The global game industry as a whole will exceed $200 billion in 2022, according to Newzoo’s latest research.
The games industry is on track to surpass $200 billion in 2022.
The mobile gaming industry is on track to surpass $100 billion in revenue this year, according to the latest market research data from Newzoo.
Mobile already accounts for more than half of all spending on gaming worldwide, and Newzoo’s latest report indicates that the segment continues to account for the largest chunk of the industry. The mobile segment including both smartphone and tablet gaming is on track to grow roughly 5% this year to $103.5 billion, Newzoo says.
Newzoo does note that mobile’s market share of global revenue is expected to drop by one percentage point, from 52% to 51%, as the growth on mobile has slowed since the explosion in spending and engagement of the early pandemic, while console and PC gaming has begun to grow again.
«From the emergence of mobile to the dawn of cloud gaming, pundits and analysts have long been predicting ‘the death of console.’ As things stand, console is still very much alive and kicking — as we have always said,» Newzoo writes. The console segment is expected to grow 8.4% in 2022 to $58.6 billion. PC gaming, meanwhile, will grow a more modest 1.9% to $41 billion.
Newzoo cites a number of factors contributing to console’s growth. Among them include a number of high-profile releases like Elden Ring, Pokémon Legends Arceus and the upcoming God of War Ragnarok; the sustained relevance of live service games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone; and the growth of next-gen install bases and subscription platforms like Sony’s new PlayStation Plus.
The report also notes that 2022 will be the first year the U.S. is slated to overtake China in gaming revenues, due primarily to the Chinese government’s ongoing scrutiny and restrictions. The U.S. will account for $50.5 billion, while China will account for $50.2 billion. Together, the two markets account for close to half of all spending worldwide.
«The overtake makes sense, as the Chinese government has been cracking down on gaming in China, limiting new game releases and young people’s gaming time in the country. The market is beginning to show the impact of these regulatory pressures,» Newzoo writes. «Nevertheless, Asia-Pacific remains the biggest region by revenues by a massive margin. And emerging regions are the only places to show double-digit growth. However, the more mature regions of Europe and North America are also showing strong growth, thanks to the performance of PC in the former market and console in the latter.»
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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 [email protected].
In yet another shot across the bow in the App Store billing wars, Match Group is suing Google over its Google Play Store billing requirements for app developers.
In a complaint filed Monday, Match alleged that Google has «illegally monopolized» the app market for Android with its Play Store policy, which requires app developers use the company’s billing system, then takes a cut of the revenue.
“Ten years ago, Match Group was Google’s partner. We are now its hostage,” Match Group said in the complaint. “Blinded by the possibility of getting an ever-greater cut of the billions of dollars users spend each year on Android apps, Google set out to monopolize the market for how users pay for their Android apps.”
Google first required developers to use its billing system for all apps selling digital goods in 2020, allowing the company to take a 30% commission from every purchase. But after massive backlash, Google cut this percentage to 15% for the first $1 million a developer makes. It cut its commission percentage for subscriptions, ebooks and music streaming services in October to between 10% and 15% as well.
After pressure from developers, Google announced in March that it would allow Spotify to test out its third-party billing options for app developers. Match Group, which owns Tinder and OkCupid, wants in on that new billing system, but was rebuffed by Google. (The Spotify pilot is still just a pilot.)
«Once (Google) monopolized the market for Android app distribution with Google Play by riding the coattails of the most popular app developers, Google sought to ban alternative in-app payment processing services so it could take a cut of nearly every in-app transaction on Android,» the complaint reads.
The complaint comes amidst increasing scrutiny of Android and Apple by developers and government agencies for their high fees. The U.S. is pushing for its own regulation of smartphone app stores through the Open App Markets Act, which aims to limit Apple and Google’s monopoly over app billing. The complaint alleges anti-competitive behavior similar to the reason Epic sued Apple in 2020.
The ACLU has reached a settlement with facial recognition company Clearview AI that will restrict the company from selling its database of faceprints to most private entities, the nonprofit announced on Monday.
The settlement, filed Monday in a federal court in Illinois, bars the company from selling its biometric data to most businesses and private firms across the U.S. The company also agreed to stop offering free trial accounts to individual police officers without their employers’ knowing or approving, which had allowed them to run searches outside of police departments’ purview. The settlement is the biggest legal action taken against the company yet over its database of billions of photos that has been used by «private companies, wealthy individuals and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,» according to the ACLU.
Clearview AI also created an opt-out form for Illinois residents, allowing them to request that their photos not show up in its search results, and will spend $50,000 to advertise this form to residents.
«Clearview treated people’s biometrics as unrestricted sources of profit and ignored the danger that comes with tracking faceprints,» the ACLU said in a tweet.
The lawsuit accused Clearview AI of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which prohibits companies from taking and using Illinois residents’ «biometric identifiers,» such as faceprints and fingerprints, without their permission. The ACLU, together with its its Illinois branch and several nonprofits helping «survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, undocumented immigrants, current and former sex workers and other vulnerable communities uniquely harmed by face recognition surveillance,» filed the lawsuit in May 2020. Clearview AI’s database reportedly includes more than 20 billion photos from across the internet, according to the Washington Post.
The Illinois statute has also been used to sue other companies over their facial recognition practices. Facebook last year reached a $650 million settlement in a long-running class-action suit alleging it violated the law when it introduced its «tag suggestions» feature.
After hinting (threatening?) that Meta would bring NFTs to Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that users will at long last be able to upload their NFTs to Instagram. Instagram isn’t even going to charge for the feature, which is, uh, magnanimous.
The feature, which will become available to a test group of users starting this week, will let everyone know that an image that appears in the Instagram feed, in Stories or in messages is an NFT, Meta said in a Twitter post. NFTs will be labeled «digital collectibles,» and more information about them can be viewed by tapping to view more (akin to a shoppable post). Zuckerberg said similar features are on the way for Facebook and potentially other Meta-owned apps as well. Instagram will support the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains to start, with the platform adding Flo wand Solana down the line, according to The Block.
