Code News

Layoffs are never an easy pill to swallow, but for Essential, it seems the writing was on the wall for a while with this one. After months of reports highlighting its struggles, the Andy Rubin-led smartphone startup has announced some major layoffs. All told, the company will be losing around 30 percent of its staff. […]

Tesla has secured the rights to about 210 acres of land in Lingang, Shanghai, the site of the electric automaker's planned factory and its first outside of the U.S.

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way from the heavy, solid hands and legs of yesteryear, but it's still difficult to pack a range of motion into them without complex or bulky machinery. But new research out of Cornell uses a cleverly designed 3D-printed mechanism to achieve speed and strength with simple construction — and it costs a lot less, too.

The EduCreator Incubator will seed 25 to 40 "emerging video creators" with $25,000 to $75,000 in seed funding.

At what point do we just give up and admit we’re living in exactly the dystopian nightmare speculative fiction warned us about? It probably ought to be these horse blinders for people, which look like something straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie. Panasonic design studio Future Life Factory designed the things, but open space […]

French startup Alan wants to be a bit better than your good old health insurance. That’s why the company is trying something new and now covers part of your Petit Bambou subscription. Petit Bambou is a popular meditation app. It’s a sort of Headspace, but with French content. You download an app, put your earphones, […]

On the heels of raising new funding on a $20 billion valuation, payments and financial services startup Stripe is making a key hire to reinforce its message to the world that it’s taking security of its cloud-based services seriously. Today the company is announcing that it has hired Niels Provos as its new head of […]

It’s been a long, bumpy road for the Skully augmented reality motorcycle helmet brand. But under the leadership of Ivan Contreras, who acquired the assets of Skully in 2017, the helmet is finally shipping to its early backers. That means anyone who paid $1,800 as part of the original Skully crowdfunding campaign will finally receive their […]

Bots went through the hype cycle faster than a speeding roller coaster, as the promise of chatting with a computer quickly turned sour. Now, Twilio wants to take another stab at this market with the launch of Autopilot, a new developer service for building omnichannel bot experiences. “Omnichannel” is a word only a marketer could […]

Making a payment over the phone, maybe because you are trying to change an airline ticket or to pay a last-minute bill, still feels like an antiquated process. You read your credit card number to an agent, then your expiration date and your security code. In the process, some number will inevitably get mixed up […]

Jessica Santana and Evin Robinson were riding the subway home from a college leadership conference when they realized they were getting off at the same stop.  It turned out, they had grown up in the same neighborhood, no more than 5 blocks apart. Years later, both Santana and Robinson were working six-figure jobs in the tech […]

“I think any company scaling today has to have a crypto strategy. This is the start of ours,” Omni founder and CEO Tom McLeod tells me. His on-demand property storage and rental marketplace raised $25 million in XRP coins back in January in what some saw as an opportunist move to capitalize on the cryptocurrency […]

Fintech startup N26 is growing quite rapidly. Building a startup is hard, but building a startup that manages your bank account is even harder given the increased scrutiny. German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an article that questioned N26’s identification processes. According to Wirtschaftswoche, it’s quite easy to create an account with a fake ID document. […]

Twitter is making a change to how its tweet reporting procedures will work. Before, Twitter had experimented with both showing or hiding the tweet you reported, but users told the company they sometimes needed to refer back to the tweet – like when they’re trying to report it to law enforcement, for example. Now, Twitter […]

Tumblr has disclosed a security vulnerability on its site that in some cases could have exposed account information. The bug was found in the part of the site that recommends other Tumblr blogs to users, according to a blog post. The blogging site said the “recommended blogs” module — only visible to logged-in users — […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, intends to buy another $20 million in common stock, a move that appears to be in response to a recent settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a filing Wednesday. The 8-K document detailed a settlement agreement between Musk, Tesla and the SEC over allegations […]

With Gartner estimating that there will be 150 billion connected devices by 2030 — many of them mission critical, such as powering major national infrastructure — the risk and realisation that these devices aren’t secured properly is leading some cyber security experts to predict that there is a large-scale disaster waiting to happen. And the […]

The UK’s still fairly new in post minister for health, Matt Hancock, quickly made technology one of his stated priorities. And today he’s put more meat on the bones of his thinking, setting out a vision for transforming, root and branch, how the country’s National Health Service operates to accommodate the plugging in of “healthtech” […]

Lyft has brought on former United Airlines Chief Commercial Officer Julia Haywood to serve as its VP of Strategy. The plan is for her to own Lyft’s market expansion efforts and accelerate growth. “I’m excited to see Julia make a huge impact here at Lyft,” said Jon McNeill, chief operating officer at Lyft. “We are in a […]

Spotify has taken a minority stake in music distribution service, DistroKid, a popular tool used by artists for uploading their music across platforms. The company didn’t confirm the size of its stake, only saying that it made a “passive minority investment.” As a result of the deal, Spotify will also upgrade its Spotify for Artists […]

We love pieces that are timely, written in response to current events that have captured the world's attention, or should have. The post Here's How to Submit to WIRED Opinion appeared first on WIRED.

Author Walter Jon Williams has forecasted a lot of things, but rarely gets credit. The post Sci-Fi Writers Are Predicting the Future. Who's Listening? appeared first on WIRED.

Life online may not be a literal horror show—but sometimes it can feel like one. The post More and More Movies Are Reflecting Our Fear of the Internet appeared first on WIRED.

The Gadget Lab team breaks down this week's tech news and welcomes special guest Ivy Ross to the show, to talk about the new Google Pixel products. The post A Conversation With Google’s Ivy Ross appeared first on WIRED.

Follow Apple's September 12, 2018 iPhone event in Cupertino with our live news updates. The post Apple Event Liveblog: Get Live Updates About the New iPhone appeared first on WIRED.

Follow Google's Pixel 3 event on October 9 in New York with our live news updates. The post Liveblog: All the Google Pixel News, as It Happens appeared first on WIRED.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari believes sci-fi has the power to shape public opinion. The post Why Science Fiction Is the Most Important Genre appeared first on WIRED.

It's true. Just ask writer Hallie Lambert. The post Saving The Expanse Is One of Fandom's Great Triumphs appeared first on WIRED.

WIRED's editor in chief Nick Thompson talks to Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris about how social platforms expertly manipulate our thinking. The post Hacking Humans appeared first on WIRED.

While <em>Futurama</em> demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of sci-fi, Matt Groening's new project doesn't evince much familiarity with fantasy tropes. The post Disenchantment May Not Enchant Hardcore Fantasy Fans appeared first on WIRED.

The YouTube star's debut novel caused him to grapple with the dehumanizing nature of celebrity. The post Hank Green Explores the Dark Side of Internet Fame, With Robots appeared first on WIRED.

The Gadget Lab team talks to WIRED editor and author Peter Rubin about the new Oculus Quest. Also: Why the SEC is suing Elon Musk. The post Virtually Riveting appeared first on WIRED.

The film has been widely praised by critics, but is it getting the credit it deserves as a visionary work of sci-fi? The post Sorry to Bother You Is Great Science Fiction, People appeared first on WIRED.

It would make garbage disposal super easy, for one. The post How Would Teleportation Change Society? appeared first on WIRED.