The car-research site Kelley Blue Book ranks vehicles in a wide range of categories, from inexpensive SUVs to the best cars for families.

On Thursday, Kelley Blue Book revealed the 10 most-awarded vehicles from the 2019 model year. Honda dominated the list, taking four of the top-five spots.

Read more: Towing capability is the one thing Ford F-150 customers want more than anything else, according to the head of marketing for the best-selling truck in the US

Customers also appear to love the cars that made the list. Nine of the 10 vehicles received a rating from Kelley Blue Book users of at least four points out of a possible five.

These are the 10 most-awarded vehicles from model-year 2019, according to Kelley Blue Book.

Quarterback is the most vital position on the football field and NFL teams will pay top dollar to ensure they have a top player commanding their offense. After all, having an efficient quarterback can make the difference between turning a mediocre team into a potential playoff contender.

"Madden 20" has rated more than 3,000 players for the upcoming NFL season and Electronic Arts has promised that this year's game will have more lower ratings to make the game more realistic and help elite players stand out on the field.

While every player rating is based on more than 50 different attributes, the game's ratings adjusters said that quarterbacks take the most time to judge properly because they have eight extra stats that are exclusive to their position. Mobile quarterbacks like Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson also require extra attention to ensure that they're properly balanced compared to running backs.

Read more: The creators of 'Madden' revealed their process for rating nearly 3,000 players every year, and it's a fascinating look inside one of the most popular video game franchises on the planet

While both Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers managed to earn a max rating of 99 overall last year, none of the league's signal callers managed to make the 99 Club this year. While Rodgers threw just two interceptions last season, "Madden 20" no longer considers him among the league's top five quarterbacks. Instead, the game has boosted cover star Patrick Mahomes and resurgent Chargers quarterback Phillip Rivers to the top of the ranks.

EA will continue to adjust player ratings as the season progresses, so there's plenty of time for these ratings to shift, but here's how "Madden 20" rates the NFL's top 32 quarterbacks going into the season.

"Madden NFL 20" will be released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on August 2. You can get access to the game three days early by joining EA's Origin Access Premier or by preordering the $80 Superstar Edition.

Apple refreshed its popular MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops this month in the lead-up to its annual back-to-school promotions that begin around August and September.

The MacBook Air now has a starting price that's $100 more than before, meaning the new computer starts at $1,099. The only other major difference is that the MacBook Air's new Retina displays also include True Tone technology, which helps match the screen's color temperature to your surroundings to make viewing easier on the eyes.

Read more: Apple kills its 12-inch MacBook and launches cheaper new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models

The entry-level MacBook Pro, meanwhile, got a more substantial upgrade.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro, which has a starting price of $1,299, now features quad-core Intel processors (compared to the dual-core processors in the previous entry-level model), Apple's T2 security chip, and the Touch Bar, which replaces the traditional function keys along the top of the keyboard. If you've never used it before, the Touch Bar is a touchscreen display that lets you control aspects of the computer with virtual keys, which change depending on the applications you're using at the time.

A handful of tech and news publications got their hands on Apple's newest laptops this week, and for the most part, they had positive things to say. Still, there are a few hangups that had some critics feeling like Apple's latest MacBooks are only "very good," instead of "insanely great."

For the buzzy enterprise startup Notion, one of the trickiest parts of running its high-growth, profitable business has been how to politely avoid coffee meetings with would-be investors.

In fact, in February, Notion CEO Ivan Zhao told Business Insider that the company decided against listing its new office address on Google Maps so that perspective VCs wouldn't come knocking — something that happened regularly at its previous workplace.

"We're not anti-VC," Zhao said at the time. "It's more about helping us focus on product and less on meetings."

That's why when The Information broke the news this week that Notion — an "all-in-one workplace" that acts as a replacement for documents, wikis, and other task management tools — was raising a new funding round, it came as something of a surprise. Doubly so, that the company was raising a relatively modest $10 million (in what it calls an "angel round") at a relatively high valuation of $800 million.

