Technology

Lyft’s ride-hailing business is down 70 percent, year over year, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s chief executives said in an earnings call with investors Wednesday. The company’s ride volume hit a bottom in the second week of April, plummeting 75 percent year-over-year, and has since gradually risen in the final weeks of the month. As the COVID-19 related shutdown continues with no clear end in sight, Lyft is projecting continued pain for its business. “We cannot predict the trajectory or timing of the eventual recovery,” CEO Logan Green said, “but it is clear that macro trends will continue to negatively impact our business.” But Lyft’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2020 was slightly less grim than it’s ride-hailing business. The company brought in $955.7 mi...

Etsy began pushing homemade masks in early April, and the results panned out in a big way: total sales on the platform doubled last month, by and large thanks to a surge in face mask sales. For comparison, Etsy’s marketplace sales figures between January and March were up only 16 percent. More than 12 million face masks were sold during April, totaling around $133 million in sales. Etsy says they represented the second largest category of product sales across the entire site during the month of April. “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday.” “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday, except everyone in the world just wanted one product and that product was in extremely limited supply,” Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said on a call with investors this afternoon...

Movie theaters across the country are closed, but some drive-ins are seeing a resurgence in the wake of social distancing practices. Now, Tribeca Enterprises (the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival), IMAX, and AT&T are partnering to bring a summer movie series to as many drive-in theaters as possible in the US. Tribeca Drive-In will feature a curated selection of movies both old and new, alongside special music and sporting events, according to a press release. The series kicks off on June 25th, although programming information — including dates for specific cities and what films will be shown — isn’t available yet. More info will be available in the coming weeks, the companies say. The series will use IMAX’s digital remastering process to enhance both the image and sound quality...

Today, as America faces a difficult debate about “reopening” state economies during the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times seemingly offered a helpful piece of guidance. The paper’s opinion section published a visualization of how people engage with different businesses like bars and gyms, estimating their risk of infection at each. Alarmingly, it dubbed some of these places dangerous “super-spreader businesses” — warning that “through the lens of contagion, a yoga class, a busy corner store, or a crowded neighborhood bar may look a lot like a wet market in China.” But at least in this story, the real worry isn’t contagion. It’s the sweeping assumptions being trained on some very limited data. And it doesn’t say much about whether your local bar can avoid serving coronavirus with its...

The new app that Sonos announced in March will be released on June 8th, and with it will come the launch of the S2 platform that exclusively powers the new Sonos Arc, Five, and Sub. That new underlying operating system will soon make its way to other Sonos products — pretty much everything except for those very old legacy devices that we keep writing about. When the revamped Sonos app arrives, the current version will be renamed “Sonos S1 Controller” in the Apple App Store and Google Play. The new one will simply be “Sonos” and, while its design will look familiar, Sonos says S2 opens up a lot of possibilities: This next generation of the app features support for higher resolution audio technologies, evident with the Dolby Atmos experience on Arc, as well as increased security and improved...

Sonos is finally making its long-awaited push into Dolby Atmos home theater audio. That effort starts with the new $799 Arc, a premium soundbar that replaces the Playbar in Sonos’ product lineup. The oddball Playbase speaker, designed to fit underneath some TVs, is also being discontinued today as Sonos simplifies your options to just the Arc and Beam. It isn’t cheap at $800, and it’s $100 more expensive than the Playbar, but Sonos claims that the Arc sets a new standard for the soundbar category. It’ll be released on June 10th and will only work with the new Sonos S2 app when that launches on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac early next month. The Arc, third-generation Sub, and Sonos Five are the first products built on the company’s S2 platform, which will allow for higher-fidelity audio (a...

Sonos is refreshing its best-sounding music speaker today, but the new product is so similar to its predecessor that there’s zero reason for anyone with a Play:5 to consider an upgrade. That new speaker is called the Sonos Five. And though it now shares branding with the Sonos One, which was the company’s first product with built-in voice assistant capabilities, the Sonos Five oddly does not include a built-in microphone for use with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Sonos told me that it’s fully focused on sound performance with this product and points to that as the reasoning for why it didn’t add mics to the design. The company also says that customers tend to put the Play:5 (and now Sonos Five) in spots where a voice assistant would be inconsequential and of limited use. I’m not really...

The NFC Forum has announced an update for the short-range wireless technology that adds a form of wireless charging to the standard. Future NFC devices could offer wireless charging functionality, albeit in a way that’s far more limited than the popular Qi standard used by almost every other device (via 9to5Google). The new NFC standard is far slower than Qi charging, offering up to 1W speeds compared to base Qi speeds of 5W. (Qi fast charging can reach speeds of 10W or more on standard hardware.) And it’ll require new hardware — you won’t be able to just get a firmware update and suddenly be able to have NFC-based wireless charging on your current device. It’s not meant to replace Qi charging Considering that the speeds are so slow compared to Qi, one might wonder why anyone would bother ...

Twitch is getting a new look — sort of. Starting today you’ll see the site’s channel pages slip into something more comfortable, to borrow a phrase; streamers will now have way more control over what their channel looks like when it’s offline, with a more customizable home page, channel trailers, and more. The changes were first announced at last year’s Twitchcon in San Diego, and they’re finally rolling out today. Probably the coolest part of the new look is the new integrated stream schedule, because it makes it super easy to see when a channel’s next planned stream is — but also because it brings watching Twitch more in line with the experience of watching TV. Now you’ll know when your favorite streamer plans to stream games you like or when they’re having guests on. (And yes: streamers...

On Wednesday, Facebook’s oversight board announced the names of its first 20 members, who will independently oversee moderation disputes on the platform. Chosen in part for a diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds, the members include a former prime minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the Guardian editor who oversaw the publication of the Snowden leaks. Facebook first announced its plans to launch an oversight board in November 2018. In the months following that announcement, the company published a charter and bylaws under which the body will be governed. The group will begin choosing cases to hear this summer. To build the board’s membership, Facebook recruited four co-chairs to lead the body. These include two American professors of constitutional law — Michael McConnell from Stanf...

Spotify is now testing video podcasts in its app, starting with two YouTube stars: Zane Hijazi and Heath Hussar, hosts of Zane and Heath: Unfiltered. The global test, which allows the creators to upload their recorded video footage to the app, will show up for 50 percent of the show’s Spotify podcast listeners, a source close to Spotify tells The Verge, and videos will only be coming to three recent episodes, numbers 28 through 30. The test doesn’t visually indicate which episodes have videos to accompany them; listeners will only know once they tap to press play and they see the video footage at the bottom of their screen. They can tap it to make it full screen. Although this is just an initial test, the source says the feature will likely come to more podcasts in the future — and “fast.”...

Epic’s Fortnite has more than 350 million registered players, the game developer announced on Wednesday. That makes the free-to-play battle royale game one of the most popular titles ever made, ranking up there with the ubiquity of Minecraft and some of the most downloaded mobile and free-to-play PC games of the last 15 years. While we have no indication as to how many players log in every day or month, as Epic doesn’t release those stats, the studio did say that in April alone, players logged 3.2 billion hours of Fortnite. The last player count stat we heard from Epic was about 250 million in March 2019, indicating that the game is still growing a year later and more than two and a half years after its initial release. That’s partly due to the game being so readily available on all platfo...