The service is officially launching on Tuesday to all U.S. customers.
Amazon Luna now comes with a free tier for Prime members.
Amazon is expanding its cloud gaming efforts with an official U.S. launch of its Luna platform. The service, which has been in an «invite-only» beta state since its soft launch in the fall of 2020, is now available for anyone in the mainland U.S. to sign up, with various subscription options.
Luna differs from competing cloud gaming platforms from Google, Microsoft and Nvidia in that it follows a cable TV model, offering channels with a bundle of games for a flat monthly subscription fee. Luna does not, however, let you play games you’ve bought elsewhere, as Nvidia’s GeForce Now does, and doesn’t let you purchase games or play free titles, as Google Stadia allows.
You effectively subscribe to Luna for access both to software and the service itself, similar in fashion to Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming. (Although it should be noted that Microsoft’s offering is tied to its Game Pass subscription, meaning titles can be played via the cloud on a range of screens or locally on Xbox and PC hardware.)
Right now, there are six available channels, including a new Prime Gaming channel with nine titles available to Prime customers for free. The other channels include an existing Ubisoft Plus channel for $17.99 and Amazon’s own Luna Plus channel for $5.99 and family games channel for $2.99. There are also two new channels, including retro arcade classics for $4.99 and the full collection of social party games from Jackbox Games for $4.99. Amazon says the monthly price for its Luna Plus and Family channels will double on April 1.
Amazon is also adding new features, including the ability to use your phone as a controller to play games through a Fire TV device and the ability to broadcast a Luna play session on Twitch. Right now, Luna is available as a native app for PC, Mac and Fire TV devices and on mobile devices, tablets and Chromebooks as a web app.
Correction: A previous version if this story said Amazon Luna was not available on mobile devices. It is in fact available as a web app on Android, iOS and Chrome OS. We regret the error.
Nick Statt is Protocol’s video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
Women were forced out of the workforce in droves throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them turned to Airbnb as a result.
Last year, about 20% more women joined the platform than men, according to company data. Now, 56% of Airbnb’s global hosts identify as women, and 59% of hosts in the United States are women, the data show. New women hosts made more than $1.1 billion last year, including $550 million in the United States.
Airbnb has always done fairly well bringing in and retaining women hosts. The percentage of global hosts who identify as women has always hovered around 55% over the past several years. Nearly 60% of Superhosts are women as well.
Catherine Powell, Airbnb’s global head of hosting, said the increase in women is due to COVID.
“The pandemic has disproportionately impacted women,” Powell told Protocol, pointing to industries like hospitality, which is dominated by women and was hard-hit by the pandemic. “Hosting has been appealing to women, it has been an important source of income.”
Women considered downshifting or leaving the workforce more than men in 2020, according to data from McKinsey. Working mothers, women in senior management roles and Black women were affected the most. For example, the rate at which women with kids under 10 years old considered leaving was 10% higher than for men. And many women who considered leaving simply wanted more flexibility with their jobs.
“If you look at what hosting offers, it is incredibly flexible,” Powell added. “We have women on the platform who work full-time, who are able to host. We have women who are full-time parents or caregivers who are able to host.”
Women who left the workforce may have sought out alternative forms of revenue, one of which could have been Airbnb, said Angie Moody, the head of tax management platform Ruby Money. Moody, who has been an Airbnb host before, said women have more control over their income through Airbnb and can choose to work more or less during parts of the year depending on, say, their kids’ school schedules. That’s part of the reason there are more women on platforms like Shopify and Upwork: Some women prefer the flexibility of working their own hours.
«When you work for a company, you don’t really get to choose when to flex up or down, and all of these needs became foregrounded for women,» Moody told Protocol. «They realized that they weren’t in control of their work schedule, so a lot of women are trying to take that control back and find new income streams.»
With all the talk about competition between the U.S. and China to dominate AI advancement, it turns out researchers in both countries work together. A lot.
A new report from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence on the global state of AI research and investment states that despite the fact that many AI researchers work together across the globe, the largest number of cross-country AI research and development collaborations between 2010 and 2021 were among people from the U.S. and China working together.
“Even with COVID and issues with respect to collaboration between countries as affected by the previous administration, collaboration between institutions in different countries seems to have continued,” Ray Perrault, co-chair of Stanford’s AI index steering committee and a computer scientist at SRI International, told Protocol last week. “Not much indicates that either of those phenomena had a major dent in collaboration across countries.”
To determine what AI cross-pollination looks like, researchers at Stanford evaluated AI-related research publications such as academic papers and industry-related research.
They noted that AI work between people in the U.S. and China, as represented by published research, far surpassed that of collaborations between the U.S. and other countries, as well as among other countries excluding the U.S. In fact, the Stanford researchers found that U.S.-China AI collaborations produced 2.7 times more publications than produced by AI work between the U.K. and China, the second most prolific partner group in AI research.
Still, after rising steadily fivefold since 2010, the number of U.S.-China AI research partnerships dipped between 2020 and 2021 from more than 10,000 publications to 9,660.
Other top AI partnerships ranked in order according to the number of research publications they produced emerged from teams in the U.S. and U.K., China and Australia, and the U.S. and Germany, Canada, Australia and France, respectively.
Some Google employees are calling out the company for unevenly applying its remote work policies, Business Insider reported Tuesday. Google is bringing Bay Area employees back to the office at least three days per week starting April 4. But while some team members are spared from in-person work policies, others are no longer allowed to work remotely, employees say.
Employees raised their complaints at a company all-hands last Thursday, submitting questions through a system called Dory. Two popular questions involved remote work, according to Insider.
