Microsoft, Google AI war; Android 14 first preview; Twitter Blue in India and other top tech news of the week

-


from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/jUA1SCL

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 investors discuss what’s in store for venture debt following SVB’s collapse

-
There are many questions around the implications of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse that won’t be answered for a long time. But there’s one question that many startups and investors are hoping will get answered sooner rather than later: What happens to venture debt? SVB was one of the larger, if not the largest, providers of venture debt to U.S.-based startups. And now that First Republic Bank has also gone under, that question has spiraled, growing ever more complex. Many startups rely on venture debt: it’s both a cheaper alternative to raising equity and can serve as a capital tool that helps companies build in ways that equity isn’t great for. For some companies in capital-intensive areas like climate, fintech and defense, access to debt is often the only avenue to growth or scale. Thankfully, venture capitalists aren’t too worried about the SVB collapse’s impact on venture debt as a whole. We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in TechCrunch su
Read more

Austin Russell became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2021; now he owns Forbes

-
Austin Russell is on quite a run. The 28-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, which develops vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies primarily for self-driving cars, told the Wall Street Journal earlier today that he is buying an 82% stake in Forbes Global Media Holdings in a deal that values the company at nearly $800 million. According to the WSJ, Russell’s stake includes the remaining portion of the company owned by its namesake family, which sold 95% of the company to the Hong Kong-based investor group Integrated Whale Media back in 2014. Forbes was essentially on sale from the moment it called off its merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in June of last year, after the market soured and investors lost their appetite for SPACs. Luminar itself had better timing; it went public via a SPAC merger in 2021 when retail investors were still clamoring for shares in mobility tech companies. By the time Forbes was calling off its own SPAC plans,
Read more

Amazon workers at two Chicago warehouses walk out to demand better treatment

-
This morning, dozens of warehouse workers at two Amazon facilities near Chicago staged a pre-Christmas walkout during the busiest time of the year to demand better treatment and higher wages. “We have been passed over for raises. We are being overworked, even when there is sufficient people to work here,” a worker at the DLN2 facility in Cicero said on a livestream posted by the Amazonians United ‘s Chicago chapter, which is not affiliated with Amazon. “We have not received the bonuses we were promised. There are people here who were hired as permanent workers, and then they took their badges away and made them temporary workers. They are staffing this place unsafely, making people work too fast, even though we don’t have to.” These workers, who work between 1:20 AM and 11:50 AM, are also demanding a $5 per hour raise. Amazon told TechCrunch that the current starting pay is $15.80 per hour at the two facilities that staged walkouts, DLN2 in Cicero and DIL3 in Gage Park. The Amazonia
Read more