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2 | These are the Daily Tech Headlines for Thursday August 1st, 2024. I'm Sarah Lane. | |||||
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6 | Video game developer Bungie,which is owned by Sony, laid off 220 employees, or 17% of the studio’s workforce, on Wednesday. Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a post about the cuts, that rising costs of development, "industry shifts," and "enduring economic conditions" all played a role in this decision, and that Bungie needs to focus development efforts entirely on live service looter shooter Destiny and the upcoming game Marathon. An additional 155 employees will be absorbed into roles at Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters. | https://www.ign.com/articles/destiny-developer-bungie-cuts-220-staff-some-of-the-most-difficult-changes-weve-ever-had-to-make-as-a-studio | ||||
7 | It's a week of earnings, folks, so let's roll through a few highlights from the latest numbers. Meta had a strong second-quarter, with revenue up 22% from $32 billion a year earlier, and net income up 73% over a year earlier to $13.47 billion, in large part due to its legacy digital ad business on Facebook and Instagram. But Meta’s Reality Labs unit which makes the Quest VR headset and Ray Ban AR glasses still has a way to go, recording an operating loss of $4.48 billion, well above its revenue which came in at $353 million. Revenue is up 28% over a year earlier, but didn't hit analysts' expectations. | https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/31/24210786/meta-earnings-q2-2024-ai-llama-zuckerberg | ||||
8 | -- | https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/31/metas-reality-labs-posts-4point5-billion-loss-in-second-quarter.html | ||||
9 | Ok, onto Qualcomm. Revenue rose 11% to $9.39 billion in its Q3, with phone-related revenue making up more than half of the total, up 12% to $5.9 billion. Automotive sales were way up, 87% to $811 million. However, Qualcomm warned that phone shipments are only gradually rebounding from a prolonged slump and it doesn't expect units to be more than “flattish” or up by a single-digit percentage for the rest of the year. | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-31/qualcomm-gives-bullish-forecast-after-phone-demand-perks-up | ||||
10 | Arm, another chip maker heavily reliant on phone sales, saw revenue up 39% year over year to $830 million in its Q2, splitting revenue from royalties at $467 million and licensing and other revenue at $472 million. Interestingly, Arm says it will no longer report shipped chip numbers. CEO Rene Haas said in a letter of the change "As we shift our focus to higher-value, lower-volume markets such as data center servers, AI accelerators and smartphone applications processors, the number of chips reported as shipped is less representative of our performance as the growth in royalty revenue is concentrated in a smaller number of chips.” | https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/31/arm-q1-earnings-report-2025.html | ||||
11 | EBay beat expectations in its Q2, reporting $2.57 billion in revenue, with gross merchandise volume rising 1% to $18.4 billion. But while Ebay's focus on specialized categories like auto parts, collectibles, and luxury accessories seems to be holding steady… its sales forecast of $2.5 billion to $2.56 billion for the current Q3 came up short of expectations. | https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ebay-forecasts-quarterly-revenue-below-estimates-2024-07-31/ | ||||
12 | Reddit has financial agreements with Google Search and OpenAI's SearchGPT to scrape its data, but CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with The Verge that its lack of deals with Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity have forced Reddit to block them outright, and that it's a pain. Reddit updated its robots.txt file on July 1st to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with, but Huffman claims Microsoft has been using Reddit’s data to train its AI and Bing results anyway, and that Reddit’s data has also been sold through the Bing API to other search engines. An Anthropic spokesperson tells The Verge that "Reddit has been on our block list for web crawling since mid-May and we haven’t added any URLs from Reddit to our crawler since then. We respect robots.txt, the industry accepted signal for blocking web crawling.” Neither Microsoft nor Perplexity responded to the Verge story. | https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/31/24210565/reddit-microsoft-anthropic-perplexity-pay-ai-search | ||||
13 | Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian tells CNBC that its IT outage caused by the infamous CrowdStrike bug earlier in July, which grounded thousands of its planes, will cost the company $500mn. Delta plans to seek damages from the disruptions. Roughly 8.5m Windows devices were affected worldwide, which stranded airline passengers, hitting Delta the hardest and prompting the US Department of Transportation to open an investigation last week. | https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/31/delta-ceo-crowdstrike-microsoft-outage-cost-the-airline-500-million.html | ||||
14 | For those in the Xbox Insider beta program, Discord is adding direct friends and chat integration to Xbox Series X and S consoles, plus the ability to watch friends’ streams without having to launch a separate app on your phone. A new Discord tab on the Xbox Friends list under the “Happening Now” tab will display all your Discord friends, then you can join a server voice channel or call friends directly, or find your friends if they’re streaming directly from your console. The feature will roll out more broadly in the coming weeks. | https://gizmodo.com/discord-playstation-xbox-voice-chat-2000481568 | ||||
15 | Italy's Bending Spoons announced it has acquired WeTransfer. WeTransfer was founded in 2009 and has 80 million active monthly users. Bending Spoons also owns Evernote and Meetup. The company has a bit of a reputation for buying up companies, and then changing pricing plans and laying off workers post-acquisition. | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-31/italy-s-bending-spoons-buys-wetransfer-the-file-sharing-pioneer | ||||
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21 | For more discussion of the tech news of the day subscribe to DailyTechNewsShow.com, [MWF] you can find show notes and links to all headlines there as well. [TTH] and if you enjoy the show, remember to tell a friend to check it out! | http://dailytechnewsshow.reddit.com | ||||
22 | Thanks for listening, we'll talk to you next time. | |||||
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26 | END OF SHOW |