In a blog post, Facebook announced that it's acquiring the customer relationship management platform, highlighting how the company could help bolster its plans for Messenger and WhatsApp to become the future of customer service interactions.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the deal could value Kustomer at over $1 billion.
Shakeel Hashim ( @shakeelhashim) is a growth manager at Protocol, based in London. He was previously an analyst at Finimize covering business and economics, and a digital journalist at News UK. His writing has appeared in The Economist and its book, Uncommon Knowledge.
Adobe said it will place employees on unpaid leave if they're not vaccinated by Dec. 8, CNBC reported Friday. The company cited President Joe Biden's executive order on vaccines as rationale for the new rule, according to a notice the company sent to employees.
Over 90% of Adobe employees have told the company that they're vaccinated against COVID-19 or in the process of getting vaccinated. As for those who haven't yet gotten the vaccine, the company said it'll weigh religious or medical exemptions.
Earlier this month IBM also said that unvaccinated workers will be suspended without pay. On the contrary, companies like Apple and Amazon rolled out incentives for its employees to get vaccinated, but they haven't set an outright mandate.
Epic Games will no longer give employees every other Friday off, Bloomberg reported Friday.
The policy began during the pandemic and was always meant to be temporary, according to Epic Games, which didn't immediately return a request for comment from Protocol.
"Right now, we are seeing lots of Fridays off for deep work, and lots of people who must work Fridays anyways," Chief Operating Officer Daniel Vogel told employees in an email, according to Bloomberg. "This meant that many people were not benefiting from this policy equally."
A number of employees have posted to the company's Slack asking Epic to keep the policy, and an internal survey of 581 employees found that almost 90% of workers wanted Epic Games to keep letting them take Fridays off, Bloomberg reported.
A new Facebook whistleblower is accusing Facebook of prioritizing money over the fight against hate speech and misinformation, The Washington Post reported Friday. The whistleblower, who is a former member of the platform's Integrity team and spoke under the condition of anonymity to The Post, made those claims to the SEC as well.
The allegations are similar to those of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has made her own SEC complaint and said earlier this month that Facebook prioritizes profit over safety. The person's remarks add to a pile of allegations made against the company over the past few weeks, which Facebook has consistently denied or defended itself against.
In the latest complaint, the former employee also claimed that Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds said, in reference to controversy around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, that lawmakers would get upset, then move on, while Facebook kept making money. "It will be a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine," the complaint quotes Bounds as saying.
Bounds, who is now a vice president of communications, told The Post that being asked about the alleged remarks "with a faceless person, with no other sourcing than the empty accusation itself, is a first for me." Facebook spokesperson Erin McPike told The Post that its reporting on the matter "is beneath The Washington Post."
According to the Post, the whistleblower's affidavit is dated Oct. 13. Haugen testified just a week before.
Walmart will now let customers buy bitcoin. And it's not a hoax this time.
The company is testing a program that lets customers buy the digital currency at certain Coinstar kiosks. The pilot program is rolling out at a select few locations; just 200 of the kiosks are installed in Walmart stores. Once people exchange cash for Bitcoin and pay a hefty transaction fee, they'll receive a paper voucher confirming their new coins.
Coinstar is leading the charge on the project, working with the exchange Coinme to offer bitcoin at 8,000 of its kiosks. The company is best known as the machine to dump your loose change into and get paper bills and gift cards in return, but now you can turn the cash in your couch cushions into cold, hard crypto.
Unlike the last time Walmart appeared to be getting into cryptocurrencies, this announcement is real. Last month, a false announcement that Walmart and Litecoin were partnering sent the value of the coin soaring for a bit before Walmart confirmed the news was fake. But the company did say it was interested in cryptocurrency in general. This is just a small toe in the water, placing a few bitcoin ATMs in a few stores, but it could be a signal of crypto's further movement into the mainstream.
Snap shares fell around 22% as the market opened Friday morning, the day after Snap announcing Apple's ad-tracking changes is presenting more of a challenge than it thought. "We grappled with industry changes to the way advertising is targeted, optimized, and measured on iOS that created a more significant impact on our business than we had expected," Snap's Chief Business Officer Jeremi Gorman said on the company's earnings call Thursday.
