Technology

18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen has landed a spot on Jeff Bezos‘ first-ever crewed Blue Origin spaceflight, making history as the youngest person to travel to space. According to the path-forging aerospace company, Daemen is set to be the first “paying customer” to ascend into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. The company announced that Daemen had secured a seat on the inaugural spaceflight, set to launch on July 20, after the original auction winner chose to instead fly on a future New Shepard mission due to “scheduling conflicts.” Daemen placed the second-highest bid, behind the anonymous original winner who reportedly paid $28 million USD for the history-making mission. The pioneering student will make the trip alongside Bezos, Bezos’ brother Mark Bezos and Wall...

If you can’t stand to type on a Macbook’s scissor switch keyboard, let alone a butterfly model, and you don’t fancy lugging around one of the small number of laptops with a full-on mechanical keyboard built in, then Epomaker’s new wireless keyboard might be one for you. The NT68 is designed to sit on top of a MacBook or other laptop’s existing keyboard so your fingers don’t have to put up with their rubbery key switches for a single second longer than they need to. It’s not an entirely new idea (Nuphy’s NuType F1 keyboard is another recent example) but the quality and specs of Epomaker’s previous keyboards make the NT68 worthy of attention. It can be hardwired over USB-C, connected via Bluetooth to up to three devices, and its switches are hot-swappable so you can modify the keyboard’s typ...

Clubhouse will now let users have one-on-one or group chat via direct messages. Since its explosive growth, this will be the first time the social audio app will bring on a text-based communication system. All iOS and Android users can now use the Backchannel messaging feature for sending text and links. No images or videos are supported in this system yet. The function will help users connect within the invite-only app without any third-party app or other social media platforms, as well as for moderators to have private discussions during a live room. You can simply press the airplane icon to start a conversation with any of your followers and messages to non-followers will go to the optional inbox that houses all your message requests. My hat? TippedMy mic? FlashedMy messaging? Direct. A...

Microsoft has been looking to take a more human approach to its designs with a renewed focus on iconography. A broader update has been planned to replace Microsoft’s 1,800 flat emojis with new 3D designs. Approximately half of the new emojis will feature some type of animation. Microsoft recently sent out a tweet with the caption: “If this gets 20K likes, we’ll replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy.” In 24 hours, the post has gotten more than 160,000 likes. In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft’s official emoji-oligist expressed her excitement for Clippy and the emoji revamp: “I grew up using Clippy, and it just seemed like a fun little Easter egg. We just all imagined that delight when you put the paperclip in a Microsoft product and then all of a sudden, you get th...

Google is launching a new privacy feature for search that lets you instantly delete your last 15 minutes of search history on mobile, the company announced on Thursday. The new option was first revealed alongside several other search and Chrome improvements at I/O 2021 and is now rolling out to everyone. The option to delete your last 15 minutes of search history is currently only available in Google’s iOS app and is headed to Android later this year. On desktop, your options for deleting searches are limited to setting your history to auto-delete every three, 18, or 36 months (18 months is the default for new accounts), or deleting searches by hand. You can see what the new option looks like in the iOS app below: Deleting the last 15 minutes of your Google search life is as simple as tapp...

Xiaomi is now the second largest smartphone vendor based on worldwide shipments in the second quarter of 2021, according to a new report from Canalys. The Chinese company captured 17 percent of global market share, according to the research firm, just behind Samsung’s 19 percent but ahead of Apple’s 14 percent. BBK’s Oppo and Vivo rounded out the list of top five vendors at 10 percent apiece. All five companies grew their shipments year on year, but what’s notable is just how much Xiaomi has managed to increase its volume — it shipped 83 percent more phones than in Q2 2020, whereas Samsung grew shipments 15 percent and Apple by just one percent. We’ve moved up one more spot! Just in from @Canalys, we are now the 2nd largest smartphone brand worldwide in terms of shipments. This amazi...

Apple is banking on increased popularity for its next generation of iPhones as the COVID-19 pandemic settles down. The global tech company has reportedly put in an order with its suppliers to increase its iPhone 13 production by 20 percent. The ramped-up order is expected to see the new generational iPhone ship 90 million units by the end of 2021. Normally, Apple orders approximately 75 million units of its new iPhone for its launch period between September and October to the end of the year. As the Coronavirus pandemic stabilizes in some parts of the world and more and more people are upgraded to 5G networks, Apple is expecting stronger sales towards the end of the year. The next iPhone is speculated to be available in the same size as the current generation. Apple plans to maintain two-e...

Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, is enough of a fan of cryptocurrency that Square’s push into the area won’t stop at releasing a hardware wallet. Instead, the company is creating a new business, to go with existing units like Tidal and Cash App, which is “focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.” Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open. Open roadmap, open development, and open source. @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build. — jack (@jack) July 15, 2021 What does that mean exactly? Is the new business called TBD, or is the name “to b...

In 2008, chipmakers Intel and AMD took two distinct paths: Intel kept manufacturing its own chips to maintain full control, while AMD decided to spin off its semiconductor business as GlobalFoundries, relying on it and other manufacturers to provide the actual silicon. Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Intel is looking to snap up AMD’s former fabs as well, in a deal that could value them at $30 billion. It’s clear from the WSJ story that the deal isn’t a sure thing, and GlobalFoundries outright denied that it was in talks with Intel. But it’s possible Intel’s negotiating with the investment firm that owns GlobalFoundries instead, as the WSJ points out. It’s also intriguing that the Journal doesn’t have a “no comment” from Intel itself — that’s sometimes a canary to indicate a ...

Catch up on our coverage of Valve’s new device Contributors: Verge Staff Valve has revealed its newest gaming hardware: the Steam Deck, a Switch-like handheld device that lets you play your Steam games on the go. The device is packed with features, including a huge variety of control options, a 7-inch touchscreen, the ability to connect to external displays, and a quick suspend / resume feature so that you can pause your games and pick them up where you left off. The device starts at $399, and Valve says that shipments will begin in December. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the Steam Deck, and you can read all of our coverage of it here. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get ...

Twitter is now rolling out captions for voice tweets, the company announced Thursday. Twitter first launched voice tweets in June 2020, but they were quickly criticized at the time by accessibility advocates for not having captions. Now, when you make a voice tweet (something you can only do on the iOS app right now), captions will be automatically generated in supported languages, which are English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian. To see the captions on a tweet, you can click or tap the CC icon in the top-right corner of the voice tweet window. Captions only appear on new voice tweets, Twitter tells The Verge, so you won’t see them on older ones. Below is a screenshot of what the captions and the CC icon look like on the web,...

Facebook Messenger is introducing Soundmojis, a new way to make its chat service more engaging. The new feature allows Facebook‘s more than 2.4 billion users to send short sound bites to their peers, adding greater expression to messages. Different Soundmojis include clapping, crickets, drumroll and evil laughter. In addition, the tool features audio clips from artists like Rebecca Black and catchphrases from TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  “We’re launching an entire Soundmoji library for you to choose from, which we’ll update regularly with new sound effects and famous sound bites,” Facebook explained in a press release. “Each sound is represented by an emoji, keeping the visual emojis we all love in play, while bringing sound into the mix. Best of both worlds!” The new feature ro...