The pandemic has shaken up the present and the future of education, and one result could be a greater focus on personalized learning.
Why it matters: Education has long been a slow-to-change industry, but the forced introduction of remote learning and the movement of some families out of public schools could lead to a technology-forward approach that is more tailored to individual students — and risks leaving the less advantaged behind.
Activision Blizzard is going bigger than ever on mobile, declaring that the gaming giant behind "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" wants a mobile game for every one of its franchises.
Why it matters: Much as some PC and console gamers may grumble, mobile gaming exerts a gravitational pull that is tugging the rest of the gaming industry toward it.
Twitter announced Wednesday that it will implement prompts asking users to review harmful or offensive replies before they hit send as a way to encourage healthier conversations on the platform.
Why it matters: Twitter, which had been testing the prompts for almost a year, said the notifications resulted in users sending fewer offensive replies and broadly improved behavior on the platform.
Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is planning to launch people to the edge of space for the first time in July, and one seat will go to the highest bidder.
Why it matters: The flight would mark the start of Blue Origin making good on its promise to send paying customers to suborbital space, opening a new market for space tourism.
Peloton on Wednesday said it will recall its Tread+ and Tread treadmill machines following reports of several injuries and one death.
Details: The company is recommending that people who have bought the machines should stop using them immediately and contact Peloton for a full refund or "other qualified remedy."
Office Depot today disclosed plans to spin off its commercial distribution business into a separate company, via a tax-tree transaction.
Why it matters: This may help clear the path for an acquisition of Office Depot by Staples, whose 1996 and 2015 takeover efforts were thwarted by antitrust regulators.
Jessica Alba today is starring in her first big-budget comeback story, as The Honest Co. will begin trading on the Nasdaq after raising $413 million in its IPO.
Why it matters: Honest, a "clean living" products company that Alba co-founded in 2011, is one of very few unicorns to lose their horn and then regrow it. It's also a reflection of how many direct-to-consumer startups have evolved into multichannel retail.
Soaring amounts of key minerals used in clean energy tech are needed to fight climate change, but costs and supply risks could create big headwinds, a new International Energy Agency analysis finds.
Why it matters: "Today’s mineral supply and investment plans fall short of what is needed to transform the energy sector, raising the risk of delayed or more expensive energy transitions," IEA warns.
The New York Times on Wednesday said it added 301,000 new digital-only subscribers last quarter, its slowest quarter for digital subscriber growth in over a year.
Yes, but: New subscriber growth was weighted much more heavily this quarter towards non-news products than in any other previous quarter in the company’s history. A record 44% of The Times’ new digital subscribers came from non-core news products, like cooking, games and audio, last quarter.
With euphoria taking over the stock market, so-called smart money investors like hedge funds and asset managers at major investment firms are hitting the sell button, expecting prices to fall.
What we're hearing: Retail traders were the only group to buy U.S. equities for the third week in a row as institutional clients sold equities for the third straight week and hedge funds sold for the fifth week, posting their largest outflows in more than a month, Bank of America's data analytics team reported in a note to clients.
Today's mortgage market is much more regulated and has much stronger fundamentals than during the housing bubble of the mid-aughts, but it's not a story that's as simple as rising demand and low supply.
What's happening: Unlike the environment ahead of the 2008 crash, housing prices are not being driven higher by a raft of underqualified borrowers getting mortgages they can't afford from unscrupulous banks.
Jeff Bezos made headlines back in 2019 when he posted on Medium that he had been having an affair with a married TV journalist and that he was writing about it because the National Enquirer had photos and was trying to blackmail him.
But there was far more to the story, as Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone details in his forthcoming book "Amazon Unbound," an excerpt of which is being published today by Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
TripActions, which allows workers to book their own business travel through a mobile app, is buying high-end British travel agency Reed & Mackay.
Between the lines: Although TripActions will still funnel the vast majority of trips through the self-service app, the acquisition gives it an added option for picky C-suite execs or companies whose employees have complex trips, such as professional sports teams.
