The race is on to cash in on the metaverse hype. Last week, Microsoft described its $68.7 billion takeover of gaming studio Activision Blizzard—a move that would have usually been interpreted as the Xbox maker simply expanding in the gaming sector—as a way to create the “building blocks for the metaverse.” Meta—which rebranded from Facebook
Month: January 2022
They decided that the project should be sited and built at the United States Postal Service, which not only had the national database of valid addresses, but would ultimately deliver the packages. When the Postal Service’s CIO, Pritha Mehra, learned about the project in December, she was given estimates that demand might peak at a
After years of wrangling, HP has won its civil fraud case against Autonomy founder and chief executive Mike Lynch. The ruling, the biggest civil fraud trial in UK history, could also increase the likelihood of Lynch being extradited to the United States, where he faces further fraud charges. The UK’s High Court found that HP
That document recommends encouraging people to use long, memorable passwords rather than forcing them to frequently change them or specifying they include special characters. It also lays down tougher ground rules for providing remote access to systems like those of the IRS and many other agencies with sensitive data. In person, government departments generally ask
Statistics help tell stories, and one often touted by technologists and engineers and police officers and even the federal government told a tale. The statistic: 94 percent of US traffic crashes are the result of human error. The number felt right. It also appealed to a very American idea: that individuals are in charge of
“There’s just no way this isn’t going to explode as a category,” says Matt Beane, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies human-robot workplace collaboration. As industrial machines become more capable and connected, Beane says, the number and variety of these jobs will grow. Beane says new forms of remote physical work may
So, what are the barriers to making this kind of thing work? I can give you at least three things. One is that nonverbal expressions, like nodding your head or leaning toward somebody, don’t work very well yet. VR headsets still don’t capture them. Headsets are actually terrible. A second one is 3D, spatial audio,
When voice actor Heath Miller sits down in his boatshed-turned-home studio in Maine to record a new audiobook narration, he has already read the text through carefully at least once. To deliver his best performance, he takes notes on each character and any hints of how they should sound. Over the past two years, audiobook
A few years ago, Rocío van Nierop visited the tech accelerator Y Combinator. Nierop is the cofounder and executive director of the advocacy group Latinas in Tech. As she walked through the building, she passed by photo after photo of the teams that Y Combinator had funded. Nierop noticed they were all white men. “Where
British entrepreneur and financier Richard O’Dell Poulden hopes that his new venture will relieve the plight of an underserved cohort: Bitcoin billionaires who want to buy a house. In October, Poulden’s Gibraltar-based company Valereum—at the time named Valereum Blockchain—announced plans to buy an 80 percent stake in the Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX), to create an
Like millions of other internet users in Europe, when Alexandra Geese, a German member of the European Parliament (MEP), wants to read something on the internet, she first has to open and scroll through several options to refuse to share her data with third-party advertisers. Europe’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
Angela Muhwezi-Hall had a startup idea long before the pandemic—it just never seemed like the right time. She had a steady job at a university, a 401(k), and the ability to take paid time off. Then came March 2020. As the university shut down and Muhwezi-Hall retreated to work from home, she started to think
So you’ve got a nice house with a garage where you can charge your electric vehicle—you’re living in the future. You’re also—sorry!—far from original: 90 percent of US EV owners have their own garages. But woe to the urbanites. Chargers built into apartment parking lots are few and far between. And as if parking in
“Despite the positivity around NFT use cases, there’s a lot of distrust in the community—perhaps due to the anonymity of key artists and influencers, and almost certainly due to the scammers that circle like vultures and frequent rug pulls,” says PJ Cooper, founder of Pandimensional Trading Co., which is launching its own NFT collection later
The Environmental Protection Agency’s revised greenhouse gas emission rules for passenger vehicles, finalized in December 2021, simply returned the standards to what they were under the Obama administration in the mid-2010s. This contrasts sharply with China and Europe, which have aggressively pursued carbon-reduction policies that incentivize the production of EVs. Besides the politics, there’s a