«We’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so that creators and collectors can display their NFTs,» Zuckerberg told YouTube creator Tom Bilyeu in an interview posted to Facebook Watch. «It’s about expression, it’s saying something about yourself.»
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video that the change is a way to help creators make a living by making «Web3 technologies accessible to a much broader range of people.»
Zuckerberg said the company is also working on adding an augmented reality layer to NFTs, essentially creating «3D NFTs» for Instagram Stories using Spark AR, its augmented reality technology.
«You can put this kind of digital art into 3D spaces and project it onto physical spaces as well,» Zuckerberg said of the project.
Twitter in January also started supporting NFTs by letting Twitter Blue subscribers upload their tokens as profile photos. Twitter denotes an NFT by displaying it as a hexagon rather than a traditional circle.
Zuckerberg hinted at bringing NFTs to Instagram during his conversation with Shark Tank investor Daymond John at South by Southwest Interactive in March, but didn’t divulge many details at the time, choosing instead to focus on his grand ideas for the metaverse.
Crypto enthusiasts like Jack Dorsey have claimed bitcoin mining can spur a renewable energy revolution despite nearly all evidence to the contrary. But a new collaboration aims to help the industry kick its dirty reputation using tools and techniques that could apply to other polluting industries eventually.
On Monday, Energy Web, which builds operating systems for energy grids, and RMI, a nonprofit researching how to accelerate the energy transition, launched a new approach to evaluating purchases of what are known as renewable energy credits, or RECs. The groups will be focusing on the bitcoin mining industry, which is burning through an increasingly large share of the world’s electricity.
While all efforts to switch to zero-carbon energy are generally good, some are better than others. Yet to this point, there has never been a way to measure the precise impact RECs have in creating a more sustainable grid. The new approach, dubbed Green Proofs for BTC, would create a certification process for energy-intensive industries on the path to decarbonizing.
It weighs several factors in determining if a bitcoin mine is actually helping clean up the grid, including the amount of renewables purchased, location and impact on the local grid and the specific renewables operations in determining a credit’s value. The groups point out that an REC from an existing clean energy power plant in California, where the grid is already well on its way to decarbonizing, is less valuable than one investing in clean energy generation in Poland, where coal is still in heavy rotation.
“With this approach, we can create an environment where more impactful renewable energy purchases are recognized,” Jesse Morris, CEO of Energy Web, told Protocol.
“We can do better,” Morris added. “By rewarding purchases of more impactful renewables, we can drive more money to renewable energy projects creating the most impact.”
While the approach is theoretically applicable to any electricity-hungry sector where REC purchases are widespread, the groups are using bitcoin mining as a case study. Mining the cryptocurrency has come under intense scrutiny from both the public and regulators given its ballooning carbon footprint. Energy Web and RMI have created the Crypto Climate Accord, which aims to get crypto miners in line with the Paris Agreement targets, and the groups say the new monitoring approach for RECs will «complement» that and other efforts to clean up the industry.
Eventually, the groups plan to create a certification program to credential renewable mining and hosting operations, which will assess a mine’s actual emissions and the emissions that its REC purchases mitigate. Assuming all goes smoothly, both the approach and the certification process can be essentially copy-and-pasted for other industries, with some tweaks of baseline electricity consumption.
Morris said the cryptocurrency sector is well-suited as a trial run because of the need for speed. The field is new enough that companies are willing to change on a dime and take some risks, whereas legacy electricity or data companies can be sluggish, and in many cases have taken decades to figure out how to reduce their emissions. A number of bitcoin miners advised Energy Web and RMI in developing the approach.
“The crypto industry, and Bitcoin in particular, is under immense pressure to go 100% renewable,” said Morris. “If crypto can be at the bleeding edge of innovation in decarbonizing the grid, it will go a long way towards eliminating the black eye the industry has gotten on the carbon-footprint front.”
RMI and Energy Web are currently soliciting stakeholder input until June 10.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees the company will cut back on hiring and other costs to address a «seismic shift» in the market, according to an email obtained by CNBC.
Khosrowshahi said Uber will treat hiring as a «privilege» and scale back on the «least efficient» marketing and incentive costs. «We will be even more hardcore about costs across the board,» he wrote in the email.
«Meeting the moment means making trade-offs,» he said. «The hurdle rate for our investments has gotten higher, and that means that some initiatives that require substantial capital will be slowed. We have to make sure our unit economics work before we go big.»
Uber is the latest to cut back on spending as companies grapple with the war in Ukraine, the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain failures, inflation and other issues. Meta implemented a hiring freeze for the rest of the year, and several startups that took off during the pandemic are laying off workers. Lyft, on the other hand, plans to increase spending to win back more drivers.
Khosrowshahi’s email followed a meeting with investors in New York and Boston following Uber’s earnings report for the first quarter. «In times of uncertainty, investors look for safety,» he wrote. The company posted a loss of $5.9 billion in the first quarter, even as revenue rose to $6.9 billion. That rise reflects the fact that COVID-19 restrictions are receding, and more people are heading back out into the world.
Uber Eats’ delivery business is also going strong. That’s more than can be said for some competitors like Grubhub, which is reportedly up for sale less than a year after being bought by Just Eat Takeaway. Khosrowshahi said investors are happy with Uber Eats’ trajectory, which surprised him because, he wrote, «I firmly believe Delivery should be growing even faster.» That said, he wondered how a recession could impact the delivery business. Still, he ended his email imploring workers to «make it legendary,» whatever «it» might be. Just with slightly tighter cash flow.
