The second-gen Apple Pencil is $40 off today

Right now, you can buy the second-gen Apple Pencil for $89.99 instead of $129.99. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The holidays are quickly approaching, and if you haven’t started shopping for gifts yet, you should probably stop procrastinating ASAP. That’s not necessarily because you’re running out of time — though you … Read more

Foundamental closes $85M fund for early-stage construction tech startups

The trillion-dollar construction industry is often tarred with the inefficiency brush, accused of failing to move with the times and ignoring digitization in favor of legacy tools. But there is plenty of evidence that things are changing, with countless startups raising large sums of cash to help the construction industry modernize. Venture capital (VC) funding in … Read more

Poppi raises a can to fresh capital to support its functional beverage growth

Consumer tastes are always shifting, but while traditional soft drink giants continue to dominate in the beverage space, many smaller players are finding success in developing soft drink-like offerings that also have a healthier function. Some venture capitalists say most beverage companies won’t end up being big players, but Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand, is … Read more

Magazine app Flipboard adds support for original content with new notes feature

Magazine reading app Flipboard is becoming the latest contender in the battle to relocate some of the online conversations taking place on Twitter onto its own platform instead. The company today announced that Flipboard’s curators will be able to publish original content into their magazine in order to engage with their readers in a conversation. … Read more

Amazon’s Echo Show adds more accessibility features, including ‘Gestures’ and text-to-speech

Amazon today is introducing a small handful of new features for its digital assistant Alexa that aim to make the device more accessible. The company is launching two new ways to interact with Alexa without speaking including support for Gestures on Echo Show devices that will users to interact with the device by raising their … Read more

How to avoid being victimized by porch pirates

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge It’s the holiday shopping season, and although people are once again visiting stores in person, most of us are also (or only) shopping online. That means there are a lot of packages being sent and received — and, unfortunately, stolen. Social networks and the media are full of … Read more

Decentralized discourse: How open source is shaping Twitter’s future

Six weeks on from Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover, few words can fully encapsulate events as they have unfolded in the period since. “Chaotic” or “farcical” come pretty close, though, with mass layoffs, u-turns, ultimatums, resignations, crowdsourced ban-reversals, advertiser standoffs, picking fights with Apple, and a revamped verification system that has everyone and their uncle … Read more

Google postpones Chrome changes that could have big impact on ad blocking extensions

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google no longer plans to begin turning off the Chrome browser’s old extensions standard in January, the company’s developer advocate for Chrome Extensions Simeon Vincent has announced (via 9to5Google). The company is currently in the process of transitioning from the Manifest V2 (MV2) extension standard to Manifest V3 … Read more