Notion's ethos since its inception over six years ago has been to grow its product, and its team, thoughtfully. In fact, in an interview with Notion's COO Akshay Kothari on Friday, the head operator told Business Insider the startup's small team, which now numbers 25 in total, had been a key to its success.

"Staying small is not just because it sounds nice," Kothari said. "Staying small is actually helpful for us to move fast."

Kothari also said that for "several months now," Notion — which reportedly has over one million registered users — has been profitable.

So why raise now?

Notion's reasons for raising

Kothari said the reasons were mostly practical.

Early on, Notion had given its investors convertible notes — a form of debt financing that act similarly to loans, often used by early stage startups — and those notes actually needed to be converted. Some of them, Kothari said, carried interest and so the team wanted to "close those out."

The team also wanted to give three individuals who have been "remarkably helpful" to Notion the opportunity to invest, Kothari said. The $10 million "angel round" was entirely comprised of investments from those three: Daniel Gross (former partner at Y Combinator), Lachy Groom (Head of Stripe Issuing), and Elad Gil (a self-proclaimed " startup helper").

Groom and Gil were previous investors in Notion. For Gross, this was his first investment in the company.

Read more: This enterprise software startup has VCs literally knocking on its doors to invest, but for now, it's not interested

Hiring for growth

Beyond sharing the goods with those who have been good to them, Kothari said the funding would be used to hire for roles that have become a necessity as Notion's customers become larger and larger. Some, like the messaging platform Intercom and Hearst Media, have over one-thousand users, and in those cases, Notion wants to have more hands-on account management.

Also, thus far, the company has never used paid marketing, like Google or Facebook ads, to gain new customers. But part of the raise, Kothari said, will be used to experiment with paid acquisition channels.

When asked if growing its operations teams and venturing into paid advertising will compromise the company's almost-obsessiveness over staying lean and growing intentionally, Kothari said: "It's a worry that I've had myself."

"We're not looking to hire a sales army here," Kothari said. "We're thinking about it very much from a systems perspective. We feel good about the way we're building products. We feel good about how we have community and support. One of the things we're investing in on the marketing side and sales side is to continue to have that systems approach in building these teams out."

As for how Notion settled on its $800 million valuation, Kothari told us that part of it was to avoid the "craze" that inevitably comes from reaching unicorn status, which comes with a valuation of $1 billion or more. The head operator also said his team considered the valuations of other, comparable software-as-a-service companies — especially Zoom and Slack, which recently went public.

Regarding how such massive valuation could come from an "angel round," Kothari downplayed the importance of such titles.

"Some of the names of these rounds," Kothari said. "Seeds have become pre-seeds. Pre-seeds have become something else. I guess it should be called a $10 million round with three individuals who have been deeply helpful."

Here's everything that's announced for HBO Max thus far:

-"10,000 hours of premium content from HBO, Warner Bros., New Line, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, The CW, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, Looney Tunes and more.

-The exclusive streaming rights at launch to all 236 episodes of 'Friends.'

-The exclusive streaming rights at launch to all episodes 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air' and 'Pretty Little Liars.'

-The exclusive streaming home to a string of new Warner Bros.' produced dramas for The CW beginning with the fall 2019 season, including new DC Entertainment series 'Batwoman,' and 'Katy Keene' (spinoff of 'Riverdale').

-New exclusive movie production deals with Greg Berlanti and Reese Witherspoon ('Big Little Lies'). Berlanti will produce an initial four movies focused in the young adult space, while Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine will produce at least two films.

-'Dune: The Sisterhood,' an adaptation of Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson's book based in the world created by Frank Herbert's book 'Dune,' from director Denis Villeneuve.

-'Tokyo Vice,' based on Jake Adelstein's non-fiction first-hand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat, starring Ansel Elgort.

-'The Flight Attendant,' a one-hour thriller series based on the novel by Chris Bohjalian. Kaley Cuoco, executive producing alongside Greg Berlanti, will star.

