Insights

A year ago, Google blew the world away with Duplex, an AI assistant that can make phone calls for you. The demo went viral and raised a lot of ethical and philosophical questions. Last month, Google announced an update for Duplex: it can now use websites for you. This announcement might not have been as controversial...

And more factoids about 5 things to know about Ive’s longtime friend and design partner. The pair are leaving Apple to start a new design firm called LoveFrom. This week, famed designer Jony Ive announced he’s leaving Apple to start his own design firm. But he’s not doing it alone.Read Full...

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the controversial chicken chain remains a crowd-pleaser. For the fourth year in a row, Chick-fil-A has found itself at the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index ranking of “limited-service restaurants” (or in other words, fast food). Its...

MIT’s new Media Lab fellows are not your everyday scientists. MIT Media Lab announced its 2019 Directors Fellows on Friday, and they’re not the tech masterminds you might expect. Read Full Story

The ethics of Facebook, as a corporation, have come into question lately. Though criticisms of the platform have stretched back to its inception, the incident that inspired the most recent waves of ire seems to be the Cambridge Analytica data scandal of early 2018, in which it was revealed that a political consulting...

Brand Twitter is the new golden age of television. There’s a lot of talk about the golden age of television and whether we’re in the middle of it or if it ended when Walter White did. One thing we can probably all agree on, though, is that for better or worse we’re living in a golden age of Brand...

Marc Newson once designed limited-edition samurai swords and sold them for $300,000 each. This week, famed designer Jony Ive announced he’s leaving Apple to start his own design firm. But he’s not doing it alone.Read Full Story

Going forward, AltSchool’s four lab schools will be operated by a new partner, Higher Ground Education. When entrepreneur and former Googler Max Ventilla cofounded education startup AltSchool in spring 2013, he had big plans. He wanted to create a toolkit for personalizing learning by building not just...

In the age of Instagram and back-to-back meetings, it’s hard to achieve “deep work.” Here are 10 steps to get into a work flow and stay in it. You know that feeling of being in flow where your mind is alert, you’re deeply focused on a difficult problem, when time stands still and work stops...

‘Hereditary’ filmmaker Ari Aster talks about making the drug sequences in his folk horror follow-up ‘Midsommar’ and why they feel uncomfortably authentic. (No spoilers.) “I would not advise people to do drugs and then watch this,” Ari Aster says of his new horror...

Users of Slack, the hugely popular messaging platform, are reporting a weird glitch that’s resulting in messages being duplicated multiple times, or simply refusing to send. To give you a sense of what that looks like, check out this screenshot from TNW’s own internal Slack team. The @thenextweb newsroom is...

‘Hereditary’ filmmaker Ari Aster talks about making the drug sequences in his folk horror follow-up ‘Midsommar’ and why they feel uncomfortably authentic. (No spoilers.) “I would not advise people to do drugs and then watch this,” Ari Aster says of his new horror...

Think of it as Material Design for data visualization. Google does everything from building smartphones to creating driverless car companies. So it’s easy to forget that its official mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google...

What if I told you your next BMW electric car could emulate The Dark Night’s fabulous theme music? Don’t think I’m joking, because famed composer Hans Zimmer has partnered with the auto giant. BMW made the announcement official at the company’s NextGen event in Munich. Under the brand name “BMW IconicSounds...

Irish cryptocurrency exchange Bitsane has reportedly pulled an exit scam and disappeared with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency belonging to its users, reports Forbes. Bitsane’s website, which reportedly boasted 246,000 registered users, has been offline since (at least) June 17, when its Facebook...

Public transportation is the circulatory system of any urban area, and it’s a better choice for the planet than driving your own vehicle. But let’s face it: no one wants to deal with late buses and crowded subways. Now Google wants to warn you about these hassles. An update to Google Maps rolling out today brings...

Faced with a potential crisis, the magnitude of which the world has never seen before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to slow down. Crises, however, wait for no one. And Facebook’s latest problem, that of altered or faked video, brings with it the democracy destroying power of an atom bomb. “There is a...

Twitter revealed today it will be adding a special label to certain tweets — namely those that violate Twitter’s terms of service, but which somehow serve public interest by remaining up. To be clear, Twitter’s been leaving such tweets up for quite some time — now it’s just managed to find a happy medium...

It’s vital to cut carbon emissions. But tech companies have a responsibility to go a lot further than that—and the ability to do so. For many years, the biggest technology companies have made pioneering commitments to reducing their energy footprint. Google and Apple claim to be completely carbon...

It’s vital to cut carbon emissions. But tech companies have a responsibility to go a lot further than that—and the ability to do so. For many years, the biggest technology companies have made pioneering commitments to reducing their energy footprint. Google and Apple claim to be completely carbon...

Prevent Google from keeping a permanent record of your whereabouts without losing all of location history’s benefits. Google has expanded its auto-delete privacy controls to include location history, so now you can prevent the company from keeping a lifetime record of your whereabouts.Read Full Story

Twitter has a new policy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Look folks, there’s no need to continue reporting a certain world leader for violating Twitter’s terms of service. The social media site is fully aware that certain commanders in chief use Twitter to bully, harass, discriminate, troll, dox, share fake...

No matter what happens over the course of this primary, we will always have the joy that John Delaney gave us by inspiring so many jokes during the first Democratic debate. At the top of last night’s first Democratic debate, just one question occupied everyone’s thoughts.Read Full Story

But Line says the new Line Score will be opt-in. It appears other countries besides China are heading toward a bleak dystopian future where a human being is scored by their online activities. Only this time, it’s a tech company and not a government implementing the social credit score. While not as bleak as...

The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites. It’s great for security—but not so great for your privacy. We’ve all tried to log into a website or submit a form only to be stuck clicking boxes of traffic lights or storefronts or...