Snap continues to grow quickly, reaching 306 million daily active users during the most recent quarter and growing its revenue 57% year over year. But the company still missed its Q3 earnings target. Snap said the setback was brought on by a few different issues, namely supply and workforce problems, but seemed to pin the majority of the issues on Apple's new privacy rules that require apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. "While we anticipated some degree of business disruption," Evan Spiegel said on the earnings call, "the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS."
Facebook has also expressed concerns about the privacy change, saying the rule makes it harder to track ad performance. Lots of users have opted out of ad-tracking on Facebook's app since the change. Spiegel said that going forward, Snap is investing in building better "first-party tooling and measurement solutions" to better work with advertisers now that the third-party connects are increasingly untenable. Spiegel projected confidence for Snap's long-term future, but its investors are clearly nervous about where things go from here. And Snap's performance doesn't bode well for the other companies affected by Apple's policy change.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the number of Snap's daily active users. This update was made Oct. 22, 2021.
Lyft users reported over 4,000 instances of sexual assault between 2017 and 2019, according to the ride-hailing app's first community safety report released Thursday. The report comes two years after Uber released a similar report on its own platform.
The number of sexual assault cases climbed over the three-year period, as Lyft's total ridership grew as well. The report showed 1,096 reports of sexual assault in 2017, 1,255 reports in 2018, and 1,807 in 2019. Of those, 360 were reports of rape. The report also includes information on fatal physical assaults and motor vehicle fatalities.
"We recognize that sexual assault is chronically underreported, and it can sometimes be months or years before a survivor is ready to come forward and report what happened – if they choose to do so at all," the company wrote in the report. "Knowing this, Lyft included any incident reported in 2017, 2018 and 2019, regardless of when the incident was reported to have occurred."
Uber released a similar report at the end of 2019, revealing around 6,000 instances of sexual assault between 2017 and 2018. Lyft said it would release similar data shortly after Uber, but its report was just released Thursday. Both companies have faced criticism for their handling of sexual misconduct on the apps, having both faced a handful of sexual assault allegations in court.
The plans that Intel announced earlier this year to reinvigorate its manufacturing business and regain the throne as chipmaking king may cost more and take longer than we may have thought.
It will take roughly four years before Intel starts to see a significant boost to its revenue and profit from its contract manufacturing business, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said Thursday during a conference call for investors.
"It will really have minimal impact in the next couple of years, and then it'll really deliver in years four and five, and in the second half of the decade more significantly," Gelsinger said in the conference call.
Regaining leadership will be costly too, as Gelsinger said the company plans to run its gross margins below its current levels for the next two to three years before recovering, though will remain "comfortably above 50%," Gelsinger said. Part of the cost includes capital spending, which Intel projects between $25 billion and $28 billion next year, and he left open the potential for even more investment.
Higher costs did not sit well with investors, as shares slid 9% in extended trading Thursday. The company reported third-quarter net profit jumped 60% to $6.8 billion. Revenue grew 5% to $18.1 billion, which fell short of investor expectations.
After Gelsinger was installed as CEO in February, he made significant changes to the company's executive and engineering teams. Thursday, CFO George Davis said he planned to retire in May.
The U.S. government announced on Thursday that it reached an agreement with Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom on the digital services tax for Big Tech.
The European nations agreed that they would end their unilateral digital services tax once a G20-backed global tax on Big Tech has been put in place. This is expected to happen around 2023 as part of a broader push to enforce a minimum 15% global corporate tax rate.
The U.S. in turn agreed to terminate proposed retaliatory tariffs against those countries. This became an issue during the Trump presidency, for instance, when the U.S. threatened to place tariffs on French cheeses and champagne if France went through with a plan to levy a tax against Big Tech firms.
Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom will not be required to change their current tax policies aimed at Big Tech as part of the agreement. They will, however, give those tech companies a tax credit if they impose higher taxes in the interim period relative to what comes due after the first full year of taxes under the new global system.
India and Turkey were notably absent from the agreement. Both nations have imposed unilateral digital services taxes that the U.S. government has attempted to push back against.
The agreement represents a win for Big Tech firms. It also belies the conjoined interest of the U.S. government and Big Tech. Whereas politicians on both sides of the political aisle publicly gesture toward a "Big Tech crackdown," in reality the U.S. federal government has unabashedly advocated for Big Tech firms on the international stage.
