve Jobs – a self-titled official biography on the Apple founder published 19 days after Jobs’ death in 2011 — Isaacson has also written biographies on historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and most recently, Jennifer Doudna, who was awarded a Nobel Prize last year for her work on CRISPR gene ed...

Microsoft is planning to unify its OneNote and OneNote for Windows 10 apps into a single OneNote app. The software maker is taking all the improvements in its UWP OneNote for Windows 10 app and bringing them over to the traditional OneNote desktop app instead. These improvements will appear in a series of updates over the next 12 months to the traditional OneNote desktop app that installs as part of Office. The updates include a visual refresh and “key existing features currently unique to OneNote for Windows 10.” It’s not clear which features from OneNote for Windows 10 will make their way over to the OneNote desktop app, but Microsoft says “we are working to ensure that all the most loved features will continue to be a part of OneNote.” A mockup of the changes coming to OneNote on Window...

This summer’s biggest Hollywood attraction is a multimillion-dollar battle between two of the industry’s best-known players: Scarlett Johansson and Disney. Johansson sued Disney last week over its day-and-date release of her Marvel superhero film Black Widow, which put the movie on Disney Plus the same day it hit theaters, potentially depriving her of a huge box-office-infused paycheck. The aftermath has been chaotic, but it’s more importantly illuminated the myriad ways that streaming has forever changed the way we experience movies and the implications for the creatives and talent who make them. Movie contracts have traditionally been negotiated around box office results, with sizable bonuses tied to how well a film performed. This worked out well for both talent and studios. Studios sav...

If you haven’t been able to secure a PlayStation 5, you might be in luck. Today, Walmart is opening up for orders for the PS5 promptly at 3PM ET / 12PM PT (online only); this includes the $500 disc-based version of the console as well as the $400 digital disc-less version. Remember, it’s usually the first who gets the worm, but not always. If you miss out on the first wave at Walmart, the retailer usually releases more in 10-minute intervals, with the next being at 3:10PM, 3:20PM, and so forth until it runs out of stock. Also, if you don’t get lucky at first, persist! Sometimes, the “add to cart” button will pop up intermittently, so just be patient and watch closely. It’ll only help your chances of securing a console if you sign in to your Walmart account and ensure that all of your shipp...