«Google made record profits through the pandemic (and WFH), traffic has already increased (at least in Bay Area) with gas prices at record high, and people have different preferences for WFH vs work from office,» one question said. «Why is the RTO policy not ‘Work from office when you want or when it makes sense to?'» Another submitter said some teams «blanket ban» remote work, with Google rejecting applications «even if managers are supportive.»
Workers told Insider that Google’s remote work policies felt arbitrary. One employee said a colleague was barred from remote work even though their manager was allowed to work from home. Bay Area employees who wish to work remotely from other states might face pay cuts: Google will lower pay if employees relocate to cities like Durham, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas.
This isn’t the first time Google’s remote work plans have upset its employees. In July, CNET reported that employees were angered by «hypocritical» remote work policies, allowing senior executive Urs Hölzle to work indefinitely from New Zealand while lower-level employees had to go through an application process.
Other big tech companies are also opening their offices for corporate employees in the coming weeks. But not everyone’s requiring in-person work. Twitter will let employees work from home forever, if they want. The pandemic has made workers accustomed to a flexible work environment, and many find required, in-person work unappealing.
Instagram is blocked in Russia as of Monday. So Russian developers created Rossgram.
On March 28, Rossgram will open to bloggers, sponsors and investors. Regular users will have access by April and be able to download the platform on Android and iOS. It will include monetization tools like paid access to content, a crowdfunding tool, a referral program and more.
«My partner Kirill Filimonov and our group of developers were already ready for this turn of events and decided not to miss the opportunity to create a Russian analogue of a popular social network beloved by our compatriots,» Alexander Zobov, one of the people building the app, wrote on the VKontakte social network, Reuters reported.
The project was announced just days after Russia blocked access to Instagram and called for parent company Meta to be designated as an “extremist” group after Meta said it would allow calls for violence against Russian soldiers as they relate to the war in Ukraine.
It’s unsurprising that Russian developers would create an Instagram clone rather than a platform similar to Facebook, which is also blocked in the country. Instagram is way more popular than Facebook in Russia, based on the number of downloads from the App Store and Google Play.
More broadly, Russia has been working to create its own “splinternet” that operates separately from the Western world since even before the war, Politico reported. Tech companies’ increased pressure on the country may only speed up that process.
As gas prices skyrocket, Uber and Lyft want riders to foot the bill. DoorDash doesn’t want customers — or drivers — to worry about it.
The food delivery company is rolling out a “Gas Rewards Program” that gives U.S. delivery drivers a prepaid business Visa debit card that will give drivers 10% cash back on gas, DoorDash said Wednesday. The company said drivers could receive anywhere from $1.65 to $2 back per gallon, and they can use the card even when they’re not working.
“Over the last few weeks, prices at the pump have increased all across the world, and for Dashers who deliver by car, this economic reality presents unique and unprecedented challenges,” the company said in a statement.
Drivers who are on the road most will earn even more money. Those who accept and complete orders that add up to 100 miles will get $5 back, and that earning will increase if they complete more miles.
The program will begin on Thursday and remain in place through at least April. “We’ll continue to monitor gas prices, listen to the Dasher community, and seek feedback as we evolve these programs and explore additional resources in the coming weeks and months,” the company said.
Uber and Lyft are dealing with soaring gas prices by asking customers to pay more. The companies added temporary surcharges on each trip to help offset gas prices for drivers, and Uber is encouraging drivers to switch to electric vehicles. A DoorDash spokesperson told CNBC that the company won’t ask customers to pay extra for gas.
“We know Dashers aren’t the only ones facing pain at the pump, and we’re not passing the cost of these programs on to consumers at this time,” the spokesperson said.
Some people don’t think the surcharge for Uber and Lyft rides are enough. A petition circulating on coworker.org is calling for customers to pay more and for companies to take a smaller commission from fares. As of Wednesday, the petition garnered nearly 9,500 signatures. «Gas prices are hitting us hard!» the petition states.
Gas prices are continuing to skyrocket nationwide. The national average sits around $4.32. The average price in California, where DoorDash is headquartered, bumped again on Wednesday to $5.77 per gallon.
Microsoft is diving deeper into building tools for the hybrid workplace. It announced several Microsoft 365 updates today as a part of its annual work trends data, and it has also scheduled an event showcasing Windows’ plans for the future of hybrid work.
Some of the new features include the ability to indicate in-person or remote attendance on Outlook RSVPs, a new Microsoft Teams layout called «Front Row» and a smarter Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera. The «Front Row» view on Teams places the video gallery at the bottom of the screen so employees in a conference room can talk to their remote counterparts at eye-level instead of awkwardly craning their necks to look up at a wall-mounted screen. And the new Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera will automatically reframe video when someone leaves or enters a meeting room. Microsoft has poured a lot of time and effort into figuring out the hybrid meeting, showing Protocol its visions for the perfect conference room last June. The stakes are even higher now that we are inching our way back to the office.
Microsoft also announced some updates to PowerPoint. There are more workplace productivity apps than ever before, including in the realm of corporate presentations. Presentation format is in flux, as presenting a slide deck remotely is not a particularly engaging experience. Microsoft previously introduced Cameo, a feature that allows users to integrate their Teams video in their PowerPoint slides. It also introduced a recording studio within PowerPoint so users can record and send presentations. Today, Microsoft is bringing the two features together.
«One of our big lessons from hybrid is that as the world went remote, people were focusing on their well-being,» Shawn Villaron, VP of Product at PowerPoint, previously told Protocol. «You couldn’t necessarily get everyone into a room to do a 40-minute presentation. You needed an asynchronous way of communicating and sharing your presentation.»
