Spotify is taking steps to clarify its position regarding COVID-19 misinformation and stabilize its fluctuating stock price after Neil Young and Joni Mitchell yanked their music from the streaming service over objections to vaccine remarks on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “These issues are incredibly complex,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said on Sunday, when the company published platform rules and announced the creation of a COVID-19 Hub to provide “easy access to data-driven facts” from “scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities” from around the world. Spotify will not be removing the offending content, Ek said. Continue reading Spotify Acts on Boycott, Posts COVID Facts After Stock Falls

Snap has secured multiyear global content collaborations with Disney, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS. The three corporations will not only continue bringing their current shows to Snapchat’s Discover feature, but also individually plan to expand offerings in the future. The deal sees programming from ESPN, Paramount+ and E! returning to the platform. Snap says more than 100 million monthly users watch entertainment content on the short-form Snapchat Discover. The mobile app, which turned 10 last year, reported 306 million daily active users worldwide as of September 30. Continue reading Snap Renews Major Content Deals and Updates AR Shopping

Apple, the world’s most highly valued public company, hit an all-time quarterly revenue record of $123.9 billion for Q4, an 11 percent increase year-over-year. The company also saw profits up 20 percent to $34.6 billion for the quarter despite the supply chain issues that plagued the industry. “We are gratified to see the response from customers around the world at a time when staying connected has never been more important,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the company’s earnings release, attributing the robust performance to “our most innovative lineup of products and services ever.” Continue reading Apple Has a Record $123.9 Billion Quarter Despite Chip Crisis

After years in which live news was an elusive commodity on the Internet, the streaming news space is suddenly crowded. The latest entry, CNN+, is gearing up for a late March launch and will cost $5.99 per month, same as Fox Nation, which began streaming in November 2018 after nine years as an opinion website. CBS and NBC offer consumers free ad-supported streaming news networks. Last week, CBS relaunched the CBS News Streaming Network what had previously been CBSN. After various experiments, NBC News launched The Choice under the MSNBC banner in the run-up to the 2020 election.  Continue reading CNN+ Aims to Break Through Crowded Streaming News Field

Consumers were cheated out of $770 million by social media scams last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which said the number accounts for roughly one-fourth of fraud losses for the year. New scams involving e-commerce and cryptocurrency helped boost the haul, which was 18 times greater than the $42 million in social media fraud the FTC tracked for 2017. As a result, incidences of younger victims grew, with adults 18-to-39 reporting fraud losses 2.4 times more than adults 40 and over. Investment and romance scams were also high on the list.  Continue reading FTC Says Social Media Has Become Goldmine for Scammers

California-based Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, reports Q4 2021 set a record and capped the company’s best year ever despite the dire worldwide shortage of processing chips. Q4 revenue was up 3 percent, to $20.5 billion, while the year totaled $79 billion, a 1 percent gain. However, Q4 net income declined 21 percent year-over-year, to $4.6 billion, and fell 5 percent (to $19.9 billion) for the 12-month period. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called it “a great finish to a great year,” besting top-line quarterly guidance by over $1 billion to deliver “the best quarterly and full-year revenue in the company’s history.” Continue reading Intel Has Record Quarter and Year Despite Supply Shortages

U.S. demand for semiconductors was as much as 17 percent higher in 2021 than it was in 2019, yet there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the available supply, with median inventory falling to less than five days in 2021, from 40 days in 2019, according to a Commerce Department report. “If a COVID outbreak, a natural disaster, or political instability disrupts a foreign semiconductor facility for even just a few weeks, it has the potential to shut down a manufacturing facility in the U.S.” that makes anything from medical devices to automobiles to computers, the report concludes. Continue reading Commerce Secretary Sounds Alarm on Global Chip Shortage

NBCUniversal is expanding its partnership with social video platform TikTok to include a joint promotion for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, set to kick off on February 4, and the 2022 Paralympic Winter Games, beginning March 4. NBC Winter Games advertisers will reportedly have first crack at piggybacking onto what is being couched as a new type of brand experience that lets them draw from NBC 2022 Winter Games clips as they try to connect with sports fans. TikTok videos with Olympic-related hashtags have resulted in 18 billion views on the platform thus far, according to NBC. Continue reading NBCUniversal Teams with TikTok to Promote Winter Olympics

