Technology

Bang & Olufsen has introduced the all-new Beoplay EX earbuds dubbed the brand’s “most versatile earphones to date,” as the latest addition to its lineup. The Beoplay EX debuts an all-new stem-based shape designed by Thomas Bentzen featuring a mirror-like glass interface and a brushed aluminum ring. Durability was a main focus, with the model boasting both a waterproof design and IP57-certified dust resistance. The earbud’s 9.2 mm speaker driver is the biggest ever produced by the brand for a true-wireless device despite the reduced size of the in-ear housing, meanwhile Adaptive Active Noise Cancelling technology eliminates background sound for an immersive audio experience. Additional specs include the latest Bluetooth 5.2 technology, three microphones on each ear, 20 hours of total pl...

MoonPay, the company that lets consumers pay for digital assets with credit cards, has raised $86.7 million from a who’s who list of celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, Bruce Willis, Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matthew McConaughey. The new round of investment is meant to help propel the company toward its goal of being the PayPal of cryptocurrency. The new investment brings MoonPay’s valuation to $3.4 billion, the company says. “I realized that the creator economy was going to be a really important part of our business.” MoonPay is probably best known for its concierge service. To put it simply: MoonPay streamlined the process of buying an NFT ape. Stars who want a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT will often go to MoonPay — and then thank the company in their tweets afterwar...

MoonPay, the company that lets consumers pay for digital assets with credit cards, has raised $86.7 million from a who’s who list of celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, Bruce Willis, Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matthew McConaughey. The new round of investment is meant to help propel the company toward its goal of being the PayPal of cryptocurrency. The new investment brings MoonPay’s valuation to $3.4 billion, the company says. “I realized that the creator economy was going to be a really important part of our business.” MoonPay is probably best known for its concierge service. To put it simply: MoonPay streamlined the process of buying an NFT ape. Stars who want a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT will often go to MoonPay — and then thank the company in their tweets afterwar...

MoonPay, the company that lets consumers pay for digital assets with credit cards, has raised $86.7 million from a who’s who list of celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, Bruce Willis, Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matthew McConaughey. The new round of investment is meant to help propel the company toward its goal of being the PayPal of cryptocurrency. The new investment brings MoonPay’s valuation to $3.4 billion, the company says. “I realized that the creator economy was going to be a really important part of our business.” MoonPay is probably best known for its concierge service. To put it simply: MoonPay streamlined the process of buying an NFT ape. Stars who want a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT will often go to MoonPay — and then thank the company in their tweets afterwar...

If you’re a ultimate Transformers fan with deep pockets and the willingness to forgive a few big flaws, your dream toy has arrived. One year after introducing a 19-inch tall Optimus Prime robot that can transform itself, pose and even drive thanks to 27 servo motors, its makers at Hasbro and Robosen have made their vision complete — with a brand-new trailer that can also open up, transform, and reveal its own miniature motorized vehicle that rolls right down the ramp. The trailer, all buttoned up.Image: Robosen Let me be clear: it costs $750 for the robot and $750 for the trailer. This is a $1,500 toy all told, and while I greatly enjoyed playing with a walking, talking, posing Optimus Prime with the voice of Peter Cullen himself, you can see from my hands-on that it won’t necessarily do e...

Lucid has a new high-performance version of its luxury all-electric sedan. The new Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance announced today (via CNBC) can be selected as a variant via the company’s online configurator, which tops the standard Grand Touring’s 819 horsepower with 1,050. This new model is actually not the most powerful of Lucid’s Air vehicles — that crown goes to the company’s 1,111 horsepower “Dream Edition” performance model, which is now sold out after a limited edition run. That performance Dream Edition model was touted as the only production electric vehicle to achieve a quarter-mile time under 10 seconds in 2020, which bested Tesla’s quickest Model S available at the time. This performance model can’t quite beat the Tesla Model S Plaid The new trim is hardly a performance d...

Starting next month, Yelp says it will cover the costs of travel if an employee or their dependent needs to leave the state to access abortion services, as first reported by The New York Times. The company employs around 200 people in Texas, where legislators passed the strictest abortion law in the country last September. The law, called SB 8, outlaws abortions after six weeks, and provides no exception for rape or incest. It also allows private citizens to sue abortion providers, as well as anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion. In line with the new law, a Texas woman was charged with murder over a self-induced abortion earlier this week, although charges have since been dropped. Yelp says its health insurance already supports abortion care, but its new policy extends coverage beyond th...

PlayStation Network had a bit of a rough patch Tuesday evening. For about 45 minutes, Sony’s PlayStation Network status page showed that all of its services were experiencing issues in some way, which affected things like signing into your account and connecting to PlayStation Now and the PlayStation Store. Now, however, the site is showing that everything is “up and running.” It’s unclear exactly how widespread the issues were. I personally was able to connect online in Bloodborne and send a message to a colleague, but the PS5’s PlayStation Store was having trouble loading a lot of content. Some others were having more serious issues connecting online, including “error code WS-37469-9,” as shown in this thread on the r/PS5 subreddit. Downdetector shows there were more than 12,000 user rep...

CNN Plus is reportedly struggling to gain viewers just two weeks out from its launch, according to a report from CNBC. People familiar with the matter told the outlet the platform is only raking in fewer than 10,000 viewers per day. As CNBC notes, this is a huge dip from the daily viewership of CNN’s cable network, which saw an average of 773,000 viewers per day last year. But, obviously, CNN Plus is still new — CNN’s TV channel has been around for many years, plus it’s (usually) free for anyone with cable or satellite service. A recent report from Insider doesn’t make these numbers look any better, though. Using data compiled by SensorTower, Insider discovered that the CNN app, which users must download to use CNN Plus, gained just 18,000 new installations on the day the streaming service...

Pegatron, a Taiwanese company that is one of a few companies that assemble the iPhone, has halted production at two plants in Shanghai and one in Kunshan to comply with the Chinese government’s stringent COVID-19 regulations, according to Nikkei Asia. China has put strict policies in place in response to a recent resurgence of COVID-19 in the country. The shutdown could have a significant impact on both Pegatron and Apple. Nikkei Asia reports that those Pegatron plants are its only iPhone manufacturing hubs, and Pegatron is responsible for making “roughly” 20 to 30 percent of all iPhones. Pegatron “hopes to resume production soon,” the publication said, though it’s unclear exactly when that might happen. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Quanta, which helps make MacB...

Big names in tech and consulting just made a $925 million commitment to purchase captured carbon between now and 2030. The pledge — made by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey — marks a big investment in carbon removal technologies. Their new initiative, called Frontier, is supposed to scale up deployment of the still-emerging tech, while making it more affordable for other companies who are also looking to purchase captured carbon as a way to make up for some of the planet-heating pollution they produce. The technology is still prohibitively expensive There are already facilities that can filter that CO2 out of the air, as well as efforts to store CO2 in rock formations or in the ocean once it’s been captured. But the existing capacity to do this is minuscule in comparison to wh...

If you’ve logged onto YouTube today, you may have noticed that something was off with the homepage: the sidebar that lets you access things like your subscriptions feed, trending videos, and “Library” that keeps your Watch Later list and video history, is missing (though you can access some of the pages by clicking on the links we’ve included). Other problems are cutting off people when trying to cast videos to a smart TV or watch streams from a game console. The account menu, which lets you switch accounts, manage settings, and view your channel, is also broken. You can still watch videos from your homepage or search, but for people who like to carefully manage their YouTube experience or creators who aren’t logged into the correct account, it’s a real pain. In my tests, the issues existe...