Microsoft announced three security services that it says are a response to the ongoing shortage of cyber talent — including a consulting service aimed at enterprises and a managed offering in the fast-growing area of extended detection and response (XDR).
Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 Security, said that the need for more services from Microsoft to augment shorthanded security teams is the No. 1 topic he hears about from chief information security officers. «People really want help,» Lefferts said in an interview with Protocol.
That prompted the launch of the new suite of services, dubbed Microsoft Security Experts. With the exception of a few enterprises that run the «biggest and best» security operations centers in the world, Lefferts said he believes customers are currently looking for the type of security assistance that these services seek to offer.
The new services include Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, which is the first managed version of Microsoft 365 Defender, the company’s XDR platform, according to Lefferts.
An emerging product area within cybersecurity — Gartner expects 40% of organizations to use XDR by 2027, up from 5% in 2021 — XDR systems correlate data from numerous security tools and environments, in an attempt to provide enhanced threat detection.
Microsoft’s managed XDR offering will let customers offload the remediation and investigation work that follows detection, and it’s meant for companies of all sizes. The service is a recognition of the fact that businesses increasingly need help with fixing their security issues, not just the ability to find them, Lefferts said.
A second new service, Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise, is targeted at companies that are seeking a consulting engagement around the security issues they’re facing.
This could include an analysis of the current state of the company’s security posture, offloading of security operations responsibilities or incident response after a breach to ensure that an attacker has been fully evicted and the attack has been remediated, Lefferts said.
The third new service, Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, provides hunting for threats in a customer’s Microsoft Defender data. The service aims to uncover threats across a customer’s endpoints, identities and cloud applications as well as threats found in Office 365 documents, emails and collaboration.
Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise is available now, while Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting is now in a preview, with plans for general availability in the fall. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR will enter a preview in the fall.
We’ve reached the point where flat-out climate denial is being stamped out. Newspapers have largely stopped quoting it and social networks and search engines have throttled its spread online. But the fossil fuel industry and its allies have found a new way to achieve the same ends of inaction: touting «energy independence.» Protocol got an exclusive first look at an analysis by Media Matters showing how the meme based on a false premise propagates across Facebook with little or no oversight.
The analysis looked at the top 100 Facebook posts by interactions from September 2021 to April 2022 that spread climate and energy misinformation. A large portion of those posts focused on the idea of «energy independence» as a justification to drill for more oil and gas, yet only two of those were labeled for spreading misinformation.
The idea that the U.S. is woefully dependent on foreign oil and gas is, if we’re being blunt, not true. The U.S. is a net exporter of liquid natural gas and oil (though the latter may shift this year). The concept that «energy independence» is tied to producing more oil and gas is also misinformation. To avoid heating the planet more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key climate guardrail, the International Energy Agency found last year the world needs to stop new fossil fuel exploration by the end of this year.
You wouldn’t know any of this from the posts Media Matters identified, though. The drumbeat for more oil and gas extraction has kicked into high gear over the past few months as gas prices have spiked (this despite the fact that you can’t just magically flip the oil switch and flood the market with cheap fossil fuels).
In a March 10 post highlighted in the report, Mike Rowe (yes, that guy— it’s kind of his thing) said, «One minute, America was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. The next minute, we’re back to buying oil from despots and sheiks, with gas prices at an all-time high.» Literally nothing has changed in the mythical «one minute» Rowe references. «Honest question,» Rowe continues, «Why would we allow energy independence to slip through our fingers?” (We’re not.)
The post has no fact-checking label and contains more misinformation and hand waving. But we’re not going to spend all day talking about Mike Rowe here because there are other, even more egregious examples out there. A post by Media Research Center TV, a right-wing media watchdog, does have a fact-checking label for falsely claiming, «American energy independence has been lost under Joe Biden and the policies of the left.» But it was still shared 29,000 times, reflecting the reality that even with moderation, misinformation is still pinging across Facebook.
«We have to have shared language around how we’re defining misinformation, disinformation and malinformation,» Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters, told Protocol. «The wider definition that we’re using includes anything that’s trying to erode climate science or efforts to act on climate as misinformation. All of these achieve the same thing, though the intent can be a little bit different.»
That intent is to delay action on addressing climate change by ending the use of fossil fuels. The longer misinformation about energy independence propagates, the greater the risk of it being treated as a political issue across the spectrum of left to right rather than a scientific one. That points for the need for more stringent fact-checking guidelines and even enforcement.
“This research and content illustrate that the policies that have been in place to address climate misinformation are inadequate,” Fisher said. “They’re just not working, either because they’re not being enforced, or they’re just inadequate to begin with.”
If you have more information about layoffs at Mural or other companies, we want to hear from you. Email [email protected], or if you’d like to send an encrypted email, contact Sarah Roach at [email protected].
Several workers at Mural, a startup that creates online collaboration tools, were laid off earlier this week, according to LinkedIn posts from affected employees.
Current and former employees posted on Twitter and LinkedIn over the past few days informing their networks of the layoffs. At least nine Mural employees have posted about being laid off in departments including HR and recruiting, engineering and marketing. One former employee’s LinkedIn profile stated she had been laid off due to “company restructuring.” It’s unclear how many total workers were let go. Leah Taylor, a spokesperson for Mural, confirmed the layoffs, but did not clarify how many employees were affected. CEO Mariano Suarez-Battan said while the decision wasn’t easy, it was necessary for the company’s «long-term success.»
«Mural has made certain staffing reductions, focused on redundancies while scaling back projections on headcount increases for 2022,» Taylor wrote.
Mural is not the only startup experiencing layoffs over the past several weeks. Pandemic darling Cameo laid off almost 90 workers, including a handful of senior execs, earlier this week (although that didn’t stop it from throwing an NFT party). Thrasio, which works with Amazon sellers, terminated some workers and named a new CEO. MainStreet and On Deck also cut their staff.
