Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice has left the company. Vice stepped down from his role, according to a report from CNBC. Chairman Fatih Ozmen will serve as interim CEO, with Eren Ozmen as president. The company also confirmed in a statement […]

The post Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice steps down amid challenges as $5 billion startup struggles to launch space plane first appeared on Tech Startups.

Following a lawsuit filed by Fubo over Disney’s practices with Hulu + Live TV, the two services are merging into a single business, and one that may end up rivaling YouTube TV in a meaningful way.

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At CES 2025, Hyper unveiled the HyperSpace Trackpad Pro – a first of its kind. , so far, has been the only good external multi-touch trackpad on the market. Hyper aims to change that with this new product, and unlike the Magic Trackpad, it’ll also work super well for Windows users.

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Satechi has been my go-to for Apple accessories for years. Their , docks, and stands are always sleek, functional, and perfectly matched to Apple’s aesthetic. Now, they’re back with something exciting for Mac Mini M4 users—a new hub and stand with built-in SSD storage, revealed at CES 2025.

Here’s what you need to know!

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The patient acquired bird flu from backyard chickens.

Scientists have stumbled upon an entirely new way for icy worlds to collide and form binary pairs in space.

It's been three decades since Ninja Sentai Kakuranger gifted the internet with one of its best weekly memes.

Seven US states have declared a state of emergency as a winter storm continues to strike.

Tom Vice, the CEO of private space technologies company Sierra Space, has left the company, according to a CNBC report.  Vice held the position for three and a half years, overseeing the VC-backed company’s $290 million fundraise at a $5.3 billion valuation in 2023 and securement of a military satellite contract in early 2024.  Despite […]

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In a bid to streamline, Dell is dropping some of its most iconic laptop brands. At CES 2025 on Monday, the PC company announced that XPS, Inspiron, and Latitude are moving to a farm upstate. In their stead come Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. The move is a bid to create “unified branding” […]

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Google has reached out to Pixel 4a owners today about an upcoming software update that will “improve the stability of their battery’s performance.” This is part of a “Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program.”

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Apple has officially responded to growing concerns around incorrect Apple Intelligence notification summaries. In a statement today, the company said it will release a software update “in the coming weeks” that makes it clearer when Apple Intelligence is summarizing notifications…

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AMD introduced a powerful new laptop chip today, the Ryzen AI Max. The company compared its new chip to Apple’s M4 line in several benchmarks, but there’s a very important detail it left out.

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The US Department of Defense has added tech giant Tencent and lithium-ion battery maker CATL to its list of Chinese military companies, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The designation doesn’t impose sanctions or a ban, but it could make it more difficult for the companies to do business in the US.

Along with owning the popular messaging app WeChat, Tencent is a major name in the gaming industry, as it owns League of Legends developer Riot Games and has invested in many others, including Epic Games, Larian Studios, Ubisoft, and FromSoftware. Meanwhile, CATL is the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery maker, with its products appearing across EVs from Tesla, Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, and more.

The designations originate from President-elect Donald Trump’s executive order in 2020, which prevented US companies from investing in entities with ties to the Chinese military. DJI, which was put on the list in 2022, says US Customs is blocking its drone imports and eventually filed a lawsuit claiming the designation has resulted in “lost business deals” and a stigma “as a national security threat.”

These companies don’t always stay on the Department of Defense’s list, as the US removed Chinese phone maker Xiaomi just months after adding it in 2021. Both Tencent and CATL plan to push back on the designations. “We are not a military company or supplier,” Tencent spokesperson Danny Marti said in a statement to The Verge. “Unlike sanctions or export controls, this listing has no impact on our business. We will nonetheless work with the Department of Defense to address any misunderstanding.” CATL similarly told Bloomberg that its inclusion was “clearly a mistake.”

The Verge reached out to CATL with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

Is Samsung’s round robot finally ready to roll out of CES demos and into actual homes?

Ballie, the rolling robot that reemerged at CES last year, will be shipping to consumers as an actual product sometime in 2025. That’s what Samsung is saying at the moment, anyway. We were first introduced to Ballie at CES five years ago. Since then, the robot has undergone a more practical redesign, so maybe it’s really going to happen — but I’m still more skeptical than not.

Am I the only one who thinks those wheels look a bit flimsy? Maybe Samsung is intentionally building in a weak spot and planning ahead for whenever Ballie secretly amasses an army and turns against us.

Either way, Ballie is putting in yet another CES appearance here in Las Vegas. During Samsung’s First Look event last night, I watched the latest canned demo of the round bot. Its operator asked for information about a nearby attraction, The Sphere, which Ballie first projected onto the ground. But when more details and driving directions were requested, Ballie automatically turned around and beamed its image onto a nearby wall instead so that it would have more room to work with.

From there, Ballie was asked to show a movie. It brought up Sony’s Uncharted, and when commanded to make the picture bigger, Ballie was smart enough to look for a wall that could accommodate the enlarged projection. The image wasn’t particularly bright; Ballie does better in that regard when beaming onto the floor immediately in front of itself. Don’t expect any ANSI lumen miracles from this rather small gadget. The built-in speakers were plenty loud, at least, and didn’t sound tinny.

