Innholdsfortegnelse for #641 i Techlife News

A couple of blocks from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Electrify America is about to open an indoor charging station that lets drivers relax in a lounge while their electric vehicle batteries are being filled up. The 20-plug direct-current fast-charging station, which opened for business Friday near downtown San Francisco, is part of a trend toward more appealing neighborhood stations, designed to serve EV owners who can’t charge at their homes, as well as travelers or commuters who are low on juice. It’s also designed to allay fears among potential EV buyers that charging stations are too scarce or that they will have no safe place to wait as their vehicles charge, spending far longer than it takes for a gasoline fill-up. EV sales growth in the United States is…

Uber posted its first full-year profit since going public in 2019 and its stock hit an all-time high Wednesday as strong bookings in the final quarter of the year pushed profit and revenue beyond Wall Street expectations. Like its final year as a private company, the last time Uber turned a profit, it got a huge tailwind from investments that helped fuel profits, $1 billion in 2023. The difference is that Uber has started making money from operations. “2023 was an inflection point for Uber,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in prepared remarks. Uber and other ride-share companies struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, whose stock recently joined the S&P 500 index, saw its ride-hailing business stymied as government lockdowns kept millions at home. But Uber has focused on…

In an unexpected move, Apple has announced an update to its App Store policies that will allow developers to release game streaming apps to the platform, meaning native versions of services like Xbox Cloud Gaming or Amazon Luna can come to iOS for the first time. A NEW ERA FOR GAMING For years, Apple’s stringent policies have meant that developers were forced to submit individual apps for each game they wanted to release on iOS, which many found burdensome and restrictive. This policy effectively barred major game streaming platforms like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Steam from providing full services on the iOS platform and has no doubt stifled innovation on iOS. However, with new guidelines, Apple now allows developers to submit a single ‘host’ app offering a catalogue of streaming…

An oversight board is criticizing Facebook owner Meta’s policies regarding manipulated media as “incoherent” and insufficient to address the flood of online disinformation that already has begun to target elections across the globe this year. The quasi-independent board this week said its review of an altered video of President Joe Biden that spread on Facebook exposed gaps in the policy. The board said Meta should expand the policy to focus not only on videos generated with artificial intelligence, but on media regardless of how it was created. That includes fake audio recordings, which already have convincingly impersonated political candidates in the U.S. and elsewhere. The company also should clarify the harms it is trying to prevent and should label images, videos and audio clips as manipulated instead of removing the…

Facebook and Instagram users will start seeing labels on AI-generated images that appear on their social media feeds, part of a broader tech industry initiative to sort between what’s real and not. Meta said this week it’s working with industry partners on technical standards that will make it easier to identify images and eventually video and audio generated by artificial intelligence tools. What remains to be seen is how well it will work at a time when it’s easier than ever to make and distribute AI-generated imagery that can cause harm — from election misinformation to nonconsensual fake nudes of celebrities. “It’s kind of a signal that they’re taking seriously the fact that generation of fake content online is an issue for their platforms,” said Gili Vidan, an assistant professor…

Nintendo reported healthy sales and profits on the back of the hit “Super Mario Bros. Wonder” game, prompting the Japanese video game maker to raise its full fiscal year forecasts. Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. said this week that demand for what it called the first completely new Super Mario game in the series remained strong. Sales of the new Zelda game and “Pikmin 4” also surged. More than 10.7 million units of the latest Super Mario game have been sold around the world since it went on sale in October, according to Nintendo. It is banking on upcoming games like “Mario Vs. Donkey Kong” and “Princess Peach Showtime” to keep the sales momentum going. The weak yen also helped Nintendo’s bottom line by boosting the value of its overseas revenue when…

Google on Thursday introduced a free artificial intelligence app that will implant the technology on smartphones, enabling people to quickly connect to a digital brain that can write for them, interpret what they’re reading and seeing, in addition to helping manage their lives. With the advent of the Gemini app, named after an AI project unveiled late last year, Google will cast aside the Bard chatbot that it introduced a year ago in an effort to catch up with ChatGPT, the chatbot unleashed by the Microsoftbacked startup OpenAI in late 2022. Google is immediately releasing a standalone Gemini app for smartphones running on its Android software. In a few weeks, Google will put Gemini’s features into its existing search app for iPhones, where Apple would prefer people rely on its…

Satya Nadella marks his tenth year as Microsoft CEO, capping a decade of stunning growth as he pivoted the slow-moving software giant into a laser focus on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s stock has soared by more than 1,000% since Nadella took the helm in 2014, compared to the more gradual 185% growth of the broader S&P 500. Microsoft now has a market value of $3 trillion — more than any U.S. publicly traded company, including its longtime rival Apple. “Nadella’s had the biggest transformation of a tech company potentially ever,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives. “The only one that would rival it was (Steve) Jobs coming back to Apple and turning it around with the iPhone.” Microsoft has created $2.8 trillion in shareholder wealth in the past…

For Americans who lacked savings prior to the pandemic, financial stress is rising. A combination of inflation, increased interest rates, and the end of pandemic-tied relief, such as the moratorium on student loan payments, has led to record credit card debt, experts say. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Americans held $1.13 trillion on their credit cards, and aggregate household debt balances increased by $212 billion, a 1.2% rise, according to the latest data from the New York Federal Reserve. Delinquencies are also on the rise. As of December, 3.1% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, up by 0.1 percentage point from the third quarter. The New York Fed’s report found that 6.4% of credit card debt was delinquent by 90 days or more, up from 4%…

