The highest-earning YouTube star in the world is an 8-year-old kid who makes millions reviewing toys online. 

Ryan Kaji, of YouTube's Ryan ToysReview, generated $22 million in revenue in a single year from his YouTube fame, according to Forbes in its latest report on YouTuber earnings.

A family-run YouTube channel, Ryan ToysReview generated about $22 million in pretax income from June 1, 2017, through June 1, 2018, according to Forbes, up from $11 million the year prior. The raw estimate of $22 million put Ryan ToysReview just ahead of controversial star Jake Paul (who banked $21.5 million that year).

Ryan ToysReview started from occasional five-minute toy-unboxing videos posted to YouTube, with Ryan as the host in 2015. 

As the channel began to grow in views and subscribers, Michael Bienstock, chief executive of the influencer-focused wealth-management company Semaphore, reached out to Ryan ToysReview, and had a conversation with Ryan's dad about how complicated things would get financially if the channel continued to grow at this pace, Bienstock told Business Insider in a previous interview. 

Bienstock helped the Kaji family turn what Ryan's parents were doing at home into something bigger. 

Today, Ryan ToysReview is more than a YouTube channel.

From toothbrushes to a television show, the Ryan ToysReview brand, Ryan's World, is a lucrative empire, built with the help of kids-entertainment company Pocket.Watch. 

The company brought the Ryan's World brand to Colgate, Nickelodeon, Bonkers Toys, Roku, and Walmart, expanding Ryan from YouTube. 

Ryan's World merchandise can be found at Target, Walmart, and Amazon, like "Ryan's World Giant Mystery Egg," which includes many toys and was produced by Bonkers.

New smartphones sure are exciting when they're announced — just like that, your current phone isn't the latest and greatest. 

But hold on a second. 

Sure, the Pixel 4 has a second camera lens, a first for a Pixel phone, as well as more recent specs that are common in 2019 flagships. And it has radar technology, for Pete's sake. But take a look back at the Pixel 3 — is it really that much different than the Pixel 4?

At the core, the Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 are essentially the same phone. You get the pure Android experience from Google, as well as the best cameras on any smartphone. 

I'd even say that buying the Pixel 3 instead of the Pixel 4 wouldn't be the worst idea in the world. 

Check out eight reasons why you should stick to your Pixel 3, and why anyone looking to buy a new smartphone could save $300 skipping Google's new hotness of 2019.

In Silicon Valley, sometimes the satire writes itself.

And no, that's not a pithy reference to an artificially intelligent joke bot, although that wouldn't be out of place in HBO's satire comedy "Silicon Valley." The show's creators, Alec Berg and Mike Judge, have had ample inspiration to pull from as the real life Silicon Valley continues to outdo itself in sheer over-the-top antics. 

"God, it's all so outrageous," Judge told Business Insider.

Read More: The flopping of the IPOs: Tech's biggest investors came to San Francisco for a major startup conference, and one topic stole the show

The sixth and final season of "Silicon Valley" premieres on October 27. We attended a screening in San Francisco on Wednesday with the show's creators and several cast members on Wednesday ahead of the premiere — and it's right back to ripping storylines from the headlines: The new season tackles tech execs testifying in front of Congress, the scooter craze, and the backlash to invasive social media data collection. 

Berg says that despite the rapid pace of change in the real-life Silicon Valley, the show has always prided itself on poking fun at the tech industry — which has, in some ways, only gotten easier since it premiered in 2014. 

"I think it went from season 1, the tech industry felt like it was a bunch of very wealthy, very smug people who were walking around congratulating themselves for having solved the world's issues, so I don't know that our relationship with them has changed, but their relationship to reality has changed," Berg said.

Indeed, the showrunners say, it's that lack of self-awareness that provides them with the ammunition they need to write the most biting satire. Judge specifically cited the time that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's went on a silent meditation retreat in Myanmar, where social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook may have helped fuel a mass genocide. 

'How did you get Jack Dorsey to become Gavin Belson?'

The whole incident was almost identical to a long-running subplot in the "Silicon Valley" show, centered on Gavin Belson, the CEO of fictional tech giant Hooli and the series antagonist. Belson relies on a grifter, his "spiritual healer," for business advice, and spends much of the most recent season in exile from the company, meditating at a monastery. 