Mural is valued at more than $2 billion. The digital collaboration software provider raised $50 million in funding last summer and is one of several startups that gained traction during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital whiteboards became particularly useful as a way for workers to collaborate and share content remotely. Figma and Miro are among Mural’s top competitors.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about climate projects like Harvard’s research into dimming the sun and big-name tech donors like Bill Gates. But for all the public interest in high-tech climate solutions, the majority of research dollars are going to decidedly more on-the-ground climate fixes.
A new study from researchers at the University of Sussex Business School examined research funding for climate and energy research from 1990 to 2020. The study analyzed 153,202 projects across 17 countries and did a deep analysis of 1,000 representative projects with a total budget of $2.3 billion.
The research found that 36% of funding has gone toward climate adaptation over that period, while another 28% went to studying how to clean up the energy system. Transport and mobility (13%), geoengineering (12%) and industrial decarbonization (11%) each represented significant shares as well.
The bulk of the funding has gone to researchers in wealthy, Western countries, which are less likely to suffer the first and worst effects of climate change. In fact, four-fifths of the funding has gone to the U.K., European Union and U.S.; other major emitters like China and India have received lower amounts, and countries in both Latin America and Africa have received just a small sliver of the research dollars despite being on the front lines of climate change.
This asymmetry raised alarm bells for the researchers, even accounting for the fact that the dataset “overrepresents research projects in the Anglo-Saxon world that can afford to publish research data in English,” Benjamin Sovacool, one of the study’s authors, said in a press release. “It is clear this is a significant failing to support a truly global response to the world’s greatest challenge.”
The researchers also found that fledgling climate technologies — specifically those that involve solar geoengineering, which aim to control how much of the sun’s energy reaches the planet’s surface — have the potential to be transformative but are “hugely underfunded.” These include stratospheric aerosol injection, which received less than 1% of all research funding.
“Although they may sound like science fiction, [stratospheric aerosol injection] techniques are actually technically feasible today and could enable near-term reduction of global warming,” the authors write.
Roughly a year ago, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that the time has come to at least study these technologies. Along with Gates, Amazon has also shown some interest in ensuring this type of research is being done and widely available, albeit using computer models and not in the real world. Dimming the sun may well cool the planet, but it comes with great risks, including unintended consequences like crop failure in certain regions of the world and lulling the world into a false sense of complacency about the need to dramatically cut emissions.
The paper notably looked at public research funding. Silicon Valley and private dollars have been flowing to companies focused on speculative climate solutions and the industrial sector. That includes notable commitments to buy carbon dioxide removal services. Venture capitalist John Doerr also recently donated $1.1 billion to Stanford’s new School of Sustainability, which will focus on an array of solutions as well.
Putting money into adaptation and energy emissions mitigation research could well put the world on a more sustainable pathway. The recent United Nations report on turning the climate tide found that in terms of deployment, building out renewable energy systems offers the most bang for the buck right now.
Mere days after laying off 87 employees, Cameo’s remaining executives are heading to Miami to party: The company is going forward with its plans to host an F1 NFT party in Miami Beach, Protocol has learned. The party coincides with the Miami Beach Race Weekend, and Cameo has invited some of its celebrity talent pool as well as owners of its Cameo Pass NFTs to attend.
Cameo CEO Steven Galanis told Protocol that the party was part of the company’s Cameo Pass program, which launched in February. «We sold 6,000 Cameo Pass NFTs with the promise to use the proceeds to invest in these types of unique and authentic experiences. […] We are grateful to our loyal customers who are part of this community, and our participation is independent of our decision to right-size our business,” Galanis said in a statement emailed to Protocol following the publication of this story.
The party is scheduled to be held Saturday at a rented mansion on Star Island, a manmade island that houses an exclusive gated private community. Some of the more notable Star Island residents reportedly include Gloria Estefan and Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin.
Cameo laid off 87 staffers on Wednesday, including the company’s CTO, CPO, chief people officer and a senior marketing executive. Cameo CEO Steven Galanis called the layoffs «right-sizing,» and said they would help “balance our costs with our cash reserves” in a statement shared with Protocol.
Galanis also called the layoffs a “brutal day at the office” on Twitter. This prompted a response from TechCrunch writer Lucas Matney, who noted that Galanis’ Bored Ape profile picture may have cost as much as the salaries of five of the affected employees.
Update: 2:09 p.m. PT: This story was updated with a statement from Cameo CEO Steven Galanis.
Tesla offers to cover the travel costs of employees seeking medical care outside of their home state, including abortions. In the company’s 2021 Impact Report, it announced an «expanded Safety Net program» that includes reimbursing travel and lodging for employees who need to «seek healthcare services that are unavailable in their home state.» Tesla has offered this benefit since last year.
A score of other tech companies have announced or highlighted similar policies in recent weeks, including Yelp, Citigroup, Apple and Match Group. Most recently, Amazon announced it would pay up to $4,000 in travel expenses for procedures including abortions. Hours after Amazon’s announcement, POLITICO leaked a Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting that the court will likely overturn Roe v. Wade come June. A Roe reversal could trigger outright abortion bans in 26 states, with tech companies calling many of those states home. Texas is a major one, as several companies, including Tesla, moved their headquarters to the state throughout the pandemic.
Elon Musk has not weighed in on abortion significantly, but tweeted in September 2021 that «in general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness. That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.»
Big tech companies are uniquely able to help relocate employees who wish to leave restrictive states, as many corporate tech jobs have flexible locations. They also have the money and resources to cover abortion-related travel, despite the legal risks they might face: Any such company could be sued due to the “aiding and abetting” clause in Texas’ abortion law. After Citigroup announced its policy of covering out-of-state medical care, a Texas lawmaker threatened legislation preventing the bank from underwriting municipal bonds in the state.