The updates stem from Microsoft’s work trends findings after surveying 31,000 people across 31 countries. The report essentially confirms what we already know: More employees are likely to prioritize health and well-being over work, leaders need to make working from the office worth the inconvenience and workers are spending more time in meetings. Microsoft also found that 54% of managers think leadership is out of touch with employee expectations.
Windows apparently plays into Microsoft’s hybrid work vision, too. It posted a sparse event page for a «Windows Powers the Future of Hybrid Work» April 5 presentation. Windows EVP Panos Panay will present the keynote and explore Windows’ productivity, management and security tools.
Meta has gotten clobbered over the impact Instagram has had on young people. Now, six months since the company paused plans to launch an Instagram app for teens, Meta is rolling out new parental controls it hopes will answer at least some of its critics’ concerns.
The new controls will live in Instagram’s so-called Family Center, where parents will be able to see how much time their kids are spending on the app, set time limits, get notified when their children report another account and get regular updates on who their kids are following and who’s following them. Meta said it will also release parental controls for Quest headsets over the course of the next few months, including allowing parents to lock kids out of certain apps starting next month. And in May, the company will also begin automatically preventing kids 13 and up from accessing age-inappropriate apps.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri described the changes as «just one step on a longer path.»
«Our vision for Family Center is to eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies, all from one central place,» Mosseri wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
Mosseri hinted that these changes were coming last December, shortly before testifying to Congress in the wake of whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosures about Instagram’s impact on teen girls. At the time, Mosseri said the company was working on new parental controls, as well as features that encourage teens to «take a break» from Instagram.
The changes Instagram is announcing now will give parents more control than they’ve had in the past, but they’re hardly revolutionary. Parents can already set time limits for their kids on iPhones and Android phones. Adding that functionality to Instagram doesn’t hurt, but for conscientious parents, it may be redundant.
Parents have also had the ability to block kids from accessing age-rated apps on smartphones for years. The fact that that control is only being rolled out for Quest now — or more precisely, next month — only underscores how far behind VR is on the evolutionary path of platform safety. If Meta really does view the metaverse as its future, then that part of the business is going to have to catch up fast.
But ultimately, there’s only so much parental controls can achieve when not all parents bother to even set them. What child safety advocates and lawmakers have been most concerned about is not just how much time kids spend on Instagram, but also the way they can get dragged down into toxic rabbit holes once they’re there. Instagram’s new controls won’t do much about that.
That said, Mosseri did indicate last year that the company was taking steps to tweak recommendations for teens and to nudge them toward different types of content when they’re dwelling on one subject a little too long. Instagram spokesperson Faith Eischen told Protocol, «Those are areas we’re still actively working on.»
The video game industry has been forever changed by the pandemic, and it’s now on track to more than double in size by revenue over the next give years, according to a new report from game development toolmaker Unity.
Unity on Wednesday published its annual game industry trend report highlighting six major shifts in how games are being played and how developers are creating and monetizing them. One standout figure is Unity’s estimate that the game industry will grow to more than $300 billion over the next five years, thanks to pandemic-induced accelerations in the number of people who play games, the number of games that are made and the amount of money spent on both new titles and existing live service games.
The report, which draws on data from the roughly 230,000 developers who use Unity’s game engine and other tools, underlines just how drastic the effects of COVID-19 have been on the game industry, which saw an explosive 2020 and steady growth all last year as people stayed indoors and spent more of their income on at-home entertainment.
Though the rate of growth the industry saw in the first year of the pandemic slowed in 2021, Unity said global game industry revenues still grew annually by 30% last year. Daily active users on PC and console are up 62% and up 74% on mobile since the beginning of 2019.
Much of the growth is happening on mobile, the report said. The number of games being developed across categories ranging from hypercasual to large, console blockbusters is increasing alongside the total number of developers, with a huge influx of new games in the hypercasual category on mobile.
«Publishers on the Unity platform built 93% more games in 2021 than in 2020 – that’s almost twice as many games as the year before,» the report said. «What’s more, there are more creators using the Unity platform to build games than ever before. In 2021, the number of Unity creators increased 31% compared to 2020.»
Unity’s report also highlighted the growth and importance of cross-platform and live service gaming, two trends the company said will become huge pillars of both how games are created and what titles maintain popularity and financial success well into the future.
«If a game can follow a player from their home console to their mobile phone or tablet, it cuts down the chance that they’ll switch to another game when they change devices,» the report said. «It also improves the player experience, making it easy for players to access their save files, in-game purchases, and content anywhere.» Unity spotlighted Genshin Impact, a game that’s available across Android phones, iPhones and iPads, PlayStation consoles, and PC; it made $2 billion in revenue in its first year since launching in September 2020. The company said it «expects this feature to become standard throughout the industry» down the line.
Unity also said modern games are now less like complete and standalone pieces of content, like a book, and now more like television shows. «In particular, live games have demonstrated their popularity with gamers, who now expect games to have regular content updates – new challenges, modes, maps, cosmetics, character options, and storylines. Many of the most popular games today are built as services, including Genshin Impact, Apex [Legends], and League of Legends,» the report said.
The great streaming service consolidation is only a few years away. To dominate the market, companies will need to acquire the most comprehensive catalog they can.
That’s probably what Amazon was thinking when it announced its $6.5 billion — $8.45 billion, including debt — bid to acquire Hollywood lion MGM. Today, the company just cleared the first major hurdle to making that a reality. The European Commission announced Tuesday that they will greenlight the deal.
”The addition of MGM’s content into Amazon’s Prime Video offer would not have a significant impact on Amazon’s position as a provider of marketplace services,” said the Commission. Notably, the Commission has filed charges against Amazon for its use of vendor data to compete with third-party sellers on its online retail platform. But while the EU’s executive arm finds Amazon’s ecommerce operations anticompetitive, it says the company’s acquisition of MGM wouldn’t be problematic because MGM isn’t a “must-have.”