Big Tech firms have poured money into D.C. lobbying in recent months. Facebook spent $5.1 million on lobbying for the three months ended Sept. 30, which fell short of the social media giant's quarterly spend record. Amazon spent $4.7 million during that same period, Google and Microsoft each spent $2.6 million, and Apple spent $1.5 million.
Would most Americans be willing to accept higher prices on French cheese if it meant these tech behemoths could pay less in overseas tax? Recent polling on the favorability of Big Tech in the eyes of the U.S. public suggests the answer is no.
Plaid is moving into the payments business, with a new program that would make it easier for consumers to make digital payments from their bank accounts.
Plaid, which connects users' bank accounts with fintech applications, has signed up more than 50 partners that will be involved in moving money from bank accounts, including Square, Stripe, Silicon Valley Bank, and SoFi's Galileo unit. The companies using Plaid's new service would offer consumers an option to pay via bank, alongside credit card or other payments methods.
Plaid told the WSJ that this product isn't meant to be a competitor to credit or debit card payments, and could be used for things that don't use typically use cards, such as remittances or invoice payments.
However, younger consumers have moved away from credit cards in recent years, in favor of other forms of payment such as "buy now, pay later" services. And merchants generally dislike the fees that credit cards charge, so easier bank payments could appeal to merchants as well. Pricing for the new product wasn't immediately clear.
Worldcoin emerged from stealth on Thursday after raising $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others. The company most recently raised funds at a $1 billion valuation. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, who led Y Combinator and co-founded OpenAI alongside Elon Musk.
Worldcoin is setting out to create "a new global digital currency that will launch by giving a share to every single person on earth," according to an online job description uncovered by Bloomberg.
To do so, Worldcoin is offering cryptocurrency to people in exchange for their iris scan. It has so far collected 100,000 iris scans and aims to collect 1 billion by 2023. It collects these scans on its proprietary hardware, dubbed an Orb, which is a metallic sphere roughly the size of a melon. Worldcoin currently has Orb Operators setting up scanning sites in 12 countries, including Chile, France, Kenya, Indonesia, Sudan and France.
Worldcoin has 30 Orbs and plans to add hundreds of Orb devices in the coming months. The company said its best-performing operators have "been able to onboard around one thousand users per Orb per week."
So what's the point of all this? Worldcoin says it's designed "to be the first widely adopted cryptocurrency." A key element to this design is the global proof-of-personhood protocol. The company claims none of the existing protocols has reached the global scale necessary to "unlock many meaningful applications."
Worldcoin has set its sights on one of these applications in the digital wallet. The company says the wallet will allow "users to learn about Worldcoin and other cryptocurrencies, find Orb operators, claim their share, view their balance, send global peer-to-peer payments, and use their Worldcoin throughout the Ethereum ecosystem."
Worldcoin's CEO and co-founder Alex Blania also suggested that the company could serve as the infrastructure for universal income, a welfare system popular among Silicon Valley elites, including Altman, Andrew Yang and Musk.
These UBI ambitions seemingly contradict Worldcoin's stated vision of a world where "everyone around the globe, regardless of who they are, could participate in the growing space of digital economies and benefit from decentralized, collective ownership." The concept of UBI generally involves a central government giving regular payment to its citizens. This necessarily involves centralization. And if Worldcoin wants to hold true to its vision of a decentralized, privacy-preserving financial system, then the question becomes who would be paying whom in any future globalized UBI system.
The latest blow to the mobile app economy's once-standard 30% cut is coming from an unlikely player: Google. The search giant on Thursday announced it would collect a lower fee from both subscription and music-streaming apps, reducing its standard cut from nearly a third of all digital transactions down to a flat 15% for eligible app categories.
To be clear, Google already allows subscription-based apps to keep 85% of revenue so long as a customer signs up through the Android app and stays subscribed for more than a year. That change was one Google made back in 2017, following in Apple's footsteps as Google has been prone to do over the years with regard to managing its mobile app marketplace. Google also followed Apple in lowering app store fees earlier this year to 12% for small developers making less than $1 million per year.
But Google is now going a step further, and breaking from its tradition of only moving when Apple does, by establishing a new flat revenue split for certain apps on the Play Store. Google's official justification is that it has "heard that customer churn makes it challenging for subscription businesses to benefit from that reduced rate," so it's making it easier for developers that bill on a recurring basis to sign up customers within their app with more confidence they'll stick around.