Most companies that signed the letters were midsize tech and consumer brands trying to attract younger customers and workers, says Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation, which engages the private sector on reproductive rights and helped organize the letters. The largest tech companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft—stayed mum. “Notably silent,”
Zeloof spun hand-cut, half-inch squares of polysilicon, each to become a separate chip, on a small homemade turntable at 4,000 revolutions per minute to coat them with the photosensitive material needed to transfer his design onto the surface. Then his homemade photolithography machine beamed on his design: a grid of 12 circuits, each with 100
the activation of C-Band frequencies by AT&T and Verizon means that improved 5G networks are now available for millions of Americans. The long-anticipated rollout began on January 19, but with one caveat: Both companies temporarily pushed back plans for 5G networks near certain airports after criticism from the Federal Aviation Administration and multiple airlines about
Polar Manufacturing has been making metal hinges, locks, and brackets in south Chicago for more than 100 years. Some of the company’s metal presses—hulking great machines that loom over a worker—date from the 1950s. Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee. The robot arm performs
When Ayleen Serrano returned to school after the recent winter break, the 15-year-old came back to nearly empty hallways, absent classmates, and what she describes as a “lifeless” atmosphere. As the days passed, fewer of her peers showed up at MetWest High School in Oakland, California; her teachers and classmates were testing positive for Covid-19,
Another subcontractor in Liverpool, who declined to give his name because he was worried about losing his job, has also encountered problems. He claims that Randstad does not compensate its remote couriers—who are able to start work from home instead of from a Just Eat courier hub—if they suffer bike problems while they are supposed
Colin Rule, who set up eBay’s system, says the company experimented with a community court in India about a decade ago. The pilot program didn’t catch on, but he says that a presentation on the system in Hong Kong caught the attention of Alibaba, and may have helped to inspire what’s likely the first large-scale
That’s because health data such as medical imaging, vital signs, and data from wearable devices can vary for reasons unrelated to a particular health condition, such as lifestyle or background noise. The machine learning algorithms popularized by the tech industry are so good at finding patterns that they can discover shortcuts to “correct” answers that
In 2010, a Google product manager named Scott Spencer gave an interview explaining Google’s use of “second-price” auctions to place ads across the web. In a second-price auction, the highest bidder wins, but only has to pay whatever the second highest bid was. Economists love this setup—the guy who theorized it won a Nobel Prize—because
It’s hard to find anything that unites Nashville, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Moab, Utah; and New York City. But all of those communities, and many others, are grappling with what to do about electric bicycles. No matter where you are in the US, ebikes are having a moment. Market research company NPD says ebike sales
In middle school, Kenan Saleh saw the movie The Social Network, the dramatized account of the early days of Facebook. He decided, right then and there, that he would one day start a company of his own. “It was the first movie I’d seen that showed that you could be young and still be the
On Tuesday, federal judge James E. Boasberg ruled that the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to break up Facebook could move forward. The case itself is far from decided. But by blessing the FTC’s theory that a monopoly can harm consumers even when its product is free, the judge has signaled that Facebook—and other tech platforms—are
When Denis Rusinovich set up cryptocurrency mining company Maveric Group in Kazakhstan in 2017, he thought he had hit the jackpot. Next door to China and Russia, the country had everything a Bitcoin miner could ask for: a cold climate, legions of old warehouses and factories where the mining rigs could be installed, and—especially—dirt cheap
Plenty of places claim they are Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley: Stockholm boasts the most unicorns per capita, and London is the continent’s VC hub. But only the small Dutch town of Veldhoven—whose population numbers 45,000—is home to the closest thing Europe has to a big tech giant. From its unassuming base near the Belgian
A newly released document sheds light on Google’s efforts to quash activism, including for a union, among its employees. In an order submitted Friday, an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board told Google to turn over to the attorney representing a group of current and former employees documents related to its “Project