Every streaming service is facing down the inevitability of the deal between Discovery+ and HBO Max, announced last year and set to be finalized next month. AT&T is spinning off Warner Media, and the company’s shareholders will own 71% of the new company, Warner Brothers Discovery. Variety reported that content will be consolidated into a single app.
That merged service, which doesn’t yet have a name, could be a Netflix killer. Amazon Prime adding MGM content likely won’t have the same effect. Amazon Prime passed 200 million subscribers last year, and the company said 175 million of those paying members also streamed Prime Video content. But it’s unclear how many folks are watch Prime Video regularly.
Meanwhile, Netflix leads the streaming pack with 222 million global subscribers and a slate of originals that continue to drive cultural conversations. Discovery+ and HBO Max will have close to 96 million subscribers combined, though it’s unclear how many will subscribe to the new mega-bundle.
Now that Amazon has been blessed by EU regulators, it faces the Federal Trade Commission, which will reportedly make its decision on the deal by mid-March.
Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service is heading in a new, more accessible direction. It just might be the platform’s saving grace if Google can convince enough players, developers and third-party companies to come along for the ride.
During Tuesday’s Google for Games Developer Summit, ahead of next week’s Game Developers Conference, the company announced a series of initiatives designed to make Stadia easier for consumers to access and try, easier for developers to deliver games and free trials, and easier for companies to use Google’s technology to build all-new products and services of their own.
The company’s consumer offering is staying put for now. But Google, in confirming some details of an Insider report from earlier this year that the company was shifting focus to a white-label enterprise offering, plans to launch “Immersive Stream for Games,» a new service companies can use to bring cloud streaming to customers using the underlying Stadia technology.
We saw this in action with AT&T’s streamable Batman: Arkham Knight offering last fall, and now Google is going ahead with turning it into a proper enterprise offering. AT&T is planning to bring a second game to customers using Google’s technology later this year, as well as expanding access when that second game arrives to mobile in addition to desktop web browsers.
One of the big changes coming to the consumer side of Stadia in the coming weeks will be the ability to browse the Stadia store without having to sign in to either a Stadia or Google account. «Players will be able to find Stadia games through Google Search and explore Stadia’s library of entirely free games or demos to try, the 50+ games in Stadia Pro, publisher sales, or the 100+ games launching on Stadia this year,» the company said.
Google is also planning to give publishers the ability to offer what it’s calling «click-to-play» trials, which will be timed access to full games on Stadia that people can play without needing an account. Gearbox’s Risk of Rain 2 is the first of these timed trial titles, available today on Stadia for one hour without needing to login; the company says any progress will carry over to your account if you do decide to purchase the full product. Google says it’s expanding the capability to all of its developer partners later this year.
And to get more games on the platform, Google says it’s planning to make it easier for game makers to port products made with Unreal Engine and Unity over to Stadia. «The core features we’re talking about today are benefitting both the development journey and player experience for Immersive Stream for Games customers, including Stadia,» said Dov Zimring, the platform’s new head of Product. (Zimring replaced former Product chief John Justice, who departed last year for Meta.) «In partnership with Google Cloud, we’re working to build out the underlying cloud gaming technology that powers both Stadia and our customers’ offerings via Immersive Stream for Games.»
Update 3/15: Clarified that Google’s announcements include the ability to browse the Stadia store without having to login with a Google account or create a Stadia one, while being able to play certain titles without an account will be limited to «click-to-play» games.
Early last week, the descriptions of Airbnb listings in Ukraine pleaded for help. One was titled, “An apartment to collect funds for Ukrainian people.” Now, the original link to the listing is forbidden.
Over the past few weeks, Airbnb users have led a grassroots movement to book stays in the country without actually going there as a way to donate to people in Ukraine. As of Friday, about 434,000 nights were booked in the country, raising $15 million for hosts. Airbnb chipped in, too, by temporarily waiving guest and host fees on bookings in the country.
But since that effort started, some people questioned the legitimacy of the listings and whether the money sent through Airbnb bookings was actually going to those who needed it. The company has since suspended «a handful» of hosts’ accounts «who did not support this effort in the spirit intended,» a spokesperson told Protocol. Airbnb refunded guests who booked through a now-suspended account.
«We have systems in place to help ensure the integrity of activity on the platform, and we continue to actively review booking and listing activity in Ukraine,» the spokesperson said. The $15 million raised through Airbnb bookings in Ukraine does not include the hosts whose accounts have been suspended, the spokesperson added.
Airbnb asks for people’s names, date of birth or government ID to verify a host. Under the company’s terms of service, Airbnb requires that listings contain “complete and accurate information” about hosts’ service, price and other charges. It also requires that listing information, like photos and calendar availability, are accurate.
One Airbnb user who supported this effort booked a night at a loft in Kyiv that was later canceled. Afterward, the guest received a refund on the stay and an email saying the reservation was canceled because it was booked with a listing «that is no longer able to receive payments,» according to screenshots of the email that were obtained by Protocol.
Separately, Airbnb.org is aiming to provide 100,000 people leaving Ukraine with free temporary housing. Nearly 30,000 hosts have signed up to support the effort through Airbnb’s nonprofit arm so far, and others who could not offer their homes opted to donate.
Seattle District Judge Richard A. Jones denied part of Amazon’s motion to dismiss an antitrust class action complaint, clearing the way for a court battle in which Amazon will defend its pricing policy for third-party sellers.