In another interaction, the person demoing Ballie held up a pair of wine bottles and asked the robot which would make a better pairing for his dinner, showing that Ballie has some visual AI powers at its disposal. Responses to most queries came within a couple of seconds without any hiccups. But again, I only saw a very controlled demo, and for all I know, it’s possible that this Ballie already had these answers programmed in. I trust absolutely nothing at this show.

You communicate with Ballie through voice, and at times, the robot also projects virtual buttons onto the floor that can be stepped on to make a selection. (I’m curious as to what its accessibility features might entail.) Samsung has also given Ballie plenty of power over the smart home; you can tell it to control your lights and various routines.

Samsung told outlets including CNET and TechCrunch, that Ballie is indeed rolling out this year. TechRadar got an even more specific “first half of 2025” timeframe. It’s possible Samsung could share more details during its CES keynote later today. As for price, your guess is as good as mine. What’s a fair amount to pay for a robot you’ll insist on showing everyone you know for a few weeks? That is, until you grow to resent Ballie for paling in comparison to the expectations set by BB-8 and WALL-E.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge

If we buy Microsoft’s recent ad campaign logic that any Game Pass-running device is an Xbox, it’s time to congratulate LG smart TV owners: You’ll soon own an Xbox. (Yippee!!) Microsoft announced Monday that the Xbox app will arrive on LG’s latest smart TVs later this year, letting Game Pass Ultimate subscribers stream to their sets from Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Microsoft and LG said the Xbox app will only be available on “supported” models of LG’s newest smart TVs (without specifying any models). Once the app launches, you’ll find it in LG TVs’ new Gaming Portal, which will also include casual webOS games.

In addition to Game Pass Ultimate’s streaming library (including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and more), LG TVs will also support Microsoft’s new feature that lets you stream some of your Xbox games. That only supports around 50 titles right now, but at least some quality ones are in there, like Balatro, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077 and NBA 2K25. It also only works with digital games you own; no dice for physical copies.

Microsoft says more details about the partnership will arrive “in the coming months.” Game Pass Ultimate costs $20 monthly.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-cloud-streaming-is-coming-to-new-lg-smart-tvs-204457962.html?src=rss

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Disney is buying Fubo and plans to merge the sports streaming platform with its Hulu + Live TV service, gaining 70 percent ownership of the company that up until today was suing it over antitrust concerns and allegations of anticompetitive practices.

According to Fubo’s announcement today, the unified company will be known as Fubo, and Fubo executives will run it. People will also continue to be able to subscribe to Fubo without subscribing to Hulu + Live TV and vice versa. Also part of the announcement is the revelation that Fubo has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over Venu, a joint venture sports app that the companies plan to launch and that Fubo was seeking to block, citing the three firms' allegedly anticompetitive practices.

Fubo had previously claimed that Disney, Fox, and WBD had forced it to pay for irrelevant channels that don’t appeal to sports fans by bundling those networks with sports networks. Fubo’s lawsuit accused Disney and Fox of forcing it to spend millions on unwanted content and forcing it “to drop valuable channels” through price hikes.

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The Waymo self-driving company says it has fixed a problem that caused a car to repeatedly circle a parking lot for about five minutes while its rider was trying to get to an airport.

Last month, Mike Johns posted a video on LinkedIn showing what happened after he was picked up by a Waymo self-driving car in Scottsdale, Arizona. Johns' post said the car made eight circles. After a Waymo support agent helped get the car moving in the right direction, he was driven to the airport in time to make his flight.

"Why is this happening to me on a Monday? I'm in a Waymo car and this car is just going in circles... I got a flight to catch, why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy," he said in the video.

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AMD's CES announcements include a tease about next-gen graphics cards, a new flagship desktop CPU, and a modest refresh of its processors for handheld gaming PCs. But the company's largest announcement, by volume, is about laptop processors.

Today the company is expanding the Ryzen AI 300 lineup with a batch of updated high-end chips with up to 16 CPU cores and some midrange options for cheaper Copilot+ PCs. AMD has repackaged some of its high-end desktop chips for gaming laptops, including the first Ryzen laptop CPU with 3D V-Cache enabled. And there's also a new-in-name-only Ryzen 200 series, another repackaging of familiar silicon to address lower-budget laptops.

Ryzen AI 300 is back, along with high-end Max and Max+ versions

Ryzen AI is back, with Max and Max+ versions that include huge integrated GPUs. Credit: AMD

We came away largely impressed by the initial Ryzen AI 300 processors in August 2024, and new processors being announced today expand the lineup upward and downward.

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Telegram, the popular social network and messaging application which has also become a hotbed for all sorts of serious criminal activity, provided U.S. authorities with data on more than 2,200 users last year, according to newly released data from Telegram.

The news shows a massive spike in the number of data requests fulfilled by Telegram after French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part because of the company’s unwillingness to provide user data in a child abuse investigation. Between January 1 and September 30, 2024, Telegram fulfilled 14 requests “for IP addresses and/or phone numbers” from the United States, which affected a total of 108 users, according to Telegram’s Transparency Reports bot. But for the entire year of 2024, it fulfilled 900 requests from the U.S. affecting a total of 2,253 users, meaning that the number of fulfilled requests skyrocketed between October and December, according to the newly released data.

“Fulfilled requests from the United States of America for IP address and/or phone number: 900,” Telegram’s Transparency Reports bot said when prompted for the latest report by 404 Media. “Affected users: 2253,” it added.