Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is cutting back its commitment to ambitious moonshot projects. Company executives have told staffers at the X unit, which converts promising investment projects into full-fledged subsidiaries, known as Other Bets, that no such conversions will happen this year, said a person familiar with the situation. At the same time, executives have told staffers that projects within X that might have turned into full subsidiaries... Read more ›
50
In case you missed it, we just started selling early bird tickets to our fourth annual Creator Economy Summit, taking place on April 2 in Los Angeles!Our event is coming at a time when the creator economy is entering a new era. Many startups are struggling to raise fresh venture funding, forcing them to seek buyers, pivot or even consider shutting down. But while investor appetite has soured, there are... Read more ›
2
As officials from Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission scrutinize the role that cloud providers play in OpenAI and Anthropic, one thing they should recognize quickly is that the two startups’ relationships with their big cloud-shareholders are not the same. Anthropic has a lot more independence from its shareholders than OpenAI. For instance, Microsoft has access to the weights of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which means that they could recreate much of... Read more ›
20
If you want to understand how Microsoft’s embrace of artificial intelligence is driving growth in its business, take a look at GitHub, a business it bought a few years ago that stores code for software developers around the world. It’s no secret that developers have flocked to GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant Microsoft developed with OpenAI. But Microsoft is making strides toward its bigger goal: convincing those customers to... Read more ›
11
Charlotte, N.C.-based Albemarle, the world’s largest lithium producer, has laid off more than 300 employees in its U.S. and global operations as the lithium industry navigates an 81% drop in prices for the central metal in the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries, according to people familiar with the matter. The layoff amounts to 4% of the company’s global workforce. Read more ›
0
Welcome to your Weekend!Let me introduce—well, reintroduce—myself. I’m Abram Brown, the new editor of Weekend, the magazine you’ve got in front of you. This issue marks my return to The Information after earlier tenures as a Weekend staff editor and senior reporter. In coming weekends, you’ll notice some changes to Weekend, but its raison d’être remains the same: to present you with the foremost chronicle of tech, media and finance—and... Read more ›
3
How does Bill Gates wield his influence? Will artificial intelligence kill us all? Why doesn’t the creator economy function better? The answers to all these questions and more fill the pages of the books we’re most excited about this year. As much as they have a common theme, several express a sense of “ennui with technology,” as Kyle Chayka, the author of one pick, understatedly put it to us. Read more ›
0
When it comes to drama, Netflix has turned out to be a disappointment, at least for reporters. In the annals of tech CEO successions, Reed Hastings’ handoff of the reins to the duo of Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters seems to have gone about as smoothly as possible. In the year since Hastings kicked himself upstairs, Netflix stock has soared 67%. Worries about its slowing growth have (to some extent)... Read more ›
0
It's been a bleak week. From the blood bath in the news industry to further job cuts throughout tech, 2024 is off to a brutal start. Unless you're Netflix. Plus, why we're so into football, pop culture and peptides at the moment. That and more on this week's More or Less. Apple Spotify YouTube Read more ›
15
Flexport plans to lay off nearly 20% of its workforce in the coming weeks, representing several hundred roles, according to people familiar with the matter. It would mark the SoftBank-backed logistics startup’s third major round of cuts in just over a year. Flexport is planning the cuts even after it raised $260 million from Shopify earlier this month. The company had approximately 2,600 employees after it cut another 20% of... Read more ›
29
Up nearly 9,000 feet in the Utah sky, the yurt-shaped lodge atop Powder Mountain offered an expansive vista when I arrived in mid-January, showing dozens of icy peaks stretching across four states. A blizzard had just dumped several feet of snow across the 10,000-acre luxury ski resort, worsening travel on the mountain’s infamously steep roads. As a matter of fact, the storm had prompted a warning from the mogul who... Read more ›
0
Earlier this week, I reported one finding from combing through details of the 123 companies in our Generative AI Database: Only four of the 96 U.S.-based startups—including two of the best known, OpenAI and Anthropic—are structured as nonprofits or for-profit benefit corporations.My dive through the database also revealed other insights, including a recent surge of generative artificial intelligence companies based in Europe. Overall, Europe is not well represented in the... Read more ›
0
For some venture capital–backed cybersecurity startups, the slow-moving gears of initial public offerings are starting to turn. Snyk, an Accel Partners–backed startup that sells security tools for developers, valued at $7.4 billion in 2022, has been drafting its IPO investor prospectus and could file it confidentially with regulators in the next few months, a person familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, Cato Networks, a SoftBank-backed Israeli startup that sells network... Read more ›
0
In the classic Akira Kurosawa movie “Rashomon,” four witnesses to a murder describe the event in four conflicting ways. Watching that movie would have been good preparation for the contradictory narratives that greeted Apple’s seemingly momentous news today about changes to its app policies in Europe. Apple outlined those changes in a news release and a long set of posts for developers. It will make the shifts in March to... Read more ›
0
Apple appeared to drop a bombshell Thursday morning in saying it would comply with a new European law by offering to lower its App Store commissions to 20% from 30% and dropping other longtime restrictions, including its prohibition on alternative app stores. Apple also opened up the iPhone chip used for Apple Pay to banks and other developers to launch contactless payments at cash registers. At the same time, though,... Read more ›
0
TikTok’s efforts to make inroads with Hollywood include bringing a dozen top movie-focused creators to the Sundance Film Festival, which is currently taking place in Park City, Utah. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s because YouTube did this at Sundance for several years last decade, when it, too, was heavily focused on making inroads into the traditional entertainment industry.TikTok creators including Joe Aragon (1 million followers on TikTok) and... Read more ›
0
This week made it clear that venture capitalists have given up on the idea that they’ll make their career finding the next hit consumer marketplace, retail brand or media company.We reported that the core consumer team at Andreessen Horowitz, a firm known for bets on Pinterest, Instacart and Airbnb, has dissolved. Connie Chan, a longtime consumer general partner at the firm, said she was leaving the firm. She was the... Read more ›
2
Many logistics startups were forced to make deep layoffs last year as their businesses slumped. Package-delivery startup Veho, in contrast, grew its revenue nearly 90% last year. Yet it’s also been cutting jobs. Veho cut 19% of its corporate workers last week, a person close to the company said, layoffs that came just a few months after it outsourced many of its customer service roles to overseas contractors. The layoffs,... Read more ›
3
At The Information, we’ve spent a lot of time writing about artificial intelligence and the people who develop it. But at the end of the day, their ability to launch software to billions of people depends on data centers. And the availability of such facilities can’t be taken for granted.Over the past few days, I’ve rubbed shoulders with the titans of American data centers at the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference... Read more ›
1
Design software maker Figma has added roughly 500 employees since it agreed to be bought by Adobe in September 2022. The companies canceled the deal in December in the face of regulators’ objections. Not much has changed, however, about who’s running Figma. Co-founder and CEO Dylan Field has seven direct reports. Only one—chief marketing officer Sheila Vashee—joined since the Adobe deal was announced. Most other senior leaders have largely stayed... Read more ›
0
Most popular sources
Tech Wire Asia
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28% 21 |
Business Insider
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24% 2 |
CNET
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8% 3 |
Eurogamer.net
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5% 1 |
Android Authority
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4% 1 |
| View sources » | |
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28.11.2024 13:43
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