-'Love Life,' a 10-episode half-hour romantic comedy anthology series starring Anna Kendrick, who will also executive produce alongside Paul Feig.

-'Station Eleven,' a postapocalyptic limited series based on Emily St. John Mandel's international bestseller, adapted by Patrick Somerville ('The Leftovers') and directed by Hiro Murai ('Barry').

-'Made for Love,' a 10-episode, half-hour, straight-to-series adaptation based on the tragicomic novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting, also from Patrick Somerville and directed by S.J. Clarkson.

-'Gremlins,' an animated series from Warner Bros. Animation and Amblin Entertainment based on the original movie.

-Stephen King's 'The Outsider,' a dark mystery starring Ben Mendelsohn, produced and directed by Jason Bateman.

-'Lovecraft Country,' a unique horror series based on a novel by Matt Ruff, written and executive produced by Misha Green, and executive produced by Jordan Peele ('Us') and J.J. Abrams ('Westworld').

-'The Nevers,' Joss Whedon's new science fiction series starring Laura Donnelly.

-'The Gilded Age,' set the opulent world of 1885 New York from 'Downton Abbey's' Julian Fellowes.

-'Avenue 5,' a high satire aboard a space-bound cruise ship from Armando Iannucci ('Veep') starring Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad.

-'The Undoing,' a psychological thriller from David E. Kelley ('Big Little Lies'), directed by Susanne Bier ('Bird Box') starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.

-'The Plot Against America,' reimagined history based on Phillip Roth's novel written and executive produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, starring Winona Ryder and John Turturro.

-'Perry Mason', the classic legal drama for a new generation, executive produced by Robert Downey, Jr. and Susan Downey, with Matthew Rhys in the title role.

-'I Know This Much Is True,' a complex family drama starring Mark Ruffalo playing twin brothers, one of whom has schizophrenia. Based on the best-selling novel by Wally Lamb, written and directed by Derek Cianfrance."

Fifth Wall, a Los Angeles-based proptech VC founded in 2016, announced a $503 million funding round on Wednesday. Fifth Wall is the largest proptech-specific investor, and the firm says it makes up 70% of all dedicated capital for proptech.

They have backed Opendoor, coworking startup Industrious, and have branched out beyond just proptech into scooter and bike rental startup Lime. Fifth Wall had more than 50 strategic partners in its latest funding round, including CBRE, Equity Residential, Marriott, Prologis and Macerich.

Business Insider spoke with Brendan Wallace, co-founder and managing partner at Fifth Wall, about the future of proptech.

Opportunities: self-storage as a service, sustainability

Wallace is closely watching the rise of companies that don't actually own assets and focus instead on providing real estate-related services. The most high-profile example is WeWork, which doesn't own most of its office space and sells office-management as a service.

"You can provide a higher level of service to customers who are demanding that higher level of service," Wallace said.

Wallace highlighted Clutter, a self-storage company that Fifth Wall has invested in since 2017, as an example. Clutter gives door-to-door service for self-storage, and rents space instead of owning and maintaining their own warehouse.

"They're a really interesting business that has almost turned self-storage into a service industry, as opposed to a real estate industry," Wallace said.

Wallace also sees opportunity in sustainability. While green construction and sustainability are nothing new for the industry, Wallace points out that real estate nonetheless accounts for almost half of US energy consumption. Sustainability technology can appeal to more environmentally minded investors and tenants, and also help companies save on energy costs.

"You can start to drive really meaningful change around sustainability as an actual investment strategy that's both economically really exciting for real estate owners in terms of the cost savings, and financially exciting for Fifth Wall from an investment perspective, " Wallace said.

Challenges: 'late-adopting' industry, blockchain roadblocks

Real estate's relationship with technology is just starting to change, according to Wallace. Many in the industry have only started to embrace new technology over the last five years.

"You might have incredibly disruptive technology, but you have to be cognizant of how challenging it is sometimes to sell in to large real estate incumbents," he said. "And we obviously support that, but real estate has been a historically slow-moving, late-adopting industry."

