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Samsung is the undisputed leader in the foldable smartphone business, in part because the Korean giant was the first to manufacture phones with foldable screens. Samsung kept showing off the technology at trade shows like CES before putting together a commercial foldable product. The first Galaxy Fold arrived in early 2019, but the launch wasn’t flawless. Samsung missed two key design issues during testing and had to postpone the release date by almost half a year to fix them. The Galaxy Z rebrand followed in 2020 when Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Flip clamshell and the Galaxy Z Fold 2 foldable. The handsets delivered a few massive upgrades, including a foldable screen made of glass and a hinge mechanism that kept dust away better than the previous models. This year, Samsung is widely expected to launch two foldable devices, the obvious successors of last year’s Flip and Fold. The Flip 3 and Fold 3 might be unveiled as soon as July, with Samsung looking to replace the Note series wit...

Back in December 2020, Congress approved the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) Program as part of the final stimulus package under President Donald Trump. This program would give Americans with low incomes or those who lost income during the pandemic the ability to sign up for $50-per-month internet subsidies that would be administered by the Federal Communications Commission and come out of a $3.2 billion fund set up by the Treasury. On Thursday, the FCC finally revealed when and how eligible Americans will be able to sign up for those subsidies. According to a press release, eligible households will be able to sign up for internet subsidies starting on Wednesday, May 12th to receive a monthly discount off the cost of broadband service from an approved provider. The families can enroll directly through their providers or on https://getemergencybroadband.org . Today’s Top Deal Everyone raves about this nonstick frying pan — now on sale for just $14! Price: $13.99 You Save: $3.00...

It’s axiomatic among digital security professionals there’s really nothing and no one anymore who’s un-hackable, and the sooner we realize that fact in this era of rampant systems intrusions, data breaches , and the like, the better off we’ll be. Law enforcement is a good example of how this is the case. You’d think that those professionals would have access to or deploy even better security protections than most of us enjoy, in order to keep their networks sufficiently hardened — and yet here we are, in a position of having to report that just days ago, Russian hackers struck a police department in the US with a ransomware attack . Today’s Top Deal This magnetic air fryer cheat sheet is a must-have in every kitchen — check out the Amazon reviews! Price: $11.45 You Save: $4.54 (28%) Buy Now Per the BBC , a ransomware group calling itself Babuk breached the computer network of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department. Even worse, the hackers threatened to make sensitive i...

One of these things is not like the other. (Innersloth screenshot) Last year’s viral hit Among Us is planned to debut on PlayStation 4 & 5 later this year. Announced during Sony’s “State of Play” news conference Thursday, the PS4/5 rev of Among Us will come with crossplay, online multiplayer, and exclusive cosmetic items that let you dress your Crewmate up as Ratchet, the protagonist of Sony’s Ratchet & Clank series. The port was made in collaboration with the Seattle-based firm PlayEveryware , which specializes in helping indie developers release their games on console. Among Us, developed in Redmond, Wash., by the indie studio Innersloth, was originally released for Steam and mobile devices in 2018. It’s a murder mystery game where up to two players out of 10 are alien Impostors masquerading as Crewmates, who are out to assassinate everyone else. After two years of relative obscurity, Among Us became popular due to a number of high-profile Twitch streamers picking it up, and ...

Amazon’s total number of full- and part-time employees fell to 1.271 million people in the first quarter of 2021, down 27,000 positions from the fourth quarter of 2020, according to numbers released Thursday along with the company’s blockbuster earnings report. In raw numbers, it’s the largest quarter-over-quarter employment decline in Amazon’s history. But flat or declining employment has been a common pattern for the e-commerce giant in the first quarter in years past. That’s because it follows the peak holiday quarter, when Amazon boosts staffing at its fulfillment and distribution centers. In that way, the raw size of the first-quarter decline speaks more to the company’s sheer size, resulting from years of meteoric growth overall. The most recent quarterly decline translates to a little more than 2% of Amazon employees, making the drop lower than in some recent years on a percentage basis. The numbers do not include temporary or contract workers. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky. (Amazon...

A rendering of the Elephant Car Wash sign as it is planned for Amazon’s headquarters campus in Seattle at the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street. (Cushing Terrell Image via Amazon) This little pink elephant will stay outdoors where it belongs. Amazon’s plans to display the smaller Elephant Car Wash sign on its Seattle headquarters campus now involve putting the historic marker at the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in front of its reInvent tower. Amazon was gifted the sign last fall by Elephant Car Wash owner Bob Haney after the business closed its nearby Denny Triangle location after 64 years of operation. Amazon originally wasn’t sure if the sign would end up inside one of its numerous Seattle office buildings. The larger elephant — a glowing, spinning, pink pachyderm piece of the city’s history — went to the Museum of History and Industry. The Seattle P-I reported this week on Amazon’s plans for the smaller sign, saying that public records show “the tech giant is ...