The decision marks a turning point in Amazon’s antitrust battle. Just as two significant congressional antitrust bills seem to be stalling, two credible court cases are gaining traction. The Seattle District Court ruling could work in tandem with a lawsuit filed by D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine, which similarly alleges that Amazon’s third-party seller policies lead to higher consumer prices.
Up until March 2019, the Amazon Services Business Solutions Agreement included a “price parity” provision that required sellers to ensure “the purchase price and every other term of sale … is at least as favorable to Amazon Site users as the most favorable terms.” Amazon got rid of this provision after the Federal Trade Commission threatened to launch an investigation.
The class-action lawsuit alleges that Amazon still pressures sellers to maintain price parity on its platform. Under a “fair pricing” provision, Amazon monitors the prices of items on other marketplaces and punishes sellers if they don’t give Amazon the best terms, according to the plaintiffs. As punishment, Amazon has the ability to hide the one-click-buy button, delete seller listings, limit shipping availability and even boot the seller from the platform entirely.
So if Amazon is fighting for the lowest prices, why are the plaintiffs arguing this is bad for consumers? It has to do with fees. Amazon charges third-party sellers a higher fee than some of its competitors. A seller might be inclined to lower prices on platforms that charge lower fees, but because of Amazon’s pricing policy, there’s pressure to not do so.
The plaintiffs allege that some sellers generate 81% to 100% of their revenue from Amazon, which gives the ecommerce company significant leverage to demand pricing compliance. One seller noted, “[We] have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it.”
This lawsuit signals a shifting backdrop for Amazon’s antitrust battle. The two major antitrust bills proposed by Congress — the Open App Markets Act (S. 2710) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S. 2992) — might not even make it to a vote. Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer reportedly told proponents of the bills, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, to prove they could garner 60 votes; only then would Schumer bring the bills to the floor. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise hasn’t publicly committed to putting the antitrust bills on the floor. Antitrust seems to be falling down the list of priorities in D.C., given the fast-approaching midterms and the prioritization of the war in Ukraine and Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Tesla is jacking up prices of its electric vehicles for the second time in less than a week after Elon Musk said the company was facing pressure from inflation.
Electric vehicle prices are increasing between 5% and 10% across its entire range. Prices of the company’s cheapest car, the Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive, rose from $44,990 to $46,990. The cost of its more expensive Model X Tri motor increased from $126,490 to $138,990, according to The Verge. Just last week, the company also increased the price of some long-range models.
While the company and Musk haven’t spoken publicly about the price raises specifically, Musk said earlier this week that inflation is hitting Tesla and SpaceX.
“Tesla & SpaceX are seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials & logistics,» he tweeted. He added, «And we are not alone,» linking to a story about a rise in the prices of raw materials since the war in Ukraine unfolded.
The war may also have an effect on EV production. Russia is a massive supplier of nickel, which is used in batteries for many EVs, and the price of nickel has recently soared. Last month, Musk tweeted that nickel is the company’s «biggest concern» for ramping up lithium-ion cell production. «That’s why we are shifting standard range cars to an iron cathode. Plenty of iron (and lithium)!» he tweeted.
The price hike follows a similar move by Rivian. The company announced it would raise prices for its two electric vehicles even for early reservation-holders. The company faced a ton of backlash for the move and walked back the retroactive increase, which Rivian executives blamed on inflation and the cost of materials. Many customers said they’d cancel their reservation for the vehicles as a result, but Tesla customers don’t seem to be too worked up about the new prices — for now.
Many Google employees don’t see their pay packages as fair or competitive, according to an annual worker survey of the company that was obtained by CNBC.
Google’s “Googlegeist” survey, which was released to employees last week, found that compensation, promotions and an ability to meet career goals were among the top concerns for workers. Employees were largely happy with the company’s ability to carry out its mission and values.
A Google executive said employees receive top compensation. But according to the survey results, the percentage of employees who think their compensation is competitive, the percentage who think their pay is “fair and equitable” and the percentage who say their performance is reflected in their pay all dropped from the previous year. Less than half of workers said their compensation is competitive compared to similar jobs elsewhere, down 12 points from the prior year.
A survey released earlier this month found that part of the reason workers are quitting en masse is because of pay dissatisfaction. Still, Google executives announced late last year they wouldn’t raise pay to match inflation even as its revenue continued to rise.
“We know that our employees have many choices about where they work, so we ensure they are very well compensated,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “That’s why we’ve always provided top of market compensation across salary, equity, leave and a suite of benefits.”
CEO Sundar Pichai received a favorable rating of 86%, while about three-quarters of workers said Pichai inspires them.
Pichai said Google’s annual survey is “one of the most important ways” the company measures employee satisfaction. Other large tech companies survey their workers through surveys, too: Meta conducts a semi-annual “Pulse Survey,” and Microsoft workers take an annual companywide poll.
Two weeks after Google laid off about 100 cloud workers, Googlers from across the company delivered a petition Monday demanding the company give the laid-off workers more time to find new jobs within the company and alleging that some workers found out they had lost their jobs from news reports, rather than from their bosses.
The petition claims that engineers, program managers and other support people in Google Cloud roles were given 60 days to try to find new jobs within the company, and that the company has not provided enough information or opportunities for those workers to successfully do that in the two-month window.
«Google has continued to maintain that workers are simply being offered an opportunity to transfer. This ignores the reality that many workers do not qualify for currently available roles and the complexity of the transfer process means that most workers are facing the termination of their livelihood in under two months,» the petition’s authors, who were members of the Alphabet Workers Union, wrote in a statement. Over 1,400 Google workers had signed the petition as of Monday afternoon.
The petition asks that the company extend the 60-day transfer window to 180 days and that Google create a more transparent process around other jobs within the company that workers could be eligible to take.