Google says e-book apps and music-streaming apps may also be eligible for a fee as low as 10%, but that developers will have to review the new guidelines and work with Google to establish a new rate. "The new rates recognize industry economics of media content verticals and make Google Play work better for developers and the communities of artists, musicians and authors they represent," Google said. The company earlier this year established the 15% rate as part of a multi-platform initiative called Play Media Experience, so apps that met certain requirements like building complaint versions of software across the Wear OS and Android Auto platforms could enjoy the lower cut.
Of course, these changes aren't happening out of the goodness of Google's heart, but rather amid increasing regulatory pressure on Big Tech and mobile app stores in particular in the U.S. and abroad.
Both Apple and Google remain embroiled in lawsuits with Fortnite maker Epic Games over app store fees and restrictions, and the Epic v. Apple case, which went to trial in May, resulted in a verdict that would in theory make it easier for developers to bypass app store fees by transacting with customers directly. Apple and Epic have appealed the ruling and Apple, has asked to delay the court's order to change its rules around those so-called steering provisions, leaving court-ordered changes to the App Store off the table for now. Google's case with Epic has yet to go to trial.
Putting aside the Epic battle, there is yet more regulatory pressure on Big Tech and an especially intense focus on Google. That includes new legislation passed in South Korea earlier this year that, when enforced, will open the door for app developers to bypass both the App Store and Play Store directly using of in-app payment systems, as well as similar legislation since proposed by lawmakers in the U.S. Google is also at the center of a number of antitrust investigations in the U.S. related to the Play Store, its search engine and other parts of its sprawling business, all of which are likely influencing Google's decision today to lower its fees further.
"Google has a long history of evolving Android and Play's model based on feedback from our developer ecosystem on what they need to be successful on Play," a Google spokesperson told The Verge when asked about why it decided to lower its fees for certain apps.
Update Oct. 21, 2:15PM ET: Included more information from Google's official announcement post.
The ongoing dispute between Roku and Google may result in Google pulling its YouTube and YouTube TV apps from the Roku app store on Dec. 9, both companies confirmed this week. Roku painted this move as anti-competitive in a blog post published Thursday morning, while Google accused Roku of making "unproductive and baseless claims" in a statement sent to Protocol. Sen. Amy Klobuchar chimed in as well, calling the dispute proof for the need for new competition laws.
At the core of the issue are distribution deals for Google's YouTube and YouTube TV apps, and the technical requirements Google insists on to distribute apps on third-party platforms. As part of these requirements, Google has been pushing hardware makers to adopt the open AV1 video codec for 4K video; currently, some but not all Roku hardware is capable of playing A1.
Roku also alleges that Google has pushed the company to prioritize its content in search results; Google has rejected those claims. As a result, Roku suggested this week that the dispute may become part of a bigger regulatory push against Google.
"Some Big Tech enterprises are using their market power to extend control over independent businesses, like Roku, to benefit their broader business objectives at the expense of the consumer, putting a fair and open competitive streaming marketplace at risk," Roku wrote in its blog post. "This is unfortunately the case Roku and numerous other independent companies now face with Google, which is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and more than 30 State Attorneys General for violating competition laws."
Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, followed up with a statement of her own, writing: "Roku's claim that Google requires the company to preference YouTube content over that of other providers in Roku's search results highlights why we need new laws to prevent dominant digital platforms from abusing their power as gatekeepers. [...] That is why Senator [Chuck] Grassley and I have joined with a bipartisan group of our colleagues to introduce legislation that will set rules of the road to make this type of anticompetitive conduct illegal to prevent harm to businesses and consumers online."
Roku's renewed publicity push primarily focused on the YouTube TV app, but Google made it clear Thursday that the YouTube app itself is at play as well: "Since we haven't been able to continue our conversations in good faith, our partnership for all new Roku devices will unfortunately end on Dec. 9," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. "We are, however, giving Roku the ability to continue distributing both YouTube and YouTube TV apps to all existing users to make sure they are not impacted."
This wouldn't be the first time Roku wouldn't be able to ship new devices with YouTube's apps. Roku didn't carry an official YouTube app for a couple of years, and was only able to do so after the two companies struck an agreement in 2013.
Apple isn't requiring employees to get vaccinated, but it is making the requirements for unvaccinated workers more stringent: it will soon require unvaccinated employees and those who won't report their vaccination status to get COVID-19 tests every day in order to enter the office. The company's new rules will go into effect Nov. 1.