Amazon has dismissed more than six managers at the warehouse in Staten Island where thousands of workers voted last month to form the company’s first union, according to a report from the New York Times.
The company fired several senior managers at the 8,000-person facility, including some with more than six years of experience, according to the Times report. Amazon was stunned by an upset loss in the union vote in late March and has since challenged the results, protesting the conduct of both the Amazon Labor Union organizers and the National Labor Relations Board, the federal body responsible for administering the election.
A second union election at a smaller Staten Island facility (also spearheaded by the nationally unaffiliated Amazon Labor Union) went in favor of Amazon earlier this week. Out of about 1,500 eligible workers, 380 voted in favor of the union and 618 against, with two ballots void. The Staten Island warehouse that voted against the union has a much smaller ALU presence and represented mostly part-time workers, compared to the larger facility’s more full-time staff.
«Part of our culture at Amazon is to continually improve, and we believe it’s important to take time to review whether or not we’re doing the best we could be for our team. Over the last several weeks, we’ve spent time evaluating aspects of the operations and leadership at JFK8 and, as a result, have made some management changes,» Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote in a statement to Protocol.
Labeling the trustworthiness of news sites may convince the heaviest readers of unreliable content to shift what they consume, but new research finds it doesn’t make much of a dent in most people’s habits.
The study, led by NYU researchers, suggests that the average person’s news diet may actually consist primarily of reliable sites. It also found that tools such as browser extension NewsGuard, which assigns icons of various colors according to sites’ reliability, can only serve as one part of efforts to combat the effect of misinformation users do consume.
Top politicians and social scientists worldwide have zeroed in on online misinformation and «fake news» as drivers of increased partisanship and even violence, particularly as poor-quality content spreads rapidly on the web and through social media.
Nudging people toward higher-quality content, while also respecting free expression, has proven difficult. Fact-checking, broadly speaking, does appear to have some effect on people’s beliefs or engagement, but the effects can be dependent on how the information is presented.
Meanwhile, purveyors of misinformation increasingly dismiss the efforts of fact-checkers and moves by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to limit engagement with shoddy claims as «bias» and «censorship.» Many right-wing figures in particular frequently agitate for less moderation on social platforms — and they appear poised to get their wish as Elon Musk inches ever closer to acquiring Twitter.
In that environment, the researchers studied whether installing NewsGuard would get people to improve their journalistic diets and help them distinguish between fact and fiction when presented with statements about the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19.
Approximately two-thirds of study participants visited news sites that met NewsGuard’s standards for reliability during the study period, but on average, the plug-in’s icons didn’t push general readers toward more reliable sources. The tool only shifted the 10% of users who consumed the most junk toward more reliable sites.
The research is being published in the journal Science Advances.
The Securities and Exchange Commission settled with Nvidia over charges that the company downplayed the impact of cryptocurrency mining on its gaming business, according to a release Friday. Nvidia agreed to pay $5.5 million in penalties.
The SEC found that in fiscal year 2018, Nvidia failed to disclose that crypto mining played a big role in the material revenue growth of its gaming business. The company agreed to pay the $5.5 million penalty «without admitting or denying the SEC’s finding.»
“Nvidia’s disclosure failures deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company’s business in a key market,” Kristina Littman, the head of the SEC Enforcement Division’s newly formed Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, said in a statement. “All issuers, including those that pursue opportunities involving emerging technology, must ensure that their disclosures are timely, complete and accurate.”
The commission said Nvidia reported material revenue growth in its gaming unit that fiscal year, but it left out information about how crypto mining drove that growth, creating the impression that its gaming business wasn’t largely affected by purchases of processors for mining rigs. Such sales to the crypto sector helped boost Nvidia’s gaming-GPU sales.
Those GPUs have historically been in high demand among miners, because the computational abilities of the cards happen to suit the requirements for the proof-of-work exercises used by some cryptocurrencies.
«As demand for and interest in crypto rose in 2017, NVIDIA customers increasingly used its gaming GPUs for crypto mining,» the release states.
The settlement may end up being a historical marker of the crypto boom, however. In 2021, Nvidia introduced a specialized CMP, or Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, and made changes to its GeForce gaming processor to make it less desirable for use by miners. And though bitcoin still relies on proof of work, the Ethereum blockchain is shifting to proof of stake, a less computationally intense method of verifying transactions. Many new currencies and blockchains also use proof-of-stake methods.
A representative for Nvidia declined to comment.
Update, May 6: This story has been updated to reflect Nvidia not offering comment.
Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tina Smith of Minnesota wrote an open letter to Fidelity Wednesday questioning why the firm was permitting customers to put bitcoin in their 401(k)s. Fidelity announced last week that it would allow people to devote as much as 20% of their retirement plan to bitcoin towards the end of the year.
“Investing in cryptocurrencies is a risky and speculative gamble, and we are concerned that Fidelity would take these risks with millions of Americans’ retirement savings,” the letter reads. “Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency your company has deemed sound enough for your customers’ retirement savings accounts, has a particularly volatile history.”
The world’s most popular cryptocurrency dropped 8% just on Thursday alone and some experts believe that the industry has entered a “crypto winter,” with bitcoin facing a prolonged downturn after an all-time high in November last year.
Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith are concerned that Fidelity is using naive investors to juice the price of bitcoin, saying that they fear Fidelity is acting on a conflict of interest after admitting that they were mining crypto in 2017. In the past five years, Fidelity has made several moves to support the crypto market, adding Coinbase links to retail customer accounts and opening a crypto and digital payments ETF. The Senators think that by allowing investors to choose bitcoin for their retirement portfolios, the firm is only acting more suspicious — especially after finding that just 2% of employers using Fidelity are interested in adding the bitcoin option.
