Technology

Panasonic is restarting production at Tesla’s Buffalo, New York solar panel factory this week after some businesses in the Western New York region have been given the green light to reopen, The Verge has learned. The factory has been idle for roughly two months. “I decided to reopen the factory from Wednesday, 5/20,” Mark Shima, the president of Panasonic’s North American solar energy division, said in a Monday evening email to his 400 employees that was obtained by The Verge. The first two days will be spent doing equipment checks, he said, and “standard manufacturing” will start on Friday, May 22nd. Panasonic has “completed preparations under close collaboration with Tesla, such as preparation of masks, sanitizers and wipes, set new protocol for entrance, new rules in cafeteria and produ...

Apple is joining other streamers in becoming a foster home for movies that studios are looking to unload in the middle of this global pandemic. Tom Hanks’ Greyhound will land on Apple TV Plus (there’s no release date yet), but the film was originally reserved for a theatrical release by Sony Pictures. The movie is described by Variety as being “set in the early days of World War II as an international convoy of 37 Allied ships, led by Hanks’ Capt. Ernest Krause, crosses the treacherous North Atlantic while being hotly pursued by wolf packs of Nazi submarines.” It’ll mark the first time that Hanks is seeing one of his movies go directly to a streamer instead of a wide theatrical release, according to Deadline (Hanks both wrote and stars in Greyhound.) Sony was originally planning to release...

The Google mobile app is getting a dark mode, with Android and iOS users gaining the option to enable the feature by the end of the week. After the update, the app will automatically use whatever theme your operating system is already set to if you use Android or iOS 13. Google says the feature is starting to roll out today, but it won’t be globally available until later this week. You’ll also be able to manually toggle between light and dark mode by heading to the app’s settings, which is what users on older operating systems will have to do. Starting today & fully rolling out this week, dark mode is now available for the Google App on Android 10 and iOS 12/13. By default, the Google App will reflect your device’s system settings in Android 10 & iOS 13. If that’s set to a dark the...

Sony Alpha just tweeted out a teaser for a camera announcement coming on May 26th. All Sony will say is that it’s a “new compact camera” along with a hazy outline of some sort of camera, likely with an articulating screen. Luckily, we don’t need to guess what it is because Sony Alpha Rumors recently dropped the details. It’s almost surely the Sony ZV-1, and if Sony Alpha Rumors’ leaked specs are correct, it looks like an ideal compact vlogging camera. The publication called the camera “basically an RX100VII successor made for vloggers,” and if that turns out to be the case, I’m fairly excited for it. It will have an articulating screen so you can see yourself, what appears to be a hot shoe for attaching a mic or other accessories, and a big red button for recording videos instead of the it...

Animated Disney movies are known for their incredible music, but not until the heroic Twitter-threaded efforts of Justin McElroy (a reporter for CBC Vancouver, not to be confused with Justin “Hoops” McElroy of the McElroy Family media empire) has there been a unified classification of every song. What follows is a compressive breakdown of all 18 categories, complete with taxonomy, defining characteristics, and even a periodic table of animated Disney songs. nobody: me: in the history of disney animated movies there have been exactly 18 types of songs, and i’m going to tell you about each of them — Justin McElroy (@j_mcelroy) May 18, 2020 As McElroy explains, while there are 18 possible types of songs, some elements are core to the entire canon. For example, the “This Is The Movie” so...

Joe Rogan, comedian and host of one of the most popular podcasts in the world, is taking his show to Spotify. The Joe Rogan Experience will soon become a Spotify exclusive, meaning episodes’ full audio and video will only be available through the platform starting later this year. Up until now, Rogan’s show has never been available on Spotify, let alone exclusive to any platform. The show will become available on Spotify globally starting on September 1st, and it’ll become an exclusive sometime after that point. Listeners won’t have to pay to access the episodes, but they will have to become Spotify users. Spotify said in a press release that Rogan retains creative control over his show. It didn’t disclose how much it spent on the deal. The company will also work with an ad agency to joint...

The Call of Duty League (CDL) announced today that you’ll soon be able to earn in-game rewards, or “drops,” for watching CDL broadcasts, and the Overwatch League appears to be teasing that drops are on the way as well. The announcement follows Activision Blizzard and YouTube’s multiyear deal announced in January that made the Google-owned video platform the exclusive streaming partner for Activision’s esports leagues. To earn the rewards, you’ll have to watch live matches on the CDL website or the Call of Duty Companion app while logged into your Activision account, according to a CDL blog post. The rewards will include team emblems, sprays, and animated calling cards, and they’ll be cross-platform. Image: Call of Duty League There aren’t any specific details just yet about what may be com...

Walmart is shutting down Jet.com, the online shopping site it bought in 2016 for $3 billion as part of its attempts to better compete with rival Amazon online, an area that Amazon excels at compared to Walmart, via TechCrunch. According to Walmart’s Q1 earnings release, the decision to shut down Jet.com is due to the “continued strength of the Walmart.com brand,” with the company citing the Jet acquisition in 2016 as “critical to accelerating our omni strategy.” But the numbers tell a different story: last year, Walmart lost about $2 billion on its online e-commerce operations, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, with the company looking to refocus its business with its retail locations at the core (a key area where Walmart holds the edge over Amazon). The company has since...

Facebook is making a major new push into e-commerce. The company today announced the launch of Shops, a way for businesses to set up free storefronts on Facebook and Instagram. The shops, which will be powered by third-party services, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Woo, are designed to turn the social network into a top-tier shopping destination. In a live stream, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said expanded e-commerce would be important to begin rebuilding the economy while the pandemic continues. “If you can’t physically open your store or restaurant, you can still take orders online and ship them to people,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of small businesses that never had online businesses get online for the first time.” The launch of Shops comes as stay-at-home orders related to the COVID-19 ...

Teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted what its CEO Kyle Wiens says is “the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals.” The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers. Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing campaign to collect repair information for hospital equipment, with a focus on “ventilator documentation, anesthesia systems, and respiratory analyzers — devices widely used to support COVID-19 patients.” But the effort grew from there, spanning more than two months as iFixit added dozens more staff members to the project; began talking to more bi...

Facebook is launching what it’s calling a “universal product recognition model” that uses artificial intelligence to identify consumer goods, from furniture to fast fashion to fast cars. It’s the first step toward a future where the products in every image on its site can be identified and potentially shopped for. “We want to make anything and everything on the platform shoppable, whenever the experience feels right,” Manohar Paluri, head of Applied Computer Vision at Facebook, told The Verge. “It’s a grand vision.” Facebook wants to create a “social-first” shopping experience Product recognition is the first in a slew of AI-powered updates coming to its e-commerce platforms in the near future, says the company. Eventually, these will combine AI, augmented reality, and even digital assista...

Microsoft is revealing some new features for its Edge browser today. The first is a new sidebar search option that’s designed to let you search the web without having to leave a tab. You can highlight text on a page and right-click to “search in sidebar” and see the results to the side of the page you’re currently viewing. Pinterest is also partnering with Microsoft Edge to bring suggestions to the Collections feature inside the browser. Collections is used to collate groups of content like links, images, and text into a single place. Pinterest suggestions will soon appear at the bottom of Collections if the new feature is enabled, and Edge users will even be able to export Collections to Pinterest. Microsoft is also adding the ability to send Collections to OneNote soon. New Edge sidebar ...