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Skiers and snowboarders love to go fast. They seek the thrill that comes from strapping on a pair of freshly waxed planks (or just one) and gliding down a mountain trail with controlled speed through carved turns. To get that speed, competitive racers spend hours crafting the perfect combination of chemical waxes to reduce friction over changing snow conditions and achieve the slipperiest surface between snow and ski.

Waymo, the frontrunner in the self-driving car industry, today announces the moment everyone has been waiting for: It is officially “launching” a robo-taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, wherein riders will use an app to hail the vehicles to take them anywhere in an 80 to 100 square mile area, for a price. “Today, we're taking the next step in our journey with the introduction of our commercial self-driving service, Waymo One,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote in a blog post.

Wherever the future of driving leads us, Porsche is sure of one thing: We’re going to need some excellent maps. And not just for navigation, either. That’s why Porsche is announcing today a collaboration with open source mapping platform Mapbox. Designers from the two companies are working together to explore new ways of using in-car maps, making them more than tools for getting from one place to another as efficiently as possible.

If America’s biggest automaker’s crystal ball is working, the future of cars has way fewer cars. That’s the thinking driving General Motors’ major internal restructuring announcement, which came Monday. The company plans to stop producing many compact or sedan models, including the Chevrolet Cruze, Volt, and Impala, the Buick LaCrosse, and the Cadillac CT6. It will close at least three assembly plants that build those cars, in Youngstown, Ohio, Oshawa, Ontario, and Detroit.

The first PopSockets gripper I plastered to my phone's rear-end was a freebie gift thing I received from some company’s swag bag. Amidst the magnets, notebooks, business cards, and other marketing ephemera, there it was: the circular doodad that has leapfrogged selfie-sticks as the must-have mobile accessory for our smartphone-saturated society. When I fished it out of the tote, I felt secretly delighted. Then I felt sort of dopey.

In news that might help you make some sense of your fragmented, frustrating device set up, Amazon announced today that its Echo devices will support Apple Music starting December 17. It’s a small breakthrough in the streaming wars, one that should help bring some sense to your streaming strategy. And you’ve got Apple’s increasing need to branch out beyond hardware to thank.

Crash a new car today, and you might be surprised by how many airbags spring to your defense. Passenger cars coming off the assembly line nowadays can have 20 or more safety sacks lying in wait. They’re tucked into the steering wheel and dashboard, of course, but they also pop out of seat belts, doors, rear seats, and the ceiling. And now, they might be headed for the outside of the car. That’s the idea behind the “external side airbag,” the work of auto industry supplier ZF.

There was a time when social media was just for sharing things with your friends. Then you started looking up your old flames from high school, and you added them to keep tabs on who got engaged or had a baby. Your parents got on social media, so you had to add them too.

Since it launched in 2015, Google's Project Fi has quietly been one of the best deals in tech. An alternative to mainstream carriers, it offers simplified data plans, easy international use, and a slew of other perks. The catch: Only Google's Nexus and Pixel phones—and, more recently, a smattering of third-party Android options—have worked on it.

Brand-influencer relationships used to be as simple as a YouTuber standing next to a man dressed as a giant tongue. At the very first Vidcon, in 2010, the tongue-scraper company Orabrush sent a bumpy pink mascot to the convention center to strike up quasi-impromptu interactions with early influencers like iJustine.