The Massachusetts Senator has been outspoken against crypto, arguing that price fluctuations make bitcoin dangerous for consumers, high energy usage makes bitcoin bad for the environment and decentralization makes the market ripe for fraud. In March Warren introduced a bill to punish crypto exchanges that perform transactions for peoples and businesses on the US sanctions list, arguing that crypto was being used by Russian oligarchs to evade punishment as a result of the war in Ukraine. She’s developed a reputation for strongly-worded and well-sourced letters laying out her complaints about crypto, some of which have been sent to SEC chair Gary Gensler.
Senator Tina Smith has made fewer waves, though she has also been a consistent critic. Last summer she said most of DeFi violates US commodities law, and she voiced her opposition to Facebook managing its own cryptocurrency in October. Both Tina Smith and Elizabeth Warren sit on the Senate Banking Committee.
Block missed earnings and revenue expectations driven in part by a drop in bitcoin revenue amid a general downdraft in the cryptocurrency market.
Shares were up 5% after hours, with the regular session down 10.5% during a broader market meltdown on Wall Street.
Earnings came in at 18 cents per share compared to analysts’ expectations of 20 cents per share. Revenue was $3.96 billion, down 22% from a year ago.
Block’s bitcoin revenue was $1.73 billion in the first quarter of 2022, a drop of 51% from the year-ago quarter. Bitcoin gross profit was $43 million — about 3% of bitcoin revenue. Jack Dorsey has pushed the company heavily toward bitcoin as a business.
Square, the merchant seller unit, had $661 million in gross profit, which was up 41% from a year ago, while Cash App had $624 million of gross profit, up 26%.
One bright spot: subscription revenue, which decreases the company’s need to rely on transaction volume alone. Square subscription revenue was $231 million in the first quarter of 2022, excluding PPP loan forgiveness revenue, up from $112 million a year ago. In addition, the company booked $54 million in Afterpay subscription revenue for Square. Cash App generated $622 million in subscription and services revenue, which was up 43% from a year ago.
Soon, you’ll need to remember one less password. Google, Apple and Microsoft are expanding passwordless sign-in capabilities across phones, desktops and browsers, the companies announced in a joint blog post on Thursday.
The companies committed to implementing passwordless authentication across devices in the coming year, supporting a standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. In a separate blog post, Google said users would unlock their phones to sign into websites or apps. The FIDO Alliance, an industry organization that promotes the use of authentication over passwords, said in its announcement of the new efforts that password-only authentication is «one of the biggest security problems on the web,» leading to data breaches, account takeovers and stolen identities.
“Working with the industry to establish new, more secure sign-in methods that offer better protection and eliminate the vulnerabilities of passwords is central to our commitment to building products that offer maximum security and a transparent user experience — all with the goal of keeping users’ personal information safe,» Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of Platform Product Marketing, said in a statement.
FIDO’s standards are based on public key cryptography, or systems using pairs of keys to gain access to accounts or devices. Passwordless access can include the use of a security key, fingerprinting or voice or facial recognition for multifactor authentication. According to the organization, passwords are the root of more than 80% of data breaches, because people reuse their passwords.
Though several applications already use FIDO standards, many require an initial sign-in that leaves users vulnerable to security breaches. But Google told The Verge that new procedures will eliminate the need for a password.
“For Google, it represents nearly a decade of work we’ve done alongside FIDO, as part of our continued innovation towards a passwordless future,» Mark Risher, senior director of Product Management at Google, said in a statement. «We look forward to making FIDO-based technology available across Chrome, ChromeOS, Android and other platforms, and encourage app and website developers to adopt it, so people around the world can safely move away from the risk and hassle of passwords.”
Haun Ventures is leading a $50 million round in the NFT marketplace Zora, the firm announced Thursday. The investment is the first funding led by Katie Haun’s new venture capital firm after a much-anticipated launch in March, and brings Zora’s valuation to $600 million. It also raises questions about an investment Haun made before her firm even had a name.
“Haun Ventures is dedicated to backing teams building a better internet,” partner Sam Rosenblum wrote in a blog post. “As Web3 expands and NFT use cases along with it, we believe Zora is well-positioned to grow into one of the most important projects in the Web3 ecosystem.”
In Zora, Haun, who co-founded a16z’s crypto fund, is choosing to support a project that arguably adheres more closely to Web3’s decentralized ideals than others in the NFT space, including OpenSea, a company Haun backed in January before her then-formative firm had even settled on a name.
Zora’s marketplace operates entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing creators to build directly on the protocol. Because of this, Zora NFTs can easily be traded on other marketplaces and sites. This contrasts with marketplaces like OpenSea, which has blocked some NFTs from sale. As the smaller startup put it in a press release: “OpenSea is to Amazon as Zora is to Shopify.”
“Zora began its journey with the shared belief that creativity should never be gatekept by the suits, corps, and institutions,” Zora co-founder Jacob Horne wrote in a separate blog post.
Haun has a notable record in the industry, getting her start in crypto as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice investigating cybersecurity and fraud issues. She was Andreessen Horowitz’s first female general partner hire, and together with Chris Dixon was responsible for profitable investments like Coinbase.
Haun Ventures started out with $1.5 billion, the largest solo fundraise by a female VC firm founder to date. Notable hires include Rosenblum and Rachael Horwitz, both Coinbase alums, as well as Airbnb policy strategist Chris Lehane and several a16z colleagues, including Nick Pacilio and Tomicah Tillemann.
Heroku disclosed on Thursday that customer passwords were stolen during a cyberattack that took place a month ago, acknowledging that an incident that also involved code repository GitHub was worse than initially indicated.
Heroku initially revealed on April 15 that a threat actor had likely accessed Heroku’s GitHub account using a stolen authorization token, or OAuth token, and downloaded certain private Heroku repositories on April 9. The download included «some» Heroku source code, according to the disclosure.