Boise, Id.-based Engage Technologies Group closed a $15 million Series A funding round for its mobile patient platform targeted for the cosmetic, optometry, dental, and orthopedic industries. Founded in 2016, Engage Technologies’ platform allows patients to access educational video content about routine procedures and care. The healthcare startup was founded by CEO Michael Boerner . Total funding to date is $20 million. The company will use the funds to enter new markets and develop more video content. The funding comes from individual healthcare professionals, the majority of whom are customers. Along with the new funding, Engage Technologies added new members to its board of directors including: USC Clinical Professor of Plastic Surgery W. Grant Stevens Novus Clinic co-founder and President Jerry Sude Former American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery President Robert J. Cionni McRae Dental Founder and President Lon McRae

(Microsoft image) Microsoft will increase the share of net revenue for game developers from the Microsoft Store in a challenge to Valve. Starting on August 1, game developers who publish their titles via the Microsoft Store will receive 88% of the net revenue from sales, up from 70%. “Having a clear, no-strings-attached revenue share means developers can bring more games to more players and find greater commercial success from doing so,” Microsoft CVP Sarah Bond wrote on LinkedIn . This can be readily interpreted as a shot across the bow to Valve Software’s Steam, the leading digital storefront for PC games. Developers who sell games on Steam receive 70% of their sales revenue below $10 million , with 30% of that going to Steam. That 70/30 revenue split was once the industry standard, but several of Steam’s competitors, such as Humble, Discord , and the Epic Games Store , have used that as a point of attack by offering developers a more favorable deal. Once it’s adjusted its terms, the...

Chrome is the world’s most popular browser because it’s made by one of the biggest software developers in the world: Google. That’s also the reason why Chrome is free to use. The majority of Google’s products are available for free because users effectively pay for access with their data. Google collects information to sell targeted ads, and those ads pay for things like Chrome. But Chrome is hardly perfect. Google might be adding new, valuable features to the browser regularly, but it’s also making controversial changes, like the new FLoC tech to track users now that third-party cookies are going away. And while that’s the kind of problem that users can fix, a huge Chrome issue remains that users have no say about. Chrome can be a massive resource hog , which is incredibly annoying on laptops. Chrome consumes battery power as it uses more resources, and it’s often the app that will turn on your notebook’s fans to cool off the device. There is a way to fix all of that if you’re willin...

If you were intrigued by the two Apple Watch models the company introduced last September, but you weren’t looking to buy either at full price, today is your lucky day. Apple has started selling refurbished units of the Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE on its website this week, starting at $259 for the refurbished SE. Apple has been selling refurbished iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV units for years now, and the latest Apple Watch models are joining that list just seven months after launch. The cheapest refurbished model Apple offers is the 44mm Apple Watch SE with a Space Gray aluminum case and Black Sport Band for $259, which is $50 off of the retail price. Apple is also selling a refurbished 40mm Apple Watch Series 6 GPS model with the Gold aluminum case and a Pink Sand Sport Band for $339, which is $60 cheaper than retail. The savings cap out at $100. Today’s Top Deal This magnetic air fryer cheat sheet is a must-have in every kitchen — check out the Amazon reviews! P...

STEM Educators of the Year for 2021, from left to right: Lauren Bricker, Cathi Rodgveller, and Kim Williams. Over the years, GeekWire has highlighted so many of the tireless folks who are nurturing the next generation of geeks. And this year we’re excited to announce a new award to recognize a select group of the Pacific Northwest’s top teachers. This inaugural cohort is an impressive collection of educators who are inspiring young minds to achieve more in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. They come from universities, public schools and nonprofits, and are working with kids from elementary school into college and supporting fellow teachers as well. We invite you to meet our STEM Educators of the Year for 2021, presented by DreamBox Learning , as part of our 2021 GeekWire Awards celebration: Lauren Bricker, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington Lauren Bricker of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of C...