Meanwhile, unvaccinated retail store workers will need to test twice per week instead of every day they come to work. Vaccinated employees are required to get weekly rapid tests.
Apple last said it hoped to have corporate workers back in the office by January, months later than originally anticipated. The company has announced a few measures to incentivize people to get vaccines, but consistently stopped short of a mandate, unlike peers like Facebook and Google.
The company has asked employees to report their vaccination status by Sunday.
Former President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday the launch of TRUTH Social, a social media platform whose takes direct aim at Trump's grievances with Big Tech. The announcement came as part of a SPAC deal between Digital World Acquisition Corp. and Trump Media & Technology Group.
As part of the launch, TMTG announced plans to launch an on-demand streaming service that will feature "'non-woke' entertainment programming, news, podcasts, and more."
"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," Trump said in a statement. "We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable."
Screenshots of the app in the App Store feature the account of user named @jack, a white guy with a long beard.
Past attempts at launching conservative, "free-speech" branded social media alternatives have not gone well. Parler enjoyed a surge of users near the end of 2020. But in January 2021, Apple and Google removed Parler from their respective app stores. Parler's CEO took this as a sign that "big tech really wants to kill competition," but Apple and Google said it was a matter of ensuring the app didn't host incitement of violence or other illegal activity. Parler has since relaunched, but it hasn't become a viable alternative to the mainstream social media sites.
Gettr, another pro-Trump social network, also failed to take off, despite being overwhelmed with jihadists.
The launch of TRUTH Social could also further fracture the already fragile ecosystem of conservative social media apps. In 2020, The Trump Organization reportedly held talks to take a stake in Parler in exchange for President Trump posting exclusively on the platform, according to Buzzfeed News. The deal fell through.
The SPAC deal would give TMTG approximately $293 million in funding to scale, though the deal is still subject to shareholder approval. TRUTH Social is available for pre-order on the Apple App store. TMTG said it hopes to conduct an invite-only beta launch in November 2021 and a nationwide rollout in Q1 2022.
Amazon warehouse workers in New York City plan to file for a union election, Vice reported Thursday. The employees said they will petition for an election before the National Labor Relations Board next week.
The workers include those at Amazon's Staten Island facilities. The Amazon Labor Union said more than 2,000 people have signed union authorization cards, and at least 100 of them are now part of a worker's committee.
The company has seen pockets of activism in recent months. Amazon workers in Alabama have tried their hand at unionization earlier this year, but those efforts were struck down. Before that, workers in Chicago staged a walkout to demand better working conditions and hours, and that group hoped at the time to form a union. A local Teamsters union in Iowa has also taken part in unionization efforts.
Unionization is an uphill battle for Staten Island workers, who have already been told by Amazon not to do so. But if the vote goes through, they would be the first in the United States to do so against Amazon.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told Protocol that employees have a choice to unionize, but the company doesn't think unions are best for employees. "Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes quickly. That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle."
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced Thursday it had issued orders for information to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal and Square on their use of consumer data.
Questions will examine the use of data harvesting and monetization, and other consumer protection issues.
The CFPB's new director, Rohit Chopra, previously served as a Federal Trade Commissioner, where he was highly critical of Big Tech companies and their data practices. The CFPB said its move built on the FTC's "work to shed light on the business practices of the largest technology companies in the world."
The Wall Street Journal previously reported the orders.
This article was updated to reflect the CFPB's official announcement.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal is urging Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Mosseri to testify on Instagram's impact on kids following the revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
In a Wednesday letter to Zuckerberg, Blumenthal said that Facebook's CEO or Instagram's head should "testify to set the record straight and provide members of Congress and parents with a plan on how you are going to protect our kids."
Blumenthal, who chaired the panel that heard from both Haugen and Facebook official Antigone Davis about the effect of Instagram on kids, also said Davis seemed "to have provided false or inaccurate testimony to me regarding attempts to internally conceal its research."
Zuckerberg once seemed ill-at-ease in Washington, but he's become something of a regular fixture on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have secured high-profile testimony from the CEO to address concerns over Cambridge Analytica, antitrust and Facebook's cryptocurrency plans, among other issues.
The CEO has rarely made gaffes or groundbreaking confessions during the showdowns, however.
Blumenthal has also set a hearing for next week on social media and kids with representatives from Snap, TikTok and YouTube.