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Chronological Twitter is here to stay. Well, it wasn’t really going away, but now the algorithmically created «Home» feed won’t be the first thing users see when they open the app.
Twitter keeps trying to make its algorithmic feed a thing, but the company sparked backlash from users following a March 10 design update that made it harder to access the chronological «latest» timeline. The company announced Monday that it has reversed its decision and will let users default to viewing tweets in chronological order.
«We heard you — some of you always want to see latest Tweets first,» Twitter Support tweeted on Monday. «We’ve switched the timeline back and removed the tabbed experience for now while we explore other options.»
The design change allowed users to swipe between the «Home» feed, which is made up of tweets suggested by Twitter’s algorithm, and the «Latest» feed. The new design still gave users a choice between the two views, but upon opening the app, Twitter would automatically show the algorithmically created feed first, with no option to make the chronological view the default. Users could choose to pin the «Home» feed, but didn’t have the ability to pin «Latest» instead. Twitter began testing the feature in October, and released it first on iOS with plans to release it on Android and the web later on.
Needless to say, the move was an unpopular one. The original announcement sparked more than 3,000 replies. One user responded that the update was «very annoying if you don’t use Home timeline ever.» Another replied, «Allow us to pin latest tweets like before. Please. I beg of you. This ruins twitter for everyone who uses it regularly.»
To several users, Twitter responded: «We’ll share your feedback with the team.» Sounds like the team got the memo that users don’t really want its algorithm.
Some Amazon customers have complained that they’ve been tricked into signing up for Amazon Prime. For Amazon, that’s a feature, not a bug, according to documents obtained by Insider.
The documents show that Amazon has been aware of complaints that the sign-up language for its Prime membership, which now costs $139 per year, has been confusing since 2017, despite internal concerns and discussions about clarifying it. No changes have been made due to the company’s worries that subscription sign-up rates would drop if the sign-up and cancellation processes were more clear.
Amazon is using a design tactic known as «dark patterns,» which manipulate customers into signing up for things they may not want using misleading and vague offers. Those patterns include fine print, oversized «accept» buttons and, yes, Amazon’s «Get FREE Two-Day Delivery with Prime» button. That button automatically enrolls users in a free Prime trial, which later converts to a paid one.
Though Amazon considered changes to address these issues, Insider reported that those changes resulted in a drop in subscription growth when tested, so the changes were nixed by executives.
Some Amazon employees were concerned about catching the eye of the Federal Trade Commission, which has looked into Amazon’s Prime subscriptions in recent years. The agency has reportedly investigated the deceptive patterns Amazon uses in its subscription sign-ups, as well as whether or not Amazon leadership is involved, but it is unclear whether or not the investigation is ongoing, Insider reported.
«Customer transparency and trust are top priorities for us,» Jamil Ghani, VP of Amazon Prime, said in a statement to Protocol. «By design we make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up for or cancel their Prime membership. We continually listen to customer feedback and look for ways to improve the customer experience.»
Amazon has also caught flack for its confusing cancellation process, with several groups filing complaints with the FTC about it last year. Internal documents found that the cancellation maze was actually intentional: In a project called «Iliad» in 2017, Amazon added multiple questions and offers that users needed to go through before actually getting to cancel their subscriptions, according to Insider.
«Digital deception should not be a viable business model, and the FTC has a responsibility to curb unfair or deceptive practices deployed to subvert and confuse consumers who intend to terminate an online service,» a complaint on the matter filed by nonprofit Public Citizen last year reads.
This week, Apple is rolling out a new iPhone feature that would’ve been incredibly useful two years ago: an update to Face ID that makes it possible to use while wearing a mask.
iPhone users will be able to unlock their phones with only the upper part of their face as part of the iOS 15.4 update, which is rolling out on Monday. The update includes a few other useful features, like a gender-neutral voice for Siri and some new emoji, like a melting face (what that’s supposed to convey, this writer has no idea).
Perhaps most importantly, the new iOS update includes improved safety warnings for Apple AirTags that will make it easier to learn if one of the devices is tracking you without knowledge or consent. The devices, along with rival Bluetooth trackers, have been used to stalk people in several high-profile incidents.
Yet, the mask-compatible Face ID is likely to generate the most buzz, given how much of a nuisance it’s been to use the iPhone’s facial recognition feature to unlock the device in public over the last two years. Apple first acknowledged this in the spring of 2020 with the rollout of iOS 13.5, which more quickly prompted users to enter a passcode when it recognized they were wearing a mask and could not use Face ID. Apple notes that the new, mask-friendly Face ID might be less secure than a full facial scan.
The rollout of a mask-friendly Face ID feature comes almost too late, as remaining blue states discard their mask mandates. However, the feature is still likely to be a welcome change — the federal government just extended the mask mandate for air travel another month, for example, while many doctors’ offices nationwide still require masks. Anyone who’s tried to access their boarding pass when their hands are full at the airport knows how irritating it’s been to not be able to use Face ID.
Apple is also rolling updates to macOS and iPadOS that let Mac users control multiple Macs and iPads using a single mouse and keyboard. This means you can drag files between a Mac and an iPad seamlessly and use the iPad as an external monitor. This will reduce friction for those who use both Macs and iPads as part of their workflow.
Universal Control will require Macs that run on macOS Monterey 12.3, in addition to iPads updated with iPadOS 15.4. iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4 and macOS Monterey 12.3 are all available today.
Google Cloud put customers on notice Monday that a series of price hikes for its infrastructure services will take effect Oct. 1.
The cloud provider is adding new data replication fees and network egress charges and, in some cases — for coldline storage operations, for example — is doubling its prices.
Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of Google Cloud Infrastructure, tied the changes to the cloud provider’s infrastructure investments in the last several years. Google Cloud has struggled to reach a break-even point over the last few years as it attempts to catch AWS and Microsoft.
“They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers,” Gupta wrote in a blog post today. Google Cloud declined further comment.
New fees for default data replication are among the new storage charges for Google Cloud services that previously were free. Google Cloud also will start charging network egress fees for reading data in a cloud storage bucket in a multiregion from a Google Cloud service in a region on the same continent.
New options and capabilities for a wider variety of workloads, meanwhile, will give customers more choice in how they pay for storage, compute and networking services, according to Gupta.
While Google Cloud is raising prices for its Persistent Disk (PD) standard snapshot storage, it plans to roll out a new, lower-cost archive snapshot option for PD in the second half of this year that will have the same features, including incremental chains, compression and encryption. This would allow for compliance/archiving use cases to be charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads, Google Cloud said.
Here’s a look at some of the other notable pricing changes. Customers who sign or renew a commit contract with a fixed or floating discount before Oct 1. will not be impacted by the price changes until they renew, according to Google Cloud.
Google Cloud storage price changes
PD snapshot pricing
Cloud load balancing
Network topology
Block said it plans to use a fingerprint sensor for its much-awaited bitcoin hardware wallet.
The company formerly known as Square is developing hardware crypto wallets, one of many efforts it’s pursuing to make bitcoin more mainstream. Block plans “to achieve seamless authentication” through fingerprint sensors, the company wrote in a blog post. The company said it plans to build a device without a display, a divergence from the hardware design of some rivals like Ledger, whose Nano wallets feature a small OLED screen.
Block said it considers “PINs, passwords, and seed phrases … confusing and often not secure given the workarounds normal people have to create given all the friction.”
The company acknowledged that the plan has some limitations. “For example, some customers will want to share access to their money without relying only on their fingerprint,” it wrote.
Block also said it was seeking to hire a lawyer to serve as product counsel for the wallet project.
The European Parliament voted Monday to advance a version of the Markets in Crypto Assets bill, or MiCA, that omitted language that would have effectively banned proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies. The bill is now headed into negotiations with the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament.
The MiCA legislation, first introduced in 2020, aims to provide a regulatory framework for digital assets for member states in the EU by 2025. While the initial draft had included explicit language that would have banned bitcoin and other proof-of-work-based digital currencies due to energy consumption concerns, the provision was struck after an outcry from the crypto industry.
The Ethereum blockchain is moving off of proof-of-work and toward a less energy-intensive proof-of-stake system, but the shift has been repeatedly delayed and progress has been slower than expected. Some bitcoin developers have proposed ways to reduce the energy requirements of proof-of-work.
“In view of the important debate about sustainability, my suggestion is to include crypto assets, like all other financial products, in the #Taxonomie area. An independent discussion of the Proof-of-Work is no longer planned in #MiCA,” Stefan Berger, the member of the European Parliament from Germany spearheading the bill, tweeted last week.
While the anti-proof-of-work language was rejected in a 30-23 vote, a majority voted that an alternate legislative proposal “with a view to including in the EU sustainable finance taxonomy any crypto asset mining activities that contribute substantially to climate change mitigation and adaptation” should be presented by the Commission by January 2025.
Update: This story has been updated on March 14, 2022, to clarify the status of an alternative cryptocurrency regulation legislative proposal.
When Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook, people warned him that Oculus would get turned into Facebook.
“I think it’s been the other way around: Facebook got taken over by Oculus, and it turned into Oculus,” Luckey observed in a recent interview with Wired.
The VR pioneer has been forced to watch this transformation from the sidelines. Luckey was pressured out of Facebook in 2017 after receiving severe public backlash for funding pro-Trump internet “shitposters.”
Shortly thereafter, Luckey founded the high-tech military contractor Anduril. As Luckey noted in the Wired interview, Anduril has become one of only three unicorns — alongside Palantir and SpaceX — to emerge in the defense space over the last 35 years. The journey to unicorn status has been propelled by plush defense contracts, including a $1 billion contract with the Department of Defense to build drone interception systems and an Air Force contract worth nearly $1 billion to help build a battlefield Internet of Things platform.
Anduril is guided by Luckey’s worldview that the era of possible warfare between great powers isn’t over. (This observation might seem obvious now, but Fukuyama’s “The End of History” stance was very much in vogue as of just a few months ago.) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was one of only a few European leaders who understood “you can’t deter expansionist dictatorships using mean words or moving money around, that it could only be deterred through credible threat of force,” Luckey told Wired.
The interview also covered the potential for dystopian weapons technology to play a role in such conflicts. Luckey said there’s a misconception that autonomous weapons systems aren’t already in use. He characterized their use as an inevitability, claiming: “There’s no other way to solve the problem. You can’t have a person literally be responsible for pulling the trigger in every instance.” Luckey said rather than resist these systems, they should be designed in a way that ensures “thinking is happening before the trigger is pulled” and that “responsibility for them always lands with a person.”
On how Anduril is playing its part, Luckey told Wired: “All of our systems have historical logs — who had access to them, what they did with them, what they told them to do, and how they handed over responsibility to somebody else. What I don’t want to do is make it impossible for these systems to ever be used in certain ways — for instance, firing on a target if they don’t have an active communication link back to a person.”
So how does a once-idealistic gamer/futurist feel developing weapons systems? “My mind is less sunny than it used to be,” Luckey said. “Now I get to think about things like, how is my system going to work during all-out thermonuclear war as our enemies try to bombard and jam and destroy us?”