"Everyone was like, 'How did you get Jack Dorsey to become Gavin Belson?'" Judge said.

Berg added that the lack of self-awareness that Dorsey showed in not only taking the retreat, but promoting tourism to Myanmar afterwards, is exactly what makes the tech industry so ripe for comedy in the first place.

"He was in a country where they are in desperate need of a non-censored social media platform that could somehow allow them to communicate beyond the prying eyes of the government. If only someone could invent something like that," Berg said. "Yeah, stuff like that, that's been our bread and butter from the beginning, is like: there's a lack of self awareness, a lack of humility that has always been red meat for satire." 

No WeWork episode

One might think that the WeWork saga would be similarly meaty enough for "Silicon Valley" to skewer. Unfortunately for those keen on schadenfreude, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann and his entourage will be absent from the show's final season.

They had just wrapped the last episode, Judge said, when the drama around its IPO began — much to the chagrin of everybody working on the show. If there were to be a seventh season, it could easily include a character based on Neumann, known for his distinctive long hair and predilection for walking around barefoot, Berg said.

"The CEO just looks like he could walk right into our show," Judge said.

Even with endless rewrites, sometimes right up until shooting, both creators said there was no way they could get every piece of real-life news into the final season of "Silicon Valley."

At the same time, after six seasons of tearing apart the tech industry, they said it was about time the tech industry tore itself apart.

"I don't know if they've quite owned the reality of everything that's happened yet but it does feel like there's starting to be this reckoning, and I've heard stories of people who would brag about what company they worked at now being afraid to tell their friends that they work in the tech business, because of the repercussions," Berg said. "And that is the polar opposite of what it was when we started."

In the past decade, sites like Kickstarter have changed the landscape of fundraising — average people now have a platform to raise money for bold, new ideas without the red tape and financial barriers associated with traditional fundraising methods.

As it turns out, a lot of those bold, new ideas are absolutely terrible.

The podcast "Your Kickstarter Sucks" wades into Kickstarter's murky underbelly. For the past two and a half years, the podcast has documented the worst projects that crowdfunding sites have to offer. Hosts Jesse Farrar and Mike Hale have become unofficial historians of bad Kickstarters, rounding up poorly-thought-out gadgets, tasteless creative projects, and blatant grifts from the world of crowdfunding.

The duo compares Kickstarter to a modern-day QVC, where an endless stream of hyper-specific products promise to improve the lives of customers. But unlike QVC, Kickstarter has no barrier to entry. 

"It's not just full-on scams," Hale said. "There's also just dumb guys who have dumb inventions that they usually make in their garage or something, and [with Kickstarter] they have a megaphone now."

A Kickstarter spokesperson told Business Insider that the platform has a list of rules for campaigns and prohibits certain projects, including medical treatments, drugs, pornography, sweepstakes, and weapons. Campaigns that abide by these rules are fair game — Kickstarter doesn't "pass judgement on the quality of those creative projects," the spokesperson said.

Farrar and Hale spoke to Business Insider about the most egregious Kickstarters they've seen over the years. Here are some of the projects — or types of projects — that stand out for their tastelessness, dubious financials, or just plain bad ideas.

Businesses are trying to do things easier and faster with the help of software that can connect and automate the patchwork of applications and systems in their networks. 

These tools, called robotic process automation, or RPA, can speed up processes and eliminate keying and other errors — saving a business a lot of money. For example, RPA systems can take on basic data entry tasks or generate automated email responses to customers.

It is still a small market, with total revenue of roughly $850 million in 2018, according to analyst firm Gartner. But it is a fast growing market. Gartner estimated the RPA segment posted a year-over-growth of 63% in 2018.

IT Central Station, the review site where IT professionals are able to weigh in on the software they use, recently conducted a survey on RPA tools.

Here are the top robotic process automation companies, according to IT professionals on IT Central Station. 

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 02: (L-R) PagerDuty CEO & Chairperson Jennifer Tejada, Box Co-Founder/Chairman & CEO Aaron Levie, and TechCrunch Writer Frederic Lardinois speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center on October 02, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

All Raise members

NASA astronauts Christina H. Koch and Jessica Meir

Tilting Point expands its user acquisition fund to $132M in annual spending

Long gone are the days in which you had to dial a number, and then dial your voicemail password when prompted by a robotic voice. 

