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Kevin Weil, Twitter’s former VP of product who was among the group of executives who left the company over the weekend, has a new job: Head of Product at Facebook-owned Instagram.

That’s according to multiple sources, who claim Weil was recruited by Instagram for months before announcing his departure from Twitter late Sunday night. The timing makes sense. Peter Deng has been Instagram’s head of product for the past two-plus years, and recently jumped to another Facebook property, Oculus, earlier this month. So the head of product position is (temporarily) vacant.

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Lyft has agreed today to pay drivers $12.25 million in compensation, give them certain benefits, and warn them when they are about to be deactivated, Reuters reports — but the ride-sharing service still won’t classify them as employees. A court filing detailed the settlement, which comes after Lyft drivers brought a lawsuit against the company that argued that they should be classified as employees, and were entitled to travel expenses as part of their work.

An attorney for the Lyft drivers said that the settlement — which still has to be approved by a San Francisco federal court judge — will “result in some significant changes that will benefit the drivers,” but that it did not achieve the reclassification as employees they hoped for….

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Yesterday’s earnings report from LG painted a bleak picture of the company’s mobile business, which hasn’t generated meaningful profit since about this time last year, and even then it was only moderately successful. Sources familiar with LG’s plans now tell The Verge that the company is going for a fundamental redesign with its next flagship smartphone, the LG G5. Unlike the G3 and G4 (pictured above) that preceded it, the G5 will not be an evolution of its forebears — it will look and feel “nothing like” those earlier Android smartphones.

The operating system won’t be changing, of course, but LG’s new flagship will have a significantly altered design, with our sources confirming it will feature a new accessory slot at the bottom, as f…

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It’s not supplanted R2-D2 in the “cute robots we wish were our best friends” stakes just yet, but The Force Awakens’ BB-8 is getting close. Sadly, we’re at least a few years away from the kind of artificial intelligence that’ll let us create a race of real-life droids. Until then, we can either with Sphero’s smaller version of the Star Wars robot, or — like 17-year-old engineering prodigy Angelo Casimiro — take matters into our own hands.

Angelo’s version of BB-8 is life-size, controllable with an iPhone, and built from just $120 worth of parts. For the body, Angelo took a low-tech approach, slathering a beach ball with paper mache to build the central sphere, before topping it with a domed styrofoam “head.” Inside, Angelo has used an A…

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If you use a padlock on a regular basis — at the gym or locking up your bike — then you’ll know the annoyance of misplacing your key or forgetting your combination. (It’s stupid but it happens.) Canadian tech firm Pishon Lab wants to solve this by kitting out padlocks with a security measure that’s become almost essential on smartphones: the fingerprint sensor. The company has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for its fingerprint-secured TappLock padlock, which Pishon claims is “the ultimate in security and convenience.”

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Kevin Weil, Twitter’s former VP of product who was among the group of executives who left the company over the weekend, has a new job: Head of Product at Facebook-owned Instagram.

That’s according to multiple sources, who claim Weil was recruited by Instagram for months before announcing his departure from Twitter late Sunday night. The timing makes sense. Peter Deng has been Instagram’s head of product for the past two-plus years and jumped to another Facebook property, Oculus, earlier this month. So the head of product position is (temporarily) vacant.

An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment.

The move is a bit of salt in the wound for Twitter, which is was already losing a number of key executives, and now has at least one headed to a direct competitor. Contrary to numerous reports, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Sunday night that all of Twitter’s executive departures were resignations, including Weil’s. If Instagram was indeed recruiting Weil for months, that seems to support Dorsey’s message. It may also be why sources inside the company tell Re/code that it appeared Weil’s responsibilities were scaled back following company-wide layoffs in October.

Weil wasn’t the only executive to leave on his own accord. According to numerous sources, VP of Engineering Alex Roetter and Media boss Katie Stanton also resigned, and were not fired as numerous stories claim. Both execs had been at at Twitter for more than five years. Roetter apparently alerted Dorsey of his decision to leave sometime after the company’s reorg late last year.

We assume Weil will report to Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom in his new role. We do not have an idea when he is expected to start, but it certainly won’t be this week. According to an SEC filing from Tuesday, Weil and Roetter are set to stay at the company until January 29 and February 4, respectively.

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Days after Kanye West announced that work was completed on long-awaited new record Swish and posted the tracklist for what he believes will be “the best album of all time,” something major about its release has changed: Swish is no more, and now we’re all waiting on Waves.

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West later tweeted an updated and embellished version of the tracklist for The Album Formerly Known As Swish, adding a new track and suggesting possible involvement from A$AP Rocky, The-Dream, and Swizz Beatz:

If you’re keeping count, that’s the third official title for West’s seventh album, though we can’t say we weren’t warned even after So Help Me God gave way to Swish.