Meta’s Global Affairs chief Nick Clegg again clarified the company’s hate speech policy for Facebook and Instagram posts in an internal memo Friday, saying that users cannot call for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had already clarified the policy earlier in the day in a public statement, saying that the company did not allow calls for violence against Russian civilians. Meta had begun allowing calls for violence against the Russian military in the context of the Ukrainian invasion Thursday, leading Russia to ban Instagram. The ban took effect today.
“We are now narrowing the focus to make it explicitly clear in the guidance that it is never to be interpreted as condoning violence against Russians in general,” Clegg said in the internal post, which was obtained by Bloomberg. “We also do not permit calls to assassinate a head of state.”
In some ways, Meta is finally getting a grip on misinformation and the promotion of violence on its platforms. The company has move more quickly to remove misinformation throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than they have in past conflicts in Myanmar or Ethiopia, for example. By changing its policy on violent speech, the company has also drawn the ire of the Russian government more than other social media platforms, like Twitter and TikTok, both of which have only been restricted in the country — not explicitly banned.
But the company has spent the last week refining and clarifying its stance on hate speech in the context of Russia’s invasion, indicating that the policy is ever-changing. The company initially said that it would allow certain calls for violence against “Russian invaders,» and several news platforms suggested threats against Putin specifically would be allowed. Critics became increasingly concerned about discrimination against Russian people abroad.
The fact that Clegg had to issue an internal statement suggests there was some level of confusion amongst employees. And despite Meta’s efforts to limit the spread of misinformation, certain Russian-backed conspiracy theories, like one about American-funded biolabs in Ukraine, have found their way into American political discourse.
The United States is continuing to roll back pandemic-related restrictions. But the health crisis is far from over, and it’s about to hit tech manufacturing again: China placed Shenzhen, where Tencent and Huawei are headquartered and Apple supplier Foxconn operates sites, in lockdown for at least a week.
The new restrictions come after the number of reported new cases in the country jumped from 1,100 on Friday to 3,122 on Sunday. The lockdown affects Shenzhen’s 17.5 million residents, who will now need to undergo mass testing. The province of Jilin was also sent into a partial lockdown.
Foxconn stopped production at its Longhua and Guanlan factories, one of which makes iPhones, and said it would move production to other plants in the country. The Apple and Samsung supplier’s Shenzhen base is its second-biggest in China, according to Nikkei. Huawei, Tencent and Oppo are also headquartered in the city.
Companies in Shenzhen supply crucial components to the chip manufacturing tool-makers such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, which are already struggling to get enough parts to build machines. Continued shortages of tool components could hamper big expansion plans announced by the chip manufacturers.
Shanghai, a huge semiconductor hub, also announced restrictions following an increase in COVID-19 cases. Power-management chip packaging and testing firm GEM Services is halting production until tomorrow as a result, Nikkei reported.
The lockdown is relatively short, but it shows how daily life and tech manufacturing are still reeling from the pandemic. Last spring, global shipping rates increased and port operations were delayed following a COVID-19 outbreak in Shenzhen, and when COVID-19 first broke out, nearly every area of tech production was hit.
Paul Weedman, the head of manufacturing consultancy Victure Industrial in Shenzhen, told Reuters that restrictions will impact the company for months. The firm was forced to suspend production and cancel visits.
«Imagine you have a factory of 100 people and all of a sudden you can’t do anything — you can’t fulfill your existing orders, you can’t accept new orders,” Weedman said. “The impact is not two or three weeks, but three to six months.»
As Discovery and Warner Bros. prepare to merge, the two companies are figuring out what to do with their various streaming services. The answer is to combine them, according to Gunnar Wiedenfels, the current Discovery CFO and future Warner Bros. Discovery CFO.
Wiedenfels said at a conference on Monday that the company plans to eventually combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single streaming service. (If we follow the company’s current naming processes, that streaming service will be called HBO Max Discovery+.) That won’t happen quickly, of course: Wiedenfels said it will take at least a few months to work out, and in the meantime the company plans to offer things like a subscription bundle and a single sign-on process to ease the transition. But ultimately, he said, per Variety, that “one of the most important items here is that we believe in a combined product as opposed to a bundle… We believe that the breadth and depth of this content offering is going to be a phenomenal consumer value proposition.”
There’s some evidence that Wiedenfels is right. Discovery said in its recent earnings call that it has 22 million direct-to-consumer subscribers, most of whom pay for Discovery+. Meanwhile, HBO and HBO Max have a combined 46.8 million subscribers in the U.S. and 73.8 million globally. Both are a far cry behind the giants — Disney+ has 129.8 million subscribers globally, and Netflix a whopping 222 million — but the combination of the two services would make Warner Bros. Discovery a strong third-place contender almost immediately.
The combination is also an unusually clean one, Wiedenfels noted. «We have HBO Max, with a more premium, male-skewing positioning,» he told the conference, «and then you’ve got the the female-positioning on the Discovery side. You’ve got the daily engagement that people enjoy with Discovery content versus sort of the event-driven nature of the HBO Max content.»
Combining the two technically will be a huge undertaking, though, as will migrating millions of existing users out of one app and into another. Wiedenfels didn’t mention a price for the combined service, but to subscribe to both right now would cost about $20 a month.
David Zaslav, soon to be the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has been hinting at this strategy for a while, and it makes sense for the company. Streaming services have said for years that the only way to win is to be so big and so all-encompassing that subscribers won’t cancel when their favorite show is over. One way to do that is to have an unending stream of cultural phenomenon shows, which nobody does better than HBO. Another is to have a near-infinite library, which Discovery has thanks to HGTV, Food Network, History and its many other endlessly watchable channels. Whatever the combined service ends up being called, it will be a power player from Day One.