Nowadays, you can reset your voicemail password with just a few taps. This is great when you want to protect those voicemails from being seen or heard by anyone else.

Luckily, the iPhone still allows you to have a passcode for your voicemail, on top of the password you set to open your device. 

Here is how to change your iPhone voicemail password.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Best Buy)

How to reset your voicemail password on an iPhone

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

2. Scroll down to the item "Phone." This option has a green icon with a picture of a traditional phone to the left of it. Tap this option.

3. On the next page, scroll down to the option labeled "Change Voicemail Password." Unlike the other options on this list, the text for this one is in blue. Tap this option.

4. You'll be prompted with a keypad that asks you to enter a new voicemail password. You may enter a password no less than four, and no more than ten digits long.

5. Once you've entered your desired password, tap "Done" in the upper right hand corner.

6. You will be prompted to re-enter the new password, to ensure that it's correct. Do so, then tap "Done" again. 

You've now successfully reset and changed your voicemail password.

Seven US lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have written a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook expressing "strong concern" about the censorship of apps in China — particularly the company's decision to remove HKmap.live, a controversial app Hong Kong protesters have used to track police activity.

"Apple's decisions last week to accommodate the Chinese government by taking down HKMaps is deeply concerning," read the letter, which is signed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Marco Rubio (R-Florida), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin), and Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey).

The letter comes after politicians including Wyden and Cotton publicly criticized Apple's decision to remove HKmap.live from its App Store on Twitter last week. 

Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment regarding the company's response to the letter.

Read more: Apple will reportedly launch as early as this month as a growing number of tech companies go to war for your ears

Apple said at the time that it removed the app because it was being used in ways that "endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong" in a statement to Business Insider on October 10. The company said it has verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app "has been used to target and ambush police."

Cook also wrote a letter to Apple staff defending the firm's decision to remove the app and recently met with the chief of China's State Administration for Market Regulation to discuss a variety of topics, including expanding investment and business development and protecting consumer rights.

"For those of us who support the promotion of basic human rights and dignity, it was refreshing to hear a tech titan say that priorities were more important than profits," the letter reads, referring to a previous Cook quote from a speech he had given in front of the Anti-Defamation League in 2018. "So you can imagine our disappointment to read that Apple had removed HKMap, a crowdsourced mapping app widely used by Hong Kong residents, from the App Store this week."

Apple isn't the only tech firm that's been in the spotlight for decisions it's made in the wake of the Hong Kong protests. The video-game publisher Blizzard Entertainment faced backlash after punishing an esports player who voiced support for the Hong Kong protests during an event. 

Every Mac computer has a name. Your Mac's name can be important for transferring files, such as through AirDrop, or for finding it on your local network. 

It's easy to add or change the name of your Mac using a few steps.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

Why should you change the name of your Mac?

There are several reasons why you might want to change the name of your Mac. If your computer is a hand-me-down, it might have the name of the previous owner on it and you probably want to change it to your name. 

If your Mac has a non-descriptive name such as "computer" or no name at all, it may be hard to find it when you want to send or share files.

If you have more than one computer, each should have a name that clearly identifies it so that you can tell them apart. You might do this by naming them for the model, such as "MacBook Air," "iMac," etc.

You might want to add your name, to differentiate your computer from others in your home that belong to other users. If multiple computers on your network have the same name, Apple will automatically add a number to the end of the name. 

Best practice, however, is to give each Mac its own unique name.

How to change the name of your Mac

It's ridiculously easy to change the name of your Mac — once you know where to look, that is.

1. Click on the Apple icon on the upper left corner of your Mac screen. Select System Preferences from the dropdown menu.

2. In the System Preferences window, select the blue "Sharing" folder.

3. In the "Sharing" window, simply click into the text box next to "Computer Name" at the top and enter your new computer name.

4. Once you exit the Sharing window, your computer's hostname will automatically change to match your new computer name. The hostname is an address (your-Mac.local) that devices equipped with Apple's Bonjour networking software use to recognize and connect to your computer. You can manually edit your hostname by clicking the Edit button under the Computer Name field.