West’s fifth album was also expected to be called Good Ass Job before that was ditched for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So then. Waves, or whatever it ends up being titled for real, will be out on February 11th and see a live premiere at Madison Square Garden also screened in theaters.

Update, 9.45PM: Added second tweet with new tracklist photo.

Microsoft’s experimental app outfit, the Microsoft Garage, released another iOS app today called News Pro. The reader is similar to Apple’s own offering, Apple News, and mobile mainstay Flipboard. You can login with a Facebook or LinkedIn account, where you’ll pick topics of interest like finance, tech, and design to get a selection of algorithmically chosen articles in a more mobile-friendly reading format. News Pro has a highlights section for getting a list of top stories and an explore tab for checking out new topics organized by industries, organizations, skills, and products. That type of granularity may be useful to some users, especially those interested in certain subtopics like coding languages.

By linking with either your Facebook or LinkedIn account, Microsoft’s is trying to glean what topics interest you most from a social and work perspective. It succeeds in some respects, and fails in others. It accurately subscribed me to The Verge, video games, nanotechnology, and graphic design, among other topics. But it also thinks I like farming, dairy, and food production, which I’m sure was gleaned from some strange misunderstanding of my Facebook activity and liked pages. News Pro also put me down as a sports fan, despite my appetite for sports-related news being almost non-existent.

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear. Garage apps, which are made by a hodgepodge of company employees, are often one-off projects put out in the wild and forgotten. They rarely if ever move from one platform to another, and Microsoft has already confirmed Android and Windows 10 Mobile users won’t be getting News Pro. Still, if you’re an iPhone user looking for a no-frills reader to stay informed and Apple News and Flipboard just don’t cut it, Microsoft’s product may be worth your time. One big benefit of News Pro is that its web app works on any device, so it could be a good desktop destination for when you’re bored at the office.

If you use a padlock on a regular basis — at the gym or locking up your bike — then you’ll know the annoyance of misplacing your key or forgetting your combination. (It’s stupid but it happens.) Canadian tech firm Pishon Lab wants to solve this by kitting out padlocks with a security measure that’s become almost essential on smartphones: the fingerprint sensor. The company has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for its fingerprint-secured TappLock padlock, which Pishon claims is “the ultimate in security and convenience.”

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The TappLock app lets you request and share entry with other users

The TappLock comes in two variations: a beefy version with a three-year battery life that doubles up as a portable phone charger, and a smaller version, the TappLock Lite, which only has a six-month battery life and can’t charge your phone. You set the padlock up with the help of a smartphone app (available on iOS, Android, and Windows), with Pishon claiming that the TappLock unlocks in just 0.8 seconds. The app also allows you to unlock your padlock using your phone and share entry with other users — either on request or during pre-defined windows of time.

All this sounds convenient, but questions of reliability are difficult to answer. Smart padlocks have been tried in the past (including the iFingerLock and the Bluetooth-only Noke range), but user reviews of these products usually include complaints about locks randomly seizing and refusing to open. Pishon is also being slightly economical with the truth in its marketing material: the video for its Indiegogo campaign (above) shows the lock’s built-in alarm sounding when someone attempts to cut the shackle, but the company later clarifies that the alarm only goes off if the shackle is already broken. And misleading crowdfunding campaigns don’t usually end well.

So, adding a bunch of sensors and electronics to a lock doesn’t necessarily make it simpler to use, but if the TappLock is as reliable as its owners claim then it could be handy. Pishon is trying to raise a total of $40,000 on a fixed goal scheme, meaning that if they don’t hit this target they won’t take any money (a positive sign when it comes to crowdfunding schemes), with early-bird prices starting at $29 for the smaller TappLock and $49 for the larger version.

To Apple enthusiasts, it’s hard to imagine that someone might go more than a year or two without upgrading to the latest and greatest iPhone.

With new plans from AT&T, Verizon, and Apple itself that make it easy (if perhaps not cost-effective) to trade in your iPhone for a new model every year, many gadget lovers are well-equipped to always have the newest iPhone. But many, many people — a majority of iPhone owners, in fact — do not upgrade every year, or even every 15 months, according to data released by Apple CEO Tim Cook on this quarter’s conference call.

In fact, only 40 percent of iPhone users who — deep breath for caveat — owned an iPhone the day before the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, have upgraded to one of the new, larger screened phones: either the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, or 6s Plus. That means 3 in 5 iPhone owners in September 2014 have yet to upgrade to new phones.

And it’s been a very slow climb. A year ago, after the first quarter of iPhone 6 availability, barely 15 percent of iPhone owners had upgraded, and that’s in a quarter where Apple sold nearly 75 million iPhones. See this chart:

So, if you read an article that says Apple’s sales have flatlined (Apple sold roughly 75 million iPhones in both the December 2014 and 2015 quarters), just remember: there are millions of people still using the iPhone 4 or 5 who might be upgrading to Cupertino’s newest phone in the next year or two. And that’s a lot of phones.