In an update posted Wednesday evening, Heroku said the attacker actually gained access to a Heroku database on April 7, and downloaded GitHub integration OAuth tokens belonging to customers at the time. Heroku, owned by Salesforce, is a widely used platform for building, running and operating applications, and touts on its website that it has been used to develop 13 million apps.
«Access to the environment was gained by leveraging a compromised token for a Heroku machine account,» Heroku said in the update. Most concerning for customers: Heroku said the investigation into the incident found that the compromised token was used by the attacker to steal hashed and salted passwords for user accounts belonging to customers.
«For this reason, Salesforce is ensuring all Heroku user passwords are reset and potentially affected credentials are refreshed. We have rotated internal Heroku credentials and put additional detections in place,» Heroku said.
The update did not specify how many customers or user accounts may have been impacted, or explain why details about stolen customer passwords are only being disclosed now.
«Nothing is more important to us than the security of customer data. We value transparency and, without compromising our ongoing investigation, we shared the additional details on the status page that may facilitate a deeper understanding for our customers of this issue. We continue to work diligently in response to this incident and have no further comment at this time,» Salesforce said in a statement.
This week, Heroku began resetting user passwords, but did not provide customers with the reason beyond citing that the action was related to last month’s security incident.
On Wednesday, GitHub announced that it will require developers who contribute code to the repository to use two-factor authentication by the end of 2023, and enterprise customers will also be able to require the use of two-factor authentication to access their repositories. Two-factor authentication helps protect customers and users against password breaches.
This story was updated to include a statement from Salesforce.
Fortnite is back on the iPhone, thanks to new partnership between Epic Games and Microsoft that sidesteps the App Store ban Apple handed down back in August 2020.
The game is available to stream starting Thursday in the 26 countries around the world where Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming is available in beta. It’s part of a new push at Xbox to utilize its Azure cloud platform and Microsoft’s existing investments in cross-platform play to enable what the company is calling Xbox Everywhere. «We want to empower everyone around the world to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they already own,» wrote Catherine Gluckstein, Microsoft’s vice president and product chief for Xbox Cloud Gaming, wrote in a blog post.
Play Fortnite at xbox.com/play with Xbox Cloud Gaming for free www.youtube.com
Since Fortnite was banned almost two years ago from both Apple and Google’s app stores, Epic has waged a bitter antitrust fight against both companies, resulting in an explosive lawsuit against Apple that went to trial one year ago. The resulting outcome was not favorable to Epic, but it did apply significant pressure to Apple, and the case is now caught up in a web of appeals as Apple attempts to avoid making court-ordered changes to its software business.
Meanwhile, regulatory pressure in the U.S. and overseas scrutinizing Apple and Google’s treatment of developers and the companies’ 30% commission on digital goods has forced both tech giants to compromise in various ways, while momentum has also been building for unprecedented app store legislation like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and the U.S.’s Open App Markets Act. Now, while Epic may not have a way to return to the App Store and Play Store on its own terms as it once hoped, the game-maker does have browser-based cloud services it can rely on while it continues its legal fights. The Google antitrust case has yet to go to trial, though Fortnite can be downloaded on Android phones directly from Epic’s website.
This isn’t the first time a cloud gaming service has been used to circumvent Apple and Google’s app store bans on Fortnite. Epic and Nvidia teamed up last year to release a cloud-based version of Fortnite, which launched back in January, on the chipmaker’s GeForce Now platform. That version of the game required you sign up for the platform and use either a restricted free tier or one of Nvidia’s paid plans, but it nonetheless was a fully fledged version of the battle royale hit streaming from a remote server.
Microsoft says its new partnership with Epic won’t involve any restrictions whatsoever. You need only a Microsoft account and an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet, or a Windows PC with internet access. You won’t need to sign up for Xbox Game Pass and you won’t need any recurring subscription or membership to any Microsoft product. The game will live at xbox.com/play, and it will support controller play or native touch controls if you’re playing on a smartphone or tablet.
«It’s an important step to add a free-to-play title to the cloud gaming catalog as we continue our cloud journey. We’re starting with Fortnite and will look to bring more free-to-play games people love in the future,» Gluckstei explained. «At Xbox we want to make gaming accessible to the 3 billion players around the world, and cloud has an important role in that mission. Quite simply we want you to have more choice in both the games you play and the way you choose to play them.»
Shopify is the latest ecommerce company to take a post-pandemic hit, which isn’t surprising given that not even Amazon was immune to the changing tide of online shopping.
Shopify reported underwhelming earnings of 20 cents per share, far below analyst expectations of 63 cents per share. The company also announced its acquisition of Deliverr, a fulfillment tech provider that provides services for Amazon and other marketplaces, for $2.1 billion in cash and stock.
“While we’ve experienced massive macro shifts since the start of the pandemic, the one mainstay has been that Shopify is the commerce platform of choice for merchants in any environment, with the ability to support commerce on any surface,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said in a release. «This has earned Shopify significant merchant trust and the ability to help them with more parts of their business, which is why we are eager to bring Deliverr’s team and technology to our merchants.»
The company’s revenue increased year-over-year to $1.2 billion but still fell below expectations of $1.24 billion. The company said it expects growth to be lower in the first half of 2022 as the pandemic tapers off. Its shares dropped more than 16% on the news of its earnings.
Deliverr is Shopify’s biggest purchase to date. The company ships more than a million orders per month.
«We are confident Deliverr’s ability to simplify the process, and arm merchants with visibility and control from the display of a delivery promise across multiple channels through its completion, will be a huge benefit to our merchants,» Shopify CFO Amy Shapero said in a statement.
Shopify isn’t the only ecommerce company to report slower growth. EBay’s second-quarter outlook also fell below expectations, which the company blamed on inflation, the war in Ukraine and changing online consumer habits. Etsy also expects to take a hit this year as people return to stores for shopping.