Wallace also thinks that blockchain, for all of its hype, has not yet meaningfully impacted real estate. Fifth Wall is optimistic that the technology will eventually develop, but real estate is behind the fintech curve.

Without offering any proof, famous tech investor Peter Thiel suggested this week that Google is a disloyal US company "infiltrated by Chinese intelligence."

His views were then echoed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who said Google is "clearly not a patriotic company," while claiming the presence Chinese spies in US companies is "a known thing in Silicon Valley."

The claims of the two prominent Silicon Valley figures come at a time when China has become America's rival superpower, and a competitor in the global economy and technology.

The suggestions of mass Chinese spying were also unleashed at a particularly fraught moment. A US president is calling on elected women of color in the US Congress to go back to where they came from. On campuses, Chinese American scientists find themselves in what MIT's president warned could turn into "a toxic atmosphere of unfounded suspicion and fear."

Chinese Americans, and the broader Asian American community, have wrestled with such toxicity in the past. The unchecked xenophobia of military conflicts, such as the deportation of American citizens of Japanese ancestry to internment camps during WWII, is well known.

But the times when the country has confronted economic threats were also marked by the rise of dangerous discrimination that we'd do well to remember now.

When Japan was the 'threat'

Forty years ago, that threat was Japan.

In the 1980s, Japanese automakers were outselling their US counterparts which led to mass layoffs and rising anti-Japanese sentiment. "Japan was considered the enemy of America, not as a military threat, but as an economic threat," Bay Area-based writer Helen Zia told Business Insider.

It was a time of intense anti-Japanese bashing, she said. Laid off workers used sledgehammers to smash Japanese cars in public as a form of entertainment and to let off steam.

Hatred of the Japanese were expressed in other ways. Some used the offensive anti-Japanese images from World War II, such as including an illustration featuring a car with a sinister Asian face dropping what looked like an Atomic bomb on Detroit. One United Auto Workers poster said: "300,000 UAW members don't like your import. Please park it in Tokyo."

Anti-Japanese car sign from the 1980s. Helen Zia collection

In fact, in those days, driving a Japanese car became somewhat risky, particularly for Asians, Zia, who had worked in the auto industry in Detroit during those years, and was among the many who got laid off, said. "I didn't know any Asian American driving a Japanese made car," she recalled. "You really felt that you had a target on your back -- or in the case of Vincent Chin, on his head."

She was referring to the most prominent casualty of the wave of anti-Japanese hatred.

Vincent Chin was celebrating with friends at a Detroit bar in 1982 when he got into an argument with two unemployed auto workers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. Ebens, according to witnesses, told Chin, "It's because of you little m—f—s that we're out of work."

Death of Vincent Chin

Chin was actually Chinese American. The confrontation escalated outside the bar where Ebens confronted Chin and repeatedly beat him in the head with a baseball bat. Chin, who was 27, died four days later. Ebens and Nitz were convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine.

The brutal killing of a Chinese American who became a target at a time of rising anti-Japanese hatred sparked a new wave of civil rights activism in the Asian American community.

Zia, who became a leader of that movement, points to similarities between the 80s and today, "with the rhetoric, innuendos and hate-mongering."

"Connecting the dots between that time and today is not a big leap," she said.

Today's anti-Chinese wave escalated with the Trump Administration's trade policies against China and its ban on Huawei. The wave has become particularly intense in academia prompting MIT President L. Rafael to speak out recently.

"We must take great care not to create a toxic atmosphere of unfounded suspicion and fear," he said in a June 25 letter to the MIT community. "Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge - because of their Chinese ethnicity alone."

Got a tip about Google or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter@benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy put a monumental goal before Congress:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth," Kennedy said. "No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

It took eight years to reach the moon after that, and NASA burned through $25.4 billion dollars before the Apollo program was finished. But on July 20, 1969, as people throughout the world gathered around fuzzy television sets, astronaut Neil Armstrong announced: "the Eagle has landed."