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a new rule on Wednesday, placing controls on exports of items that could be used for surveillance, espionage or other actions. The rule will go into effect in 90 days and is intended to stymie the sale of hacking tools to China, Russia and other countries.
According to the Washington Post, these tools would include software like Pegasus, the military-grade spyware sold by the Israel firm NSO Group to governments around the world, which the Washington Post and a consortium of media partners reported on for The Pegasus Project.
Once the rule is enacted, organizations would need a license from the Bureau of Industry and Security in order to sell software or equipment that could be used for hacking purposes in China or Russia.
But Commerce did try to strike a balance so as not to inhibit cybersecurity efforts in some countries. For instance, according to the Post, licenses would be required for so-called "intrusion software" sold to governments in Israel, the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. But software intended for cyber defense sold to non-governmental actors in those places would not require a license. However, sending any such software to China or Russia, whether the purchaser is a government entity or not, would require a license.
The ultimate goal of the rule is to balance the need for software and equipment globally with the protections necessary to prevent malicious activity.
According to one senior official interviewed by the Washington Post, the Department is "trying to walk the line between not impairing legitimate cybersecurity collaboration across borders, but trying to make sure these pieces of hardware and software technology aren't obtained and used by repressive governments."
A network of Russian-speaking hackers are phishing YouTube influencers with fake collaboration offers in order to hijack their accounts, Google said in a blog post Wednesday. Since May of this year, Google's Threat Analysis Group has blocked 1.6 million phishing messages and restored almost 4,000 accounts that were targeted using these techniques.
Google identified the perpetrators of the campaign as a group of hackers tied to an online forum. They developed false collaboration opportunities with YouTubers ranging from free antivirus software to online games in order to steal their accounts.
Once the victims took the bait, the hackers would take over their channels and sell it or use it to perpetuate crypto scams. The hackers have done everything from forging business emails and building fake websites to delivering malicious files via social engineering.
The company said it has "decreased the volume of related phishing emails on Gmail by 99.6% since May 2021" and has referred the scheme to the FBI for further investigation.
Sony on Wednesday announced another major PlayStation exclusive game, 2018's God of War reboot, would be making its way to the PC platform early next year. The company intends to distribute the game through both the Epic Game Store and Valve's Steam on Jan. 22.
As part of its announcement, Sony said God of War has sold more than 19.5 million copies for the PlayStation 4 platform, surpassing former sales leader Uncharted 4: Thief's End and making the Santa Monica Studio title the most successful PlayStation Studios release to date.
"Our primary goal when bringing God of War to PC was to highlight the exceptional content the team created and leverage the powerful hardware that the platform offers to create a uniquely breathtaking and high-performance version of the game," reads a blog post by Santa Monica Studio community manager Grace Orlady. "You'll be able to enjoy the full potential of our cinematic, no-cut camera as it follows Kratos and Atreus across the realms with the option of true 4k resolution, on supported devices, and unlocked framerates."
Sony has been more aggressive in the last few years about expanding its original games portfolio beyond the PlayStation, starting with Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn and then zombie survival game Days Gone, with confirmed plans to port Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4 as well.
Earlier this year, Sony acquired both Bluepoint and Nixxes, companies specializing respectively in remastering games and porting games to the PC platform, to accelerate those efforts, which are partly a response to competitor Microsoft's Xbox platform and the Windows maker's device-agnostic approach to game releases.
PayPal is interested in buying Pinterest, according to Bloomberg News. The payments company recently approached Pinterest about a possible acquisition with a price tag of around $45 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The potential deal comes during a tumultuous time for Pinterest, which saw its cofounder Evan Sharp leave for LoveFrom last week. Employees have also accused Pinterest of racism and discrimination, staging walkouts and circling petitions during the 2020 summer.
Pinterest is known as a steady source of traffic for ecommerce websites. It has attempted to integrate payments and purchasing more directly on its website, without much success. Pinterest shares increased by almost 13% after news of the potential deal broke.
PayPal shares dropped 3% in an apparent reaction to the potential deal. The company, which split off from former parent eBay in 2015, is worth more than $300 billion — approximately six times eBay's current market cap.
WeWork's merger with a Silicon Valley SPAC went through on Tuesday, closing the loop on a chaotic two-year journey to become a publicly-traded company.
