Quibi, the mobile-only video subscription streaming service, is shutting down, the company announced Wednesday. The company said the decision was made to preserve shareholder equity.
Why it matters: Quibi had struggled to hit its subscriber growth targets amid the global pandemic. The app launched six months ago.
New forms of "empathetic computing" are helping human users feel more comfortable in opening up to a program.
Why it matters: Our mental health has taken a major hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, while social distancing means it's harder to meet in person with therapists. That has opened a space for emotionally attuned machines to help us.
The Justice Department filed a 63-page antitrust lawsuit against Google related to the tech giant's search and advertising business. This comes just weeks after the House subcommittee on antitrust issued its own scathing report on Google and other Big Tech companies, arguing they've become digital monopolies.
Axios Re:Cap talks with Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chair of the subcommittee on antitrust, about Google, the DOJ's lawsuit and Congress' next move.
The recent firestorm over the New York Post’s publication of stories relying on data from a hard drive allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden shows the increasingly hazy line between domestic political “dirty tricks” and a foreign-sponsored disinformation operation.
Why it matters: This haziness could give determined actors cover to conduct influence operations aimed at undermining U.S. democracy through channels that just look like old-fashioned hard-nosed politics.
Google is expected to net more than 71% of the U.S. search advertising spending this year, down from roughly 74.7% of market share in 2017, per eMarketer.
The Justice Department fired the starter pistol on what's likely to be a years-long legal siege of Big Tech by the U.S. government when it filed a major antitrust suit Tuesday against Google.
The big picture: Once a generation, it seems, federal regulators decide to take on a dominant tech company. Two decades ago, Microsoft was the target; two decades before that, IBM.
It's taken Google two decades to transform from a beloved search innovator into a Big Tech behemoth.
Flashback: At Google's launch 22 years ago, it provided accurate, simple, fast results — unlike its competitors in search, which had become bloated "portals" — and quickly won the hearts first of Internet insiders and then of the broader public.
Microsoft's epic battle with the U.S. government from 1997-2002, the last major federal antitrust action in tech, casts a long shadow over today's Department of Justice lawsuit against Google — but the industry landscape today is profoundly different.
The big picture: Microsoft's legal ordeal came at a moment when its old competitors, like Apple, were on the ropes, and new competitors, like Google, were just launching. The antitrust case preoccupied Bill Gates and the rest of Microsoft's leadership for years and arguably gave all those competitors the breathing room to grow toward their current success.
More than 430,000 people tuned in simultaneously to Twitch on Tuesday night to watch Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) play a hit video game as part of an effort to promote voting.
Why it matters: The event brought in reportedly the third biggest audience ever for an individual Twitch stream, with Ocasio-Cortez playing Among Us joined by popular gamers as well as fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The Justice Department's new antitrust lawsuit against Google centers on the charge that Google has built a self-reinforcing machine to illegally insulate it from any serious competition in search.
Why it matters: DOJ spent more than a year investigating Google to assemble what prosecutors believe is the cleanest case for convincing a court that the company is deliberately hamstringing would-be competition. Both sides now face the likelihood of a bruising, years-long battle that could expand to touch on other aspects of Google's business.
When the Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, it did so without the backing of most of the state attorneys general who have also been probing the search giant.
Yes, but: Those states may well swoop in later to expand the case to cover even more competition concerns.
One of the fastest-growing workplace applications of artificial intelligence is in hiring, but imperfect algorithms leave qualified women and candidates of color out — and can ultimately build weaker teams.
Why it matters: Algorithms are most often used to make the initial applicant screening process — the resume review — more efficient. But their role cannot be underestimated, as around 95% of all job applicants are rejected based on resumes.
Netflix's stock was down more than 5% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the tech giant reported that it missed expectations on global subscriber growth for the quarter.
Why it matters: Netflix experienced explosive growth during the first half of the year. It wasn't expected to match that growth this quarter, when lockdowns lifted and after new competitive services had launched, but analysts were still expecting it to meet expectations of at least 3.3 million net new global subscribers.
Google says the Justice Department's lawsuit alleging competitive abuses is "deeply flawed" and would fail to help consumers.
Driving the news: The Justice Department and 11 states Tuesday filed an antitrust case against Google, accusing the company of using anticompetitive tactics to illegally monopolize the online search and search advertising markets.
Why it matters: Huge amounts of data pour in from space to Earth each day, and the tech heavyweight sees an opportunity to capitalize on that big data and the growing markets for it.
Sweden banned Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G mobile networks on Tuesday, citing China’s “extensive intelligence gathering and theft of technology.”
The big picture: Since the Trump administration announced its own ban last year, the U.S. government has increasingly pressured allies to follow its lead amid growing tensions between the West and China. In July, the United Kingdom became the first European country to announce plans to exclude Huawei from its networks by 2027.
The Justice Department and 11 states Tuesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using anticompetitive tactics to illegally monopolize the online search and search advertising markets.
Why it matters: The long-awaited suit is Washington's first major blow against the tech giants that many on both the right and left argue have grown too large and powerful. Still, this is just step one in what could be a lengthy and messy court battle.
The Justice Department will unveil its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Google today, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, charging the company with abusing a monopoly position in search and search advertising.
Details: Justice Department lawyers are expected to outline their monopoly case against the search giant in a call with reporters Tuesday morning.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the tech world — not only for those companies that make remote work possible, but even for those whose products and services might not seem to have much to do with the pandemic at all.
The big picture: Adobe offers a case study in adapting to our new reality, plugging forward with a long-planned product roadmap while also trying to remain relevant with new products that ease collaboration and help identify misinformation.
Intel agreed to sell its NAND memory chip unit, including a China production factory, to South Korea's SK Hynix for $9 billion in cash.
Why it matters: This would make SK Hynix the world's second-largest NAND chipmaker, behind only Samsung. It also gets Intel mostly out of the memory chip market, which is where it got its start.
Why it matters: Republicans are ratcheting up pressure on tech platforms over allegations of anti-conservative bias, which have reached a fever pitch following the incident with the Biden article, based on documents supplied by Rudy Giuliani.
Stir, a service that lets creators on new online platforms manage their businesses, has raised $4 million in seed funding, executives tell Axios.
Why it matters: The company, backed by heavy hitters in the creator economy, helps individual creators and journalists share revenue when they collaborate. This type of service could incentivize more creators to branch out on their own, expanding the creator economy as a whole.
Many of the world's biggest tech and telecom companies, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AT&T, are licensing the Associated Press' election results to power their voice, video and search products, executives tell Axios.
How it works: Because tech firms need to answer millions of unique voice commands and search queries in real time, the results will be coded through an API — an interface that a computer program can read — designed to handle "not enough results in yet" and "too close to call" cases.
Facebook and Twitter's frantic attempts to stop the spread of the New York Post's Hunter Biden story didn't prevent the article from becoming the top story about the election on those platforms last week, according to data from NewsWhip.
Why it matters: The data shows that even swift, aggressive content suppression may not be swift or aggressive enough to keep down a story with as much White House backing and partisan fuel as this one.
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