Magic Spoon is an adult version of what you loved as a kid—without the sugar, carbs, or guilt. It might just be what the grocery aisle needs. The death of cereal has been wildly exaggerated. It’s been reported that sales have plummeted in recent years as millennials opted for seemingly more nutritious or...

The fashion designer reveals her tips and tools for getting the most out of every day. Fashion designer Rachel Roy is not afraid of hard work. After moving to New York, she worked her way up in the fashion industry through a series of jobs, starting as an intern in the Rocawear mailroom and eventually becoming...

The employees say they are sick of Google’s policies that allow for harassment of LGBTQ+ persons on its platforms. Google employs have written to the organizers of the San Francisco Pride parade requesting that their employer be barred from representation in the parade as well as revoking Google’s...

Another day, and another cryptocurrency exchange hack. Attackers have thieved $4.2 million worth of cryptocurrency from exchange Bitrue. Earlier today, the exchange announced on Twitter (spotted by ZDNet) that it was subject to a hack in which bad actors made off with 9.3 million Ripple ($4 million) and 2.5 million...

Google’s LGBTQ+ employees are petitioning to remove Google as a sponsor from San Francisco’s Pride celebration this weekend. As reported by Bloomberg, the search engines’ employees published a petition on Medium addressed to San Francisco Pride’s board of directors.  In the post, it explained: “We, the...

The Carnegie Corporation of New York announces this year’s entrants to its list of great immigrants, as a counterbalance to increasingly anti-immigrant government policies that it’s fighting against. In honor of Independence Day, the Carnegie Corporation of New York has inducted 38 new immigrants into...

YouTube is introducing three new ways to fine-tune your browsing experience on the platform. First, the Google-owned video service is rolling out topics and related videos on its homepage and under its “Up Next” tab. Second, it is giving users the ability to remove suggestions from channels they don’t want to...

The Carnegie Corporation of New York announces this year’s entrants to its list of great immigrants, as a counterbalance to increasingly anti-immigrant government policies that it’s fighting against. In honor of Independence Day, the Carnegie Corporation of New York has inducted 38 new immigrants into...

Ladies and gentlemen, the art of the soundbite. It’s smart for candidates to do some debate prep. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has been consulting over WhatsApp with his debate-champion son, Dante. Senator Cory Booker has apparently been doing pushups. And it’s natural for them to practice pre-prepared...

Though WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, plenty of the app’s users are happy to ignore the fact the big blue parent network exists. Somewhat surprisingly, Facebook has been content to let WhatsApp do its own thing since its $19 billion purchase back in 2014. But there are signs this might be slowly changing Case in...

Scott clearly did not want to have any part of being a GIF in a Mitch McConnell tweet, and his resulting back-and-forth with the account was very . . . popcorn GIF. Being Mitch McConnell’s social media strategist must be a tough gig.Read Full Story

There’s some new competition for NSO, the Israeli company which boasts of its ability to take over phones and computers on behalf of high-paying government clients: Dozens upon dozens of spyware firms that offer a range of surveillance options. Last month, Facebook said that WhatsApp users were vulnerable to a...

NBC is letting cord cutters live-stream the Democratic debates online for free on its YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter channels. Here’s where to find them. Twenty candidates. Three television networks. One goal: Get through the next two nights without throwing your TV, computer, or smartphone out the window.Read...

Kim Kardashian West is at again with the cultural appropriation with her new intimates line Kimono—but someone on Twitter has way better name suggestions. Kim Kardashian West is taking on the shape wear and intimates industry with her new launch—and people are pissed. Not so much at the products...

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Transcribing interviews is a pain, there’s no doubt about it. Listening back to the conversation, it becomes painfully obvious how often people sniff, how incoherent their...

Wanna feel old? It’s been seven years since Doom-creator John Carmack first unveiled his ski-goggles contraption that would eventually become the Oculus Rift. A lot has happened in the years that have since passed, including Oculus’ 2 billion dollar acquisition by Facebook. What was then only a finicky but...

There’s some new competition for NSO, the Israeli company accused of helping the Saudi government track down Jamal Khashoggi. Last month, Facebook said that WhatsApp users were vulnerable to a sophisticated exploit capable of hacking into phones with little more than a few unanswered calls. The new exploit was...

The number of connections to kick-start the value of LinkedIn’s network is 30. Are yours the right ones? Having a robust professional network can be a game changer when thinking about your career journey. The people in your network can help make future connections, refer you for a job, provide advice, and so...

Facebook has agreed to hand over identifying information on French users suspected of using hate speech on its platform, making it the first deal of its kind between the social media giant and a government. According to Reuters, the decision appears to have been a result of successive meetings between Facebook chief...

If for some reason you decide you want to mute the president this week, Twitter has you covered. The first round of Democratic primary debates is taking place over two nights this week in Miami, where 20 candidates will face off against each other—10 candidates each night—in an attempt to win over...

The terms may be new to you, but you experience them nearly every day. When I visit my aging mother in the Midwest, I watch as she sits at her computer endlessly scrolling on Facebook. In earlier times, she would have been joyfully soaking up the time with her visiting kids and grandkids. Like many of us, her use of...

A platform-as-a-service company is only as good as its APIs, and Shopify has dozens of them. These expose a specific part of the Shopify’s product to third-party developers, who can then incorporate them into their own applications. And last week, at the annual Shopify Unite summit, the company announced it was...

IBM developer Nicholas Bourdakos recently created a new Code Pattern that lets just about anyone develop and train an AI model to recognize objects using computer vision. Bourdakos’ Code Pattern, called “Create a real-time object detection app using Watson Machine Learning,” relies on a tool called Cloud...