Investors in BowX, the special acquisition company helping WeWork go public, voted to officially merge with WeWork on Tuesday. The company's shares will start trading Thursday, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, likely under the "WE" ticker symbol. BowX said WeWork will get about $1.3 billion in cash from the deal, and it values the company at a total of about $9 billion, according to WeWork's announcement from March 2021.
The WeWork that's going public is a far cry from the high-flying company of a few years ago. WeWork filed for public status in August 2019, but the IPO went up in flames after the valuation sunk from $47 billion to $10 billion. The company removed Adam Neumann as CEO, and then was absorbed by investment firm SoftBank.
WeWork has seen its fortunes improve somewhat during the pandemic, though, as the shift to remote and hybrid work has made WeWork's flexible offerings potentially more relevant than ever. That's the message new CEO Sandeep Mathrani has been promoting, anyway, as the company has tried to get back on the right track by shedding bad deals and trimming costs. Now it will test the market's appetite for a calmer, less ambitious version of the original idea.
Activision Blizzard has fired 20 individuals and reprimanded or punished 20 more in the course of its investigation into allegations of discrimination, harassment and sexism within the company, according to a Financial Times report.
None of those fired or punished were C-suite or director-level employees, Frances Townsend, the chief compliance officer at the gaming company, told the Financial Times. The company announced the firings, as well as a large expansion of its ethics team, in an all-staff memo filed Tuesday. Townsend also said that while the company has yet to meet the demands of organizing workers, who have asked for an end to mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts and a company-wide commitment gender pay equity, she has been given a "blank check" to make changes as she sees fits.
Activision Blizzard is facing a sweeping investigation and lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing into the allegations of gender-based discrimination, and the company also recently settled an investigation from the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission into the same complaints. Activision Blizzard is now asking for a pause in the DFEH suit because the EEOC and DFEH have been publicly fighting over the nature of the dueling suits and settlements, accusing each other of ethical violations. The company appears to be taking advantage of the conflict to try to bring an end to the DFEH process.
Some workers at Activision Blizzard are instead protesting the EEOC settlement and appear to be pinning their hopes on the DFEH, accusing the current agreement of being too weak to cause real change or represent the harms that have been caused by the company.
The company is also facing charges from the Communication Workers of America union in front of the National Labor Relations Board, which allege that Activision Blizzard has tried to quash union organizing efforts protected under national labor laws in the wake of the allegations and lawsuits.
Representatives from the company did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The attorney general of Washington, D.C. told The New York Times on Wednesday that he plans to name Mark Zuckerberg in a privacy lawsuit that stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The suit, first filed in December 2018, charges Facebook with misleading DC residents about their privacy, because Cambridge Analytica was able to illicitly obtain data on tens of millions of users.
Attorney general Karl Racine told the Times that new information had shed light on Zuckerberg's role in product changes that enabled third-party developers to collect data on their users' friends, a technique that allowed a Cambridge University researcher to collect reams of data and sell it to Cambridge Analytica. "Under these circumstances, adding Mr. Zuckerberg to our lawsuit is unquestionably warranted, and should send a message that corporate leaders, including the C.E.O., will be held accountable for their actions," Racine told the Times.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone called the allegations "meritless" in a statement to the Times and said, "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts."
Facebook is planning a rebrand, including a name change, sometime next week, The Verge reported. According to a source, the company plans to use the rebrand to signal its ambitions to become more than just a social network, positioning Facebook as just one of many products under a larger umbrella.
Many people inside the company, including senior leadership, are reportedly not privy to the details of the new name, but The Verge speculated that the name could have something to do with Horizon, the not-yet-released VR version of Facebook, which the company has been working on for the last few years. In August, the company released Horizon Workrooms in beta.
A rebrand that focuses on Facebook's metaverse plans should come as no surprise. The company has been talking about its intention to build the metaverse since this summer, including Mark Zuckerberg telling investors that building the metaverse will be expensive.
In July, Facebook announced a metaverse product group headed up by Instagram VP Vishal Shah, and most recently, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth was promoted to CTO when Mike "Schrep" Schroepfer left, bringing with him years of VR hardware experience. Under Bosworth's leadership, Facebook refocused its VR hardware play on the Oculus Quest headset, Portal smart display, and smart glasses with Ray-Ban.
"We don't comment on rumor or speculation," a Facebook spokesperson told Protocol.
This article was updated to include a statement from Facebook.