Elon Musk gets by with a little help from his friends. He now has several big-name investors on board with his Twitter purchase, including Larry Ellison, Binance, a16z and Sequoia Capital. A total of 19 investors helped secure $7.14 billion in new funding for Musk’s $44 billion buy, according to an SEC filing Thursday.
Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has for years backed Twitter and was initially hesitant to support Musk, also pledged to invest in Musk’s purchase vehicle. The prince agreed to roll over his $1.9 billion investment in the company, which reduces the amount Musk has to raise for his purchase.
«I believe you will be an excellent leader for Twitter to propel & maximise its great potential,» Alwaleed tweeted Thursday.
Musk named Strauss Capital, Brookfield, Baron Capital’s Bamco and others as investors in the filing. Ellison, who is on Tesla’s board and a friend of Musk, chipped in $1 billion. VyCapital and Sequoia Capital, which dropped $700 million and $800 million apiece, have invested in Musk’s Boring Company. Binance, which shares Musk’s love of crypto, committed $500 million.
Musk isn’t done bringing in new investors, either. He’s holding more conversations with current Twitter shareholders like Jack Dorsey to contribute to his purchase, according to the filing.
The new investments helped cut Musk’s $12.5 billion margin loan against his Tesla stake to $6.25 billion, the filing states. The Tesla CEO’s borrowing plans had rattled the automaker’s investors, sending shares plunging.
Another potential concern for Tesla shareholders: CNBC’s David Faber reports Musk plans to serve temporarily as Twitter’s CEO after the deal closes.
Musk also recently told potential investors that he wants to take Twitter public again after a few years, sources told the Wall Street Journal. Twitter officials have said the deal is expected to close later this year, pending shareholder and regulatory approval.
Meta is pulling back on hiring in order to control its spending, Insider reported Wednesday.
The Facebook parent is working to cut costs as its revenue grows more slowly than expected. Insider cites an internal memo from CFO David Wehner that pointed to Apple’s data privacy changes on iOS devices, a downturn across the industry and the war in Ukraine as reasons for the hiring freeze. Meta’s stock price has dropped by more than one-third in the last six months.
The hiring cutbacks will hit “almost every team across the company» and will last for the rest of the year, according to internal memos cited by Insider. It’s a far cry from the «Why hiring is so hard right now» memo that was leaked in 2021 as part of The Facebook Papers. The memo described the struggle and subsequent failure to meet recruiting goals.
Cameo, the celebrity video greetings startup, laid off 87 of staffers Wednesday, a move that CEO Steven Galanis described as “right-sizing.” The layoffs also affected some of Cameo’s most senior executives, Protocol has learned. Leadership departures included Cameo CTO Rob Post, top marketing executive Emily Boschwitz, CPO Nundu Janakiram and Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach, according to a source close to the company.
The team in charge of music partnerships saw big cuts, according to a LinkedIn post first reported by The Information. Also affected by the layoffs were the company’s international operations, including much of its London office, as well as a number of employees in sales and marketing, the source told Protocol. Galanis is said to have announced the layoffs in a staff meeting, during which he told staff that the company was forced to cut costs because it hadn’t met revenue projections.
In a statement to press, Galanis pointed to pandemic-fueled hiring as a reason for the cuts. “We hired a lot of people quickly, and market conditions have rapidly changed since then,” he said. “Accordingly, we have right-sized the business to best reflect the new realities.”
Galanis went on to call the layoffs “a painful but necessary course correction.” Cameo has raised a total of $165 million in funding to date.
Brandon Silverman is a big part of why anyone knows anything about what’s happening on Meta’s platforms: As the co-founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, he created what was, for a while at least, the most robust real-time look at what’s happening on social media’s biggest platforms at any given time.
Now, that tool is quietly dying, and in his testimony during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Silverman explained why.
«There were a lot of challenges inside Facebook, but one of them was certainly the question of: Are we putting ourselves out on a limb when others aren’t?» Silverman told the panel of lawmakers. «These companies can do very little, and it doesn’t matter.»
Of the Big Tech giants, Meta has arguably done the most to reveal what’s happening under the hood both through CrowdTangle and through its transparency reports. But far from generating praise, that has often only made the company the subject of more scrutiny. «No matter how much transparency you do,» Silverman said, «you’re rarely going to get credit for it in the public eye.»
Silverman spoke about the challenges of running a product that mostly exists to get its parent company in trouble. «It can be incredibly uncomfortable when your work and the work of your team are constantly fueling criticism — some fair and some not — of the company where you work,» he said. «Those moments take a toll on your team. But they also make it harder to get resources. They make it more difficult to launch new features and add more data. And ultimately, they provide constant ammunition to executives who are skeptical about doing transparency.»
Silverman left the company last fall, and has since been careful in his criticism of his former employer. But his testimony was clear about the end result of all of this tension inside the company. «CrowdTangle is still available, but it’s in maintenance mode,» he said. «Facebook has stopped onboarding new partners. No new features or major updates have been released in two years, and a global partnerships team that used to run it no longer exists.»
That, Silverman argued, should serve as proof that tech companies can’t be trusted to be sufficiently transparent all on their own. «It’s too hard to make progress on these issues at the scale and breadth we need from inside a company,» he said. «And as a result, we’ve seen is that the industry as a whole has simply not made enough progress equal to the responsibilities they have.»
Silverman called on lawmakers to pass the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which he said would be an «important step in the right direction.» That bipartisan bill would require platforms to provide access to certain data to pre-vetted researchers. Europe’s Digital Services Act includes a similar provision.
But both Silverman and experts on the panel pointed out that transparency must be balanced with user privacy — an easier task to achieve in Europe, which, unlike the U.S., has enshrined privacy rights under the GDPR. «It gives them a baseline to start with in how privacy is supposed to work that then you can build transparency on top of,» Stanford Cyber Policy director Daphne Keller told the senators. «You are in a much more difficult position.»