YouTube plans to test new monetization features for creators of its YouTube Shorts videos, which have passed more than 5 trillion views since debuting in September 2020, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who also said the company is exploring adding NFTs to its toolkit for video creators. In addition, YouTube is testing new shopping features tied to its video content. The number of global creator channels making more than $10,000 a year “is up 40 percent year over year,” Wojcicki wrote as part of an annual letter to creators that outlined 2022 priorities focusing on helping creators generate income. Continue reading YouTube Exploring Commerce and NFTs, Says CEO Wojcicki

Microsoft ended Q2 for fiscal year 2022 on a high note, with sales up 20 percent to $51.7 billion, and net income rising 21 percent to $18.8 billion, beating analysts’ predictions. Cloud revenue grew 32 percent year-over-year, hitting $22.1 billion. Revenue in Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud business was $18.3 billion, a 26 percent jump propelled largely by a basically flat 46 percent increase from Azure and cloud services. “Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world’s disposal to overcome constraints and reimagine everyday work and life,” Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in the earnings release. Continue reading Lifted by Cloud, Microsoft Sales Jump 20 Percent for Quarter

The immersive experiences Meta Platforms has planned for the metaverse will require processing power beyond what’s possible today, tipping into the quintillions of operations-per-second. But the company has a fix for that. Meta announced Monday that it has been working on a new artificial intelligence supercomputer called the AI Research SuperCluster, that will be the fastest in the world when fully built this summer. Drawing on resources from partners like Nvidia, Penguin Computing and Pure Storage, the effort took two years and involved several hundred people who collaborated remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic for much of the project. Continue reading Meta AI Research Supercomputer Aims to Be World’s Fastest

Australian researchers have had a breakthrough in quantum computing, proving that nearly error-free processing is possible, which could lead to the possibility of silicon-based quantum machines whose manufacture could be compatible with today’s semiconductor manufacturing technology. “Our operations were 99 percent error-free,” said University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) professor Andrea Morello, who led the work with partners in the U.S., Japan, Egypt, and at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of Melbourne. “When the errors are so rare, it becomes possible to detect them and correct them when they occur.” Continue reading Quantum Computing in Silicon Achieves 99 Percent Accuracy

Facebook finds itself the subject of yet more unflattering allegations, this time claiming the company gouged people in third world countries by charging them for services it had said would be free when making deals with cellular carries in the areas. Internal documents are said to have surfaced indicating that after promising to let low-income citizens in places like Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines use a pared-down version of Facebook along with some Internet browsing without incurring data charges, the Meta Platforms company wound up charging, in total, millions of dollars a month. Continue reading Facebook Caught in Fee Controversy for Free Mobile Service

Intel is building a new $20 billion chip foundry in Ohio, where CEO Patrick Gelsinger says the company envisions investing more than $100 billion over the next decade to create a complex of up to eight plants. The move is part of a U.S. effort to increase domestic production of computer chips, alleviating supply chain shortages and reducing reliance on foreign suppliers. The new build, located near Columbus, is an economic boon for Ohio, creating 7,000 construction jobs and eventually employment for about 3,000 people in two flagship factories, and potentially many more jobs through the satellite suppliers nearby. Continue reading Intel Announces Plans for New $20 Billion Chip Plant in Ohio

The European Parliament has added amendments to the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act that will further strengthen consumer protections and make it more difficult for Big Tech to continue tactics for surveillance advertising and microtargeting. The new amendments, advanced at a plenary session last week, are significant in part because they apply to digital services more broadly than the original DSA, which targets “gatekeeper” companies like Google and Facebook. Parliament had already endorsed a full ban on the profiling of minors as well as limiting the use of special category data for ad serving. Continue reading Euro Parliament Toughens Stance on Surveillance Advertising