Tech Trend 247

One socially conscious company is making your emoji keyboard a little less perfect in an effort to tackle food waste.

Hungry Harvest, a startup service that delivers "recovered produce" to consumers' doorsteps, has created a series of "ugly" fruit and vegetable emoji meant to get people thinking — and typing — about our preoccupation with aesthetically pleasing food.

In late September, the company rolled out Ugly Produce!, an iOS app that gives every user a package of new emoji, including a slightly misshapen strawberry and an imperfect potato.

Pretty produce is the standard in most U.S. supermarkets, meaning fruits and veggies that have visible variations from our standard idea of a robust apple or a snappy carrot are usually tossed. That means roughly 1 out of every 5 edible fruits and vegetables are thrown out every year — simply for appearing a little out of sorts.

Roughly 1 out of every 5 edible fruits and veggies are tossed every year.

This adds up to a lot of wasted food — but it's not only an American problem. About one-third of all food produced worldwide is wasted or lost between the process of food production and consumption, worth around $1 trillion annually.

All this waste is disheartening when you consider the realities of hunger and food insecurity across the globe. But high rates of discarded food also have adverse impacts on the environment. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills in the U.S., contributing substantially to methane gas emissions that warm the atmosphere.

Hungry Harvest wants you to use its emoji to make an impact. But it isn't stopping with just an opt-in app. The company is taking its mission further, currently petitioning to encourage Unicode, Apple and Google to adopt the imperfect produce into their standard emoji keyboards.

While it isn't likely that these massive tech companies will change their faultless emoji fruit for something a little more flawed, iPhone users who want to make a difference can tackle the issue through tech. 

At the very least, it will make you think twice next time you scoff at a misshapen melon.

Welcome to the 2016 presidential election.

Here we have a photograph of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton standing before a crowd full of excited young supporters at a campaign event in Orlando... except the group of "millennials" greeted Clinton by literally turning their backs to her. 

You're probably asking yourself what could possibly be more important than looking directly at the potential first female president of the United States. A selfie, of course.

The iconic photograph, captured by Barbara Kinney — a former White House photographer for Bill Clinton who is currently working full time for the Hillary Clinton campaign — perfectly highlights the essence of this generation's technological priorities.

Though it is unclear whether the massive group selfie session was requested by Clinton herself, the candidate is no stranger to the art of selfie taking.

What a time to be alive.

Mashable has reached out to Barbara Kinney for comment.

Amidst all the crazy news at Apple's iPhone event last week, the announcement of new emoji may have gotten lost in the shuffle. (Remember the shuffle? RIP.)

As part of the iOS 10 update that rolled out this week, a slew of new – and for the most part, progressive – emoji are available on your iPhone.

With so many new emoji sliding into your DMs, we created a guide on when each is most appropriate to use. 

Here are our suggestions on when you should use all of the shiny new emoji. Happy texting!

Andrew Luck, the highest-paid player in NFL history, got a cool new piece of technology recently.

No, not a personal robot butler or a self-driving car — a flip phone.

Luck, who will make $25 million this season alone, announced on his Facebook page Thursday that he's upgraded to a new flip phone. We're guessing it cost him about $11, so he should have plenty of cash left over to get him through the next few months.

"I like it. It’s a comfort thing," Luck told USA Today earlier this month. "I don’t think I want to be connected 24/7, and this phone is maybe sort of a reminder that you don’t have to be connected."

Sure, Andrew, but like, does that thing even have Tetris?

I just want to Netflix and Chill like it's 1999.

Netflix has become a staple of entertainment. It's assumed that everyone you know has an account, and if they don't, they're using someone else's. 

But let's not forget how Netflix started back in 1998 as a revolutionary DVD-by-mail service. Users would create a queue of movies or TV shows online, and then the company and its customers would exchange DVDs by mail. (This service actually still exists.)

Even though the streaming version of Netflix we all know and love is much more popular, there were a lot of advantages to the old fashioned DVD-by-mail Netflix.

Here are 10 things we miss about it:

1. Inviting someone over to watch Netflix made you feel super fancy.

2. There was no fear of a bad Wi-Fi connection getting in the way of movies loading.

3. Receiving a Netflix envelope in the mail was the ultimate after-school excitement.

4. A Netflix and Chill invitation didn't come with any pressure to do more than just watch Netflix.

5. There was no burden to watch every episode of 10-season shows like Friends within three days.

6. Indecisiveness didn't cut into watching time as much, because there were only three DVDs to choose from.

7. Instead of Netflix's "continue watching" prompt, the DVD would straight up stop playing — a kind reminder of your humanity. 

8. Malnourishment due to binge watching spirals was less of a problem. You could get a snack and change the DVD in one trip!

9. DVDs came with special features.

10. No one ever asked you for your Netflix password.

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Bonus: Thanks Netflix.