Apple snapped out of a yearlong sales funk during its holiday-season quarter, propelled by solid demand for the latest model of its iPhone and still-robust growth in a services division facing legal threats that could undermine its prospects. The modest revenue growth announced last week as part of Apple’s October-December results ended four consecutive quarters of year-over-year sales declines. But the performance still may not be enough to allay recent investor concerns about Apple’s ability to rebuild the momentum that established it as the most valuable U.S. publicly traded company. After years of holding that mantle, Apple recently ceded the top spot to its long-time rival Microsoft, which has been elevated largely through its early leadership in artificial intelligence technology. Apple is hoping to shift the narrative back in its…

ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery announced plans this week to launch a sports streaming platform in the fall that will include offerings from at least 15 networks and all four major professional sports leagues. A one-stop app to view most sports should be a welcome sight for fans, who continue to navigate rising costs by subscribing to multiple services. Kevin Krim, the president and CEO of the ad measurement firm EDO, compared the three companies teaming up for sports like what some networks did when Hulu started in 2008. “My sense is knowing the cast of characters, they’re looking at the original Hulu concept and thinking, ‘Well, that worked out really well for us.’ So let’s do that again. But for live sports streaming,” he said. The three companies…

A checkered mesh of mysteries have accompanied the release of Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle.” There is the promoted one: Who is the “real” Agent Argylle? Then there’s all the (baseless) conjecture over whether argyle aficionado Taylor Swift had anything to do with the film. But most of all: Why two L’s? While we can finally put to rest the first two puzzles, we’re left to posit that the spelling must be to differentiate the movie for those who just want to buy a pair of socks. The socks would be a wiser investment. “Argylle,” a $200 million production from Apple Films opening in theaters last week, is a big bet to kickstart a new spy series, presumably with iterations to follow such as “Plaidd” and “Herringbonne.” Criss-crossing patterns of ridiculousness and…

Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding on Wednesday approved an additional $25 billion authorization to its share buyback program, after reporting lower-than-expected sales revenue for the last quarter of 2023. The company’s Hong Kong-traded shares plunged 6.8% on Thursday. Alibaba’s New York-listed stock price sank 5.9% on Wednesday and has fallen nearly 26% over the past year. Alibaba posted a 5% increase in sales to 260.3 billion yuan ($36.67 billion) in the quarter that ended in December, slightly missing analysts’ estimates. Net income sank to 14.4 billion yuan ($2 billion), down 77% compared to a year earlier. The Hangzhou, China-based firm attributed the drastic decrease to declining values of its equity investments and falling revenues. Alibaba has struggled to sustain its growth and faces increasing competition in the e-commerce sector…

The U.S. economy is humming and there are hundreds of thousands of jobs being added every month. In a stunning burst of hiring to start the year, the nation added 353,000 jobs in January, shrugging off the highest interest rates in two decades that have been put in place by the U.S. Federal Reserve in part to cool off hiring and spending. The unemployment rate is hovering at 3.7%, just above a half-century low. At the same time, layoffs continue to arrive across almost every sector in 2024 as companies adjust to a shifting economy. Job cuts in tech and retail follow a massive ramp-up in hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic — when people spent more time and money online. Now, many companies are reducing headcounts to help lower costs…

With Apple’s hotly anticipated Vision Pro headset hitting store shelves, you’re probably going to start to see more people wearing the futuristic googles that are supposed to usher in the age of “spatial computing.” It’s an esoteric mode of technology that Apple executives and their marketing gurus are trying to thrust into the mainstream. This while avoiding other more widely used terms such as “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” to describe the transformative powers of a product that’s being touted as potentially monumental as the iPhone that came out in 2007. “We can’t wait for people to experience the magic,” Apple CEO Tim Cook gushed while discussing the Vision Pro with analysts. The Vision Pro also will be among Apple’s most expensive products at $3,500 — a price point that…

General Motors’ troubled robotaxi service Cruise this week endured a public lashing from a California judge who compared the company to the devious TV character Eddie Haskell for its behavior following a ghastly collision that wrecked its ambitious expansion plans. The withering comparison to the two-faced Haskell from the 1950s-era TV series, “Leave It To Beaver,” was drawn by Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason III during an hour-long hearing held to consider a proposed settlement of a case accusing Cruise trying to conceal its excruciating role in an incident that resulted in the suspension of its California license. After a vehicle driven by a human struck a San Francisco pedestrian in early October, a Cruise robotaxi named “Panini” dragged the person 20 feet (6 meters) while traveling at roughly seven…

The Dutch parent of pioneering Russian tech company Yandex is selling its operations in the country at a steeply discounted price of just over $5 billion to its Russia-based managers and oil company Lukoil, one of the biggest deals for Western-held companies to exit Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. The price reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from “unfriendly” countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia, according to a statement this week from Nasdaq-exchange listed Yandex NV. It follows drawn-out negotiations that show the complexities international companies must navigate if they want to unload their Russian businesses, which many have been struggling to do since President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the sweeping financial and economic sanctions that…