Here's how the US made it to the moon 50 years ago.

It's been half a century since Buzz Aldrin rocketed to the moon and walked upon its dusty, pockmarked surface, but his memory of that historic event is still as fresh as ever.

On July 16, 1969, Aldrin was just 39 years old when he boarded a small capsule atop a 363-foot-tall (111-meter-tall) Saturn V rocket and launched toward the moon. About four days later, on July 20, Aldrin and his commander, Neil Armstrong, climbed into a lunar lander. The two left fellow astronaut Mike Collins behind in the capsule, descended toward the lunar surface, and stepped outside.

In remembrance of NASA's historic feat on the eve of its 50th anniversary, watch brand Omega— which made the Speedmaster timepieces astronauts wore on the moon — spoke to Aldrin about his experiences.

Below are excerpts from Omega's exclusive interview with the moon walker and the moments he said defined Apollo 11.

Basis co-founder and CEO Andrew Chapin (center) with the founding team last year

Adam Neumann (WeWork) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Silicon Valley has many dreams. One dream — the Hollywood version anyway — is for a down-and-out founder to begin tinkering and coding in their proverbial garage, eventually building a product that is loved by humans the world over and becoming a startup billionaire in the process. But when it comes to that Silicon Valley dream of a nice house from a decent return on exit, it’s getting narrower and less widely distributed. Blitzscaling is making a lot of people a lot of wealth, but early employees? Not so much.

Read more from TechCrunch editor Danny Crichton.

Considering we rely on our smartphones for just about everything — from getting directions to listening to music and answering work emails — your phone's battery life can never last long enough.

If you find that your iPhone's battery life isn't meeting expectations, try managing the way your phone is refreshing apps in the background. Not only will it preserve some battery life, but it will probably cut down on your data usage too.

There are many adjustments you can make to save battery life: lowering the screen brightness, turning off location services for certain apps, and disabling push notifications for some apps are all great examples. You can also put your phone in Low Power Mode if you're low on juice, which reduces features like "Hey Siri" and automatic downloads among other features and pauses backing up your photos to iCloud.

But making changes to Background App Refresh can help extend battery life without sacrificing much functionality.

Here's a look at the various ways you can tweak the Background App Refresh setting on your iPhone to extend its battery life and preserve data.

Connectivity is central to doing business today — enterprises rely on telecoms to connect the various sprawling parts of their businesses as they engage in digital transformation and modernize practices. It will become even more important as telecoms roll out their blazing-fast 5G networks, which enable near-instantaneous communication alongside complementary wireless protocols that let companies monitor assets scattered around the world.

5G and other next-generation networks can allow telecoms to become the key partner in enterprise connectivity, where they previously were one among many. But telecoms aren't uncontested in trying to take advantage of the growing opportunity in enabling enterprise transformation: Cloud, software, and technology vendors are also out for the market, setting the stage for a clash of titans between two connectivity models that will reign in different industry verticals.

In the Connectivity B2B Ecosystem Report, Business Insider Intelligence unpacks the enterprise telecommunications ecosystem at the cusp of the 5G era. First, we highlight the ways that companies employ telecommunications technology in business, both today and in the near future with 5G. Next, we look at the various types of companies involved in the wider ecosystem and explore the relationships between these company archetypes. Then, we examine the players involved in these relationships and look at specific efforts and initiatives that are driving change and transforming the companies involved. Finally, we look to some of the key trends that will define the next decade of B2B telecommunications.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

The companies mentioned in this report are: Amazon, Arm, Artik, Arundo Analytics, AT&T, C3 IoT, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Everactive, GE, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi, Honeywell, Huawei, IBM, Intel, MediaTek, Microsoft, Nokia, Nvidia, Oracle, Particle, PTC, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Samsung, SAP, Semtech, Siemens, Sierra Wireless, Sigfox, Splunk, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are three ways to access it: