Technology

For the last year, FlyQuest has been on a mission. Though the team competes in the League of Legends Championship Series, it has steadily become as known for its socially conscious efforts as its in-game performances. The team launched initiatives centered on planting trees, donating to a coral reef foundation, and improving mental health. But for FlyQuest CEO Tricia Sugita, the process was always a bit incomplete. “While we were doing those actions, a part of it always felt missing,” she tells The Verge. “Because what was lagging behind was our design.” Today, FlyQuest is revealing a brand-new logo meant to invoke its focus on everything green. It’s a fairly simple design: a straightforward “Q” with a leaf in the middle. Despite this simplicity, the rebranding has been in the works for qu...

Turntable.fm, the social platform that lets people collaboratively build and perform DJ sets, has raised $7.5 million in venture capital funding, according to a Medium post by CEO Billy Chasen. Turntable.fm was revived by Chasen as a response to the pandemic, after it shut down in 2013. But it’s not the only version of Turntable in the works now, which makes that funding more interesting. The investment was led by the Andreessen Horowitz firm, also known as a16z, which has invested in products like Clubhouse, Coinbase, and Robinhood. The list of investors also includes Seth Goldstein, who was a co-founder and investor for the original incarnation of Turntable.fm in 2011. While Turntable.fm is being run by its original creator, another group is trying to create a competing revival of the se...

The hack of the Colonial Pipeline — which kneecapped oil availability on the East Coast for almost two weeks — was as disastrous as it was likely preventable. A branch of the Department of Homeland Security, however, is hoping to correct course by changing the rules on cybersecurity and disclosure for Colonial and other companies in the pipeline industry. As reported by The Washington Post, the Transportation Security Administration (yes, the same sub-branch of DHS everyone associates with taking their shoes off in airports) will be requiring pipeline companies to report breaches and other cybersecurity incidents, with additional rules on how to keep these critical infrastructure systems secure from digital threats arriving “in coming weeks.” Any sort of abnormality which could, say, cause...

David Hall, the founder of leading lidar manufacturer Velodyne, is going to war with the SPAC that acquired his company. In a letter, Hall is calling for the resignation of two of the company’s SPAC-appointed board directors, whom he blames for Velodyne’s “poor financial performance.” It’s the latest twist in the increasingly dramatic saga of Velodyne, a top maker of the laser sensors that are viewed as crucial for the operation of autonomous vehicles. Last month, Hall was ousted as chair of the company’s board, and his wife, Marta Thoma Hall, was removed as its chief marketing officer. The board cited an investigation into “inappropriate behavior” by both Halls in its justification for their removal. Marta Hall remains a member of Velodyne’s board of directors, while David Hall resigned h...

Microsoft isn’t talking about its big Windows plans at Build 2021 this week, and that’s because the company is preparing to detail what’s next for its PC operating system separately. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teased this announcement during his Build keynote this morning, revealing he has been testing “the next generation of Windows” in recent months. “Soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. I’ve been self-hosting it over the past several months, and I’m incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows. Our promise to you is this: we will create more opportunity for every Windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open...

Asus’ ROG Phone 5 is now available in the US from its official store, with a price tag of $999.99. It’s Asus’ latest maxed-out gaming phone, with all of the top-notch specifications: a Snapdragon 888 Plus, 144Hz display, front-facing speakers, and a massive 6,000mAh battery. Asus says the Ultimate and Pro versions of the phone will be available later this year. We reviewed the Ultimate in March and found that it was a good phone that went a little — okay, maybe a lot — overboard with its specs. The vanilla version available for sale today, though, is perhaps a bit more reasonable: it “only” has 16GB of RAM (as opposed to the Ultimate’s 18GB), has half the storage (256GB instead of 512GB), and features an RGB logo on the back instead of an entire OLED screen. The other thing the regular ver...

Being a young person in the city is hard enough without being haunted by a cabaret singer from the 1960s, but that’s exactly what Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit) appears to be dealing with in the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. The film is set to premiere in theaters in October, but the trailer seems like a nice taste of Wright’s clever style through a horror lens. Last Night in Soho follows McKenzie as Eloise, a young fashion fan who seemingly has the ability to dream herself into the past. The problem is she isn’t herself when she visits London’s West End in the 1960s; she’s Anya Taylor-Joy’s Sandy, a singer who, if the trailer is anything to go by, probably shouldn’t be dating whoever Matt Smith is playing (“Jack,” according to IMDb). Things take a turn toward the g...

Public, the trading and social networking app, is the next app to get into live audio. Like many apps before it, the company says it’s planning to roll out live audio features starting this week under the name Public Live. Unlike its competitors, like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, however, Public will initially program these chats with moderators it pays, meaning not just anyone can start a conversation. It’ll host about three events a week, and users will receive a push notification to join, along with a badge inside the app allowing them to hop into it. Topics might include coverage of an upcoming IPO, the day’s news, or analysis. The first chat will be between Scott Galloway, who co-hosts the Pivot podcast and is an investor in the app, and Stephanie Ruhle, an NBC News senior business c...

Arm has introduced its latest CPU and GPU designs, including its flagship Cortex-X2 and Cortex-A710 CPUs and Mali-G710 GPU. The new CPU and GPU designs aren’t just Arm’s latest chip blueprints, though; they’re also its first designs to utilize its new Armv9 architecture, its first in a decade, which means big jumps in performance, along with new security and AI features. Most consumers probably aren’t familiar with the exact Arm cores inside their phones or computers, but Arm’s designs — and particularly, its big.LITTLE configuration of combining powerful high-performance cores and battery-saving high-efficiency cores — are common to virtually every Android phone. That means the designs introduced here are effectively a preview of what the best Android phones of 2022 will look like. Arm is...

If you’re a Nintendo Switch owner, you’re probably already familiar with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It remains one of the most ambitious and charming Zelda titles to date. But like most first-party Nintendo games, it’s one that rarely receives a sizeable discount. Right now, though, you can purchase a physical edition of the beloved title at GameStop for $40, with free shipping. The popular retailer is also offering a host of other first- and third-party games at a discount as part of its ongoing Memorial Day sale, including standouts such as Persona V Strikers, Splatoon 2, and Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. Now, if only Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate would make the cut. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild $40 $60 34% off Prices taken a...

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is effective in 12- to 17-year-olds, the company announced today in a press release. It plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the shot for this age group in early June. None of the teens who received two shots of the Moderna vaccine in a clinical trial developed COVID-19, and there were no safety concerns. The trial included 3,732 participants. Two-thirds got the shot, and one-third received placebo injections. There were four cases of COVID-19 in the group that received placebo injections. The vaccine was 93 percent effective against even mild forms of the disease in this group as early as 14 days after the first dose, the company said. The Moderna vaccine is currently authorized for people 18 and older. If the FDA allows its use for people ...

Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei has reportedly urged the Chinese tech giant’s staff to turn the company into a major software force as a way to alleviate the impact of devastating US sanctions. In an internal memo viewed by Reuters, Ren says that Huawei should focus on software because the industry is “outside of US control and we will have greater independence and autonomy.” Huawei is presently unable to mass-produce much of its hardware products because of sanctions forbidding US firms from doing business with it. The company stockpiled chips and components in an attempt to mitigate the sanctions, but the reserves are limited and in some cases will be swiftly obsoleted. Huawei is also blocked from using Google apps and services on its smartphones. The Biden administration hasn’t sugg...