Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent Meta, told employees Wednesday morning that more than 11,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of the company's workforce, will be laid off. In his letter, Zuckerberg said "we are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1." The layoffs are the first broad workforce reductions in the company’s 18-year history, and a sign of the increasing competitive and regulatory challenges facing Meta, the Wall Street Journal noted.
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, late Wednesday backed out of a plan to rescue FTX, its smaller rival, after due diligence revealed problems it said were “beyond our ability to help.” The collapse of FTX is the most consequential failure the crypto world has seen since Mt. Gox disappeared overnight in 2014, Axios reports.
Six-year-old Mastodon is reaping the benefits of the exodus of Twitter users following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform, Business Insider reports. Mastodon's CEO says the platform has over 1 million users, with 489,003 new users signing up since Oct. 27—the day that Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter.
Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet, CNBC reports. “In fact, Web3 is not the web at all,” he told an audience at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon. He has his own web decentralization project called Solid.
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Before you got in line on Election Day, the emerging and largely unregulated political tracking industry was able to trace your movements, The Markup reports. These firms routinely circumvent privacy controls and permissions systems built into today’s smartphones and meant to protect the location data generated as you travel to work, school, home, and your doctor.
Recognizing that it can’t rely completely on online meeting software, Zoom this week announced the beta of email and calendar software. Among the features it will have, TechCrunch reports, are the ability to create a unique customer domain and end-to-end encryption.
Data can help marketers identify future content needs by analyzing past trends and patterns, Contently reports. And by revealing a target audience’s demographics, interests, and behavior, data can enable content marketers to create material that is more likely to resonate with their audience.
With 26 million subscribers as of 2021—along with its recently announced intention to acquire the UX prototyping juggernaut Figma for $20 billion—Adobe is a design titan. But Fast Company says Adobe’s thunder this year has been stolen by DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, and all the AI variations that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
The Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL will no longer get regular software updates, Android Authority reports. The October 2022 security update was officially the last one for the phones. The next Pixel phone reaching end-of-life is the Pixel 4a, which will stop receiving updates in August 2023.
A robot fish that collects microplastics from waterways has gone from idea to working prototype. The design won the University of Surrey’s public competition, the Natural Robotics Contest, The Next Web reports. The robotic fish filters the water and keeps the microplastics inside its container as it swims.