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...