The Amazon Spheres in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Amazon blew past expectations for its first fiscal quarter earnings , posting revenue of $108.5 billion, up 44% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $15.79, up from $5.01. Profits of $8.1 billion and an operating margin of 8.2% set new records. Analysts expected Q1 revenue of $104 billion and earnings per share of $9.54. The Seattle-based giant has surged amid the pandemic as more consumers turn to online shopping and companies rely on its cloud arm, Amazon Web Services. Its advertising and grocery delivery businesses are also gaining momentum, and streaming hours on Prime Video are up 70% year-over-year. Even as life returns to some level of normalcy in parts of the world, Amazon’s growth continues to accelerate, much like other tech powerhouses such as Microsoft , Facebook and Apple , which all reported giant revenue gains this week. In a report this week, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said “we think ...

Vector Remote Care , a digital health startup for care teams to remotely monitor patients with implanted cardiac devices, closed a $12.5 million Series A funding round led by Updata Partners. Based in Bend, Ore., Vector Remote Care will use the funds to double its headcount with a focus on product and engineering. The startup’s services have seen increased demand during the COVID-19 pandemic amid a larger adoption of telemedicine. The company’s solution includes a remote data management tool, software for device reporting, medical billing, and more. Kevin Hoffman founded Vector Remote Care in 2017 and is CEO. The startup’s focus drew on his family’s personal experience with cardiac arrest and his mother’s defibrillator malfunctioning.

The increasing number of iPhones and other Apple devices in use allowed Apple to create a unique device tracking service. It can help users find lost phones, tablets, and other devices even if those gadgets are not connected to the internet or do not have enough battery life. Apple further leveraged this massive iPhone network to launch the AirTag tracker that can ping any nearby iPhone to send out location information about a lost object. Google might not have the same control over the Android network to offer similar object-tracking functionality, but it has found a different way to leverage the massive number of Android devices out there. It’s using them to provide a unique service that will be incredibly useful in certain places. Google built an earthquake detection system on top of Android that could provide early warnings about local seismic activity and save lives. The service launched last year in California, and it’s now expanding to Greece and New Zealand. Today’s Top D...

Because the coronavirus pandemic has made a fast, stable, and secure internet connection more important than it’s likely ever been for many people, AT&T this week announced something of a gift for new and eligible current AT&T Fiber home internet customers. The “gift” is automatic speed upgrades as well as new security features for these customers, which comes as AT&T says customers on its network have consistently spent as much as 14 hours per day streaming apps and 12 hours per day engaged in video conferencing. The gist of what AT&T is doing is as follows: AT&T Fiber customers on entry and mid-level plans are getting a 200Mbps boost to their upload and download speeds, for free. AT&T Fiber’s home internet entry speed, for example, will now be 300Mbps, up from 100Mbps. Today’s Top Deal This magnetic air fryer cheat sheet is a must-have in every kitchen — check out the Amazon reviews! Price: $11.45 You Save: $4.54 (28%) Buy Now The details: That base-...

Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature that rolled out with iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 earlier this week is one of the most talked-about developments in tech. This is the first technology that forces developers to ask for permission before tracking users. That’s why Facebook has been so terrified of the new privacy feature. iOS 14.5 will now let iPhone users block the social network from collecting the precious data it uses to serve personalized ads. As ATT started rolling out, some iPhone and iPad users noticed that the anti-tracking setting appears grayed out in the Settings menu. We already explained what it all means  and Apple posted a support document to detail the three exceptions where the button will be grayed out. But anecdotal evidence indicates some people do not fall into the categories that Apple highlighted, yet they still can’t enable the feature. The good news is that a grayed-out button doesn’t mean the anti-tracking functionality is disabled, and there a...

A screenshot of the animated Baba Yaga label that is being sold as an NFT by Andrew Januik Wines. A Washington state winery with tech connections is getting into the NFT game with a sale of three unique digital artworks commemorating the release of a limited bottling of a cabernet sauvignon. While fine wines largely appeal to an older crowd, the NFT tech phenomenon skews younger. “It’s a way to generate interest from a segment of people who maybe would not have known about the wines,” said winemaker Andrew Januik . The artworks are animated versions of the label for Januik’s Baba Yaga wine — so named for a fabled witch who resides in a house perched on chicken claws. The question now is whether potential buyers will see the value of the NFTs, or write them off as a fantastical tech vision with little more than poultry legs to stand on. A similar experiment seemingly paid off earlier this month for Yao Family Wines, a Napa Valley winery founded by retired basketball star Yao Ming. Th...

Stratolaunch’s Roc carrier plane flies above California’s Mojave Desert. (Stratolaunch via Twitter) Stratolaunch, the aerospace company founded by the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, put the world’s biggest airplane through its second flight test today, two years after the first flight. “We are airborne!” Stratolaunch reported in a tweet . Today’s takeoff from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port at 7:30 a.m. PT marked the first time the plane, nicknamed Roc after the giant bird of Arabian and Persian mythology, got off the ground since Stratolaunch’s acquisition by Cerberus Capital Management in October 2019 . The flight lasted more than three hours — longer than the first flight on April 13, 2019 . Since then, the business model for the 10-year-old venture has shifted: In its early years, Stratolaunch focused on using Roc as a flying launch pad for sending rockets and their payloads to orbit. The concept capitalizes on the air launch system pioneered by SpaceShipOne, which wo...

Apple announced a range of new products at its Spring Loaded event on April 20th, but not all of those products came with release dates. The company wasn’t ready to announce when the new 2021 iMac and iPad Pro models with Apple Silicon chips or the Apple TV 4K with a redesigned Siri Remote would actually start shipping, but multiple sources are now reporting that Apple will release all three new products on May 21st. Back on April 26th, Front Page Tech host Jon Prosser said in a tweet that he was hearing from sources that the 11-inch iPad Pro would arrive on May 22nd, while the 12.9-inch model would arrive a day earlier. He offered an update on Thursday morning, explaining that the May 22nd date is likely in regards to a 5G model for a mobile carrier, and that both sizes of the iPad Pro should be available on May 21st, as should the new Apple TV. Today’s Top Deal AirPods Pro are finally back in stock at Amazon… at the lowest price of 2021! Price: $197.00 You Save: $52.0...

Microsoft announced its acquisition of Kinvolk , a 6-year-old startup out of Berlin that develops open source cloud-based projects. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Kinvolk is the company behind Flatcar Container Linux, an alternative to CoreOS Container Linux designed for container workloads. Kinvolk will contribute to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, “and future projects that will expand Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and increase Microsoft’s upstream open source contributions in the Kubernetes and container space,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post . Microsoft said it is “committed to maintaining and building upon Kinvolk’s open source culture,” which includes continuing community development of Flatcar Container Linux.

A new message on the homepage of Blue Origin’s website. (BlueOrigin.com screenshot) Step aside, Mannequin Skywalker. Blue Origin is getting ready for real humans to man its New Shepard spaceship and replace the high-tech dummy that has flown on previous test flights . In an Instagram post on Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos again said, “It’s time,” and pointed people to the Blue Origin website where a countdown clock is running to May 5. The site encourages people to sign up “to learn how you can buy the very first seat on New Shepard.” Bezos’ post includes highlights from New Shepard’s first uncrewed test flight back in January, in which Blue Origin’s reusable booster rocket and its crew capsule performed a successful mission in West Texas. Bezos is seen zipping across the desert in his pickup truck emblazoned with his space venture’s feather logo. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos) Humans factored more heavily into an April 14 test flight, perform...

(Bigstock Photo) The conservative Freedom Foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday in an effort to stop the capital gains tax approved by the Washington state legislature only four days ago. The legislation places a 7% excise tax on the sale of stocks, bonds, and businesses — the first tax of its type in state history. The lawsuit, expected by both proponents and opponents of the new tax, asserts that the new tax is illegal under the Washington state constitution which sharply limits income taxes. Backers of the tax, approved in the form of SB 5096, counter that the tax isn’t an income tax at all but an excise tax which is common and legal in the state. The tax would be narrowly applied to capital gains of more than $250,000. And it would exempt a laundry list of potential capital gains including real estate land and structures; retirement accounts; livestock for farming or ranching; and the sale of timber and timberlands, among other exceptions.  If it survives legal challenges, it will...

The Apple AirTag offers an affordable way for iPhone users to track nearly anything, but there’s a catch. By itself, the AirTag can really only be thrown into a bag. To make it more versatile, you’ll need some accessories. Read This Article on How-To Geek ›

The world has digitized its way in the 21st century. The applications and websites need UX/UI designers to increase the sales of their products. Both UX designers and UI designers need to be creative and make the application or the website easy to use. It should essentially have a fresher appeal so that everyone can have a clear idea of what to do when you launch the application. In today’s blog, we will tell you the top reasons for using illustrations to amplify games. But before we proceed to the reasons for using illustrations, let us quickly help you get a better understanding of illustrations and the types of illustrations. What is illustration? The illustration is the way to interact with the users via visual aid ; it can represent the context behind the formation of the application in a user-friendly manner such as when the person uses the application it doesn’t seem foreign to him or her. It helps the user understand the concept of the text or story easily. What do illustratio...