Author: News Room

We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency.UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show up anywhere have UTA agents representing them. For full disclosure, that includes me! UTA handled the sale of the forthcoming Decoder book. Which means I paid them money, making this a reverse conflict of interest. Now you know.Anyhow, that has nothing to do with Ali and…

One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the bill — the money came from Partiful.As a college ambassador for the startup, D’Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says…

If you’re into automatic watches, getting a decent watch winder isn’t just a luxury – it’s genuinely useful. These watches rely on your wrist’s motion to keep ticking, so if your favourite piece spends more time sitting in its case than being worn, it’ll eventually stop. A winder solves that by keeping everything moving when you’re not. A good one doesn’t just keep your watch running, either. It can also help preserve its accuracy by preventing the oils inside the movement from drying out – something that can happen if it’s left idle for too long. Whether you’ve got a…

I’ve got a clean driving license and would like to keep it that way. Yet even the most attentive drivers can accidentally creep over the speed limit at the wrong time and end up with the dreaded points and fine double-whammy. Ooono’s puck-like Co-Driver No2 aims to keep you within the law while letting you keep your eyes on the road ahead – and doesn’t charge a subscription fee in the process. After driving with one in my car for the past few weeks, I’m convinced it’s the ideal accessory for those shorter trips and journeys on UK and European…

Rocking an iPhone? If so, chances are your smartwatch of choice is an Apple Watch. There’s a new one on the horizon too – the Apple Watch Series 12. It’s not official, of course, (nothing ever is until the launch event), but we all know it’s coming later this year. For now, then, we’ll have to make do with industry analysts, sensible predictions, and rumours. If you want the short version, everything so far points to a more familiar update, with a new chip, watchOS 27, Apple’s rebuilt Siri experience, and a handful of under-the-hood improvements doing most of the…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.Microsoft closed out Summer Game Fest with a bang. The company’s annual June showcase was packed with crowd-pleasers: Halo, Gears of War, Fable, a translucent Xbox, and even some pleasant surprises like new Persona and Crazy Taxi games. It was the kind of event that harkened back to the boisterous days of E3,…

Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely common problem. At least, that’s how it started.On this episode of Version History, we dig into the history of the Keurig, and the ways in which the idea got vastly bigger than anyone expected. K-Cups and Keurig machines became ubiquitous in offices all across the…

“Group project, but make it 1776.” That’s how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google’s collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence.Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to check on the status of a draft, who takes a photo and uses AI to transcribe it into a Google Doc. Franklin and Adams hop in to make edits in suggestion mode, Gemini finds them a meeting time, takes notes during a Google Meet call, and…

Baking sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast instead of the simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it might sound anathema to bring a gadget into the mix.The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick — backed and branded by King Arthur flour — is that it promises to automate the boring bit of sourdough baking: starter management. It feeds your starter flour and water on a set schedule, ready for exactly when you want to bake, leaving you to focus on kneading, shaping, and the actual baking.Like any single-purpose kitchen gadget, you’ll have to be confident you’ll…

When I first started testing Vizio’s 65-inch Mini LED Quantum TV, I thought the big story was that Vizio was back and that it had a quantum-dot TV for under $398 — the cheapest on the market. Vizio’s been pretty quiet since it was acquired by Walmart in 2024, so putting out a TV with quantum dots, which allow for higher brightness levels and more accurate color, at a budget price seemed like a strong comeback.But that’s not the big story. While those two points are intriguing, the big news about the Mini LED Quantum TV is that Vizio accidentally…

The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum by a pretty comfortable margin. If you’ve been thinking about buying one, you may want to plan on doing it sooner than later. The company will raise its price by $250 on September 9th, going from $1,245 to $1,495. Matic told The Verge that the new price reflects its rising costs for memory and other components for the vacuum, which it says are now tenfold.Those who buy one directly from the company will get a year’s worth of replacement bags worth $96 at no extra cost. Each refill contains 12 bags, and they…

I know a vocal group of people who swear by the number pad on their keyboard. And yet, for years I haven’t cared about using one — until I put my hands on the Epomaker RT98. It’s a mechanical keyboard with a charming retro aesthetic, a fun CRT-like screen, VIA compatibility, a nice typing feel, and most importantly, a modular number pad that can be moved to either side. It’s a clever compromise in a budget friendly-ish board, allowing you to further customize your setup without losing the functionality of the coveted “tenkey.”But like many mechanical keyboards out there, it’s…