Technology

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 ...

Razer’s new $200 Opus noise-canceling, wireless headphones aren’t good enough to tempt me away from my tried-and-true $350 Sony WH-1000XM3. I’m not surprised by that, partially given the huge price difference. More so, I wasn’t expecting miracles given Razer’s comparative lack of experience in making headphones. However, they are good enough to make me doubt if my Sony’s are that much better to warrant costing almost double the amount. My answer to that question is yes, but nevertheless, that the Opus is making me question it at all speaks to their quality and value. For the money, these come with almost everything I want in a set of headphones: comfort, good sound quality, and long battery life — with a few extra features as a bonus. For instance, the ear cups can swivel 90 degrees to res...

Microsoft is creating a new lists app for businesses that use its Microsoft 365 services. Not to be confused with To Do, Microsoft’s consumer lists app, Microsoft Lists is designed to be the next evolution of SharePoint Lists. SharePoint users have been using lists for years to track issues and organize information, and Microsoft Lists will work across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. Microsoft Lists will include templates for quick lists, configurable color formatting, and even the ability to create alerts and processes. Lists can track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory, and more for companies. While Microsoft has created a separate web and mobile app for Microsoft Lists, it’s also fully integrated into Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Lists integration in Microsoft Teams. ...

Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps. This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps. While it has been possible to run Linux GUI apps within Windows previously using a third-party X server, poor graphics performance has always been an issue. Microsoft is promising to solve this, too. Windows 10 will soon get added support for GPU hardware acceleration ...

A group of senators, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), is demanding that all calls between the Senate and the House of Representatives be encrypted, according to a new letter obtained by The Verge. In the letter dated Tuesday, a bicameral group of Republicans and Democrats requested that the House sergeant at arms and the chief administrative officer “take immediate action to secure telephone calls” between both the House and Senate. The group of 20 lawmakers, including Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Ed Markey (D-MA), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), are asking that the officials provide a plan to secure calls by June 12th. “Calls between the Senate and House are still vulnerable to spying by anyone who gains access to the data connection between the...

British airline EasyJet says that it has been the victim of a cyberattack that exposed the email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers, Bloomberg News reports. In a statement, the company said that, of these customers, 2,208 had their credit card details accessed by what the company describes as a “highly sophisticated” attack. EasyJet said that it has already closed off the unauthorized access that allowed the data breach, and it has contacted customers who had their credit card details exposed. Although EasyJet says that “there is no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused,” it added that it will be contacting all 9 million customers who have been affected by the breach by May 26th. No passport details were exposed in the hack, Th...