Meta revealed a new VR headsettoday, the Meta Quest 3, coinciding with the company’s latest video game push. The news also got ahead of a rumored major Apple product announcement that could prove competitive.
Why it matters: The tech giant formerly known as Facebook is eager to get people excited about its push into virtual worlds, following deep job cuts and reports of low user counts in its metaverse spaces.
Twitter has not removed recent posts from verified subscribers that violated the social media platform's hateful conduct policy, according to a new report released on Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Why it matters: The findings suggest the company has either disregarded or overlooked posts from Twitter Blue subscribers — who pay the company $8 a month or $84 a year — that contained hateful content, even though such posts are prioritized in conversations and searches on the platform.
Anyone that messes with cryptocurrencies almost certainly sometimes uses MetaMask, the ubiquitous browser wallet most closely associated with Ethereum.
Driving the news: Demox Labs aims to build the next-generation wallet (among other things), and to that end it has raised $4.5 million led by HackVC to support development of various products for the privacy-oriented Aleo blockchain.
The $10 trillion worth of investments tied to special environmental, social and governance criteria — ESG — sits at the center of a new culture war, and AI may be the only thing that can save it.
How it works: Companies' claims to meeting ESG criteria often rely on patchy and hard-to-verify data, leaving investors unsure what to believe and ESG investment managers vulnerable to political attack. AI is promising better organized company data and more transparent insights.
Meta on Wednesday threatened to pull news links from Facebook and Instagram in California if state lawmakers moved forward with a bill that would tax them for news content.
Why it matters: History suggests that it's not an empty threat. Meta pulled news from Facebook in 2021 in response to an Australian law that similarly forced it to pay for news content. It reversed the ban days later after the government agreed to change some of the terms of the law.
Amazon will pay over $30 million to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that its Ring and Alexa divisions violated the privacy of users.
The latest: A lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC said Wednesday Amazon violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by retaining voice and geolocation information from young users for years despite parents' requests that they delete the data.
Activision Blizzard saw an uptick in employee reports of misconduct in late 2022, a rise the company attributes to greater scrutiny of the issues.
Driving the news: The game maker’s inaugural transparency report, released Wednesday, says the company received 114 reports of harassment, discrimination or retaliation by its employees last year.
Cars must be able to stop themselves when they detect an imminent crash, even at high speeds and at night, per a newly proposed rule from U.S. safety regulators.
Why it matters: The proposed standard, which goes far beyond today's crash-avoidance technology, aims to reduce the carnage on U.S. roadways.
Corey duBrowa will depart Google and parent company Alphabet in June to serve as CEO of global public relations firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW), Axios has learned.
Why it matters: DuBrowa's departure comes at a pivotal time for Google as the tech giant embarks on the generative artificial intelligence race.
It feels like every new startup is calling itself an AI company, no matter what it really does, while many old ones are rebranding as such. And some of that is showing up in domain name registrations.
Driving the news: Registrations of .ai domain names are up 156% over the past year, compared to just a 27% increase for .com domains over the same time period, according to Domain Name Stat.
Breaking: Equatic, a UCLA spin-out pairing carbon dioxide removal using seawater and hydrogen production, just unveiled a major deal with Boeing.
Why it matters: While the deal is preliminary and contingent upon Equatic's ability to scale its tech, it's large for the nascent carbon removal market.
🗞️Driving the news: The "pre-purchase option agreement" is for 62,000 metric tons of CO2 removal, and 2,100 metric tons of "carbon-negative" hydrogen that Boeing sees as feedstock for cleaner jet fuel.
It covers a roughly five-year period that starts mid-decade, a spokesperson said.
Equatic is also divulging more details about its structure and plans.
John Browne, the former BP CEO who's now chairman of the climate tech fund BeyondNetZero, is heading Equatic's advisory board.
Reality check: Volumes in recent industry deals are growing. But they're still tiny compared with the global scale envisioned to make removal a meaningful tool in future decades, which involves handling multibillions of tons a year.
That's hardly a sure thing, and for now, the priority is scaling and driving down costs.
How it works: Equatic's tech passes electrical current, obtained via renewables, through seawater — a process called electrolysis that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.
They then pass atmospheric air through the processed seawater. "These steps trap CO2 in solid minerals and as dissolved substances that are naturally found in the oceans," the company said.
🧮The big picture: The process enables precise accounting of how much CO2 is removed, Equatic said.
And the hydrogen can be used in heavy industry, electricity, production of transport fuels — or powering Equatic's CO2 removal plants.
🔍Zoom in: Equatic has pilot projects in L.A. and Singapore.
It hopes to reach 100,000 metric tons of carbon removal annually by 2026, and millions by 2028 for under $100 per ton, a goal set by the Energy Department.
Removal pledged under a far smaller deal with Stripe in 2021, when Equatic was called SeaChange and housed at UCLA, was for $1,370 per ton.
🏃🏽♀️Catch up fast: Equatic has raised over $30 million. Its many backers include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation and DOE.
The intrigue: Chief Operating Officer Edward Sanders told Axios that Equatic's hydrogen production will be eligible for climate law tax credits for U.S. projects.
But separate carbon removal credits don't apply because they're only for geologic storage, not ocean-based removal, he said.
Sanders said he hopes lawmakers will broaden the applicability but added that Equatic's business model doesn't rest on it.
He's also confident a U.N. panel will eventually reverse its preliminary view that engineered removal should be excluded from carbon markets under the Paris Agreement.
The bottom line: Equatic's novel vision of merging direct air capture, CO2 storage in oceans and hydrogen production shows how no tech is yet dominant in the emerging removal field.
Artificial intelligence's rise is already beginning to reshape tech's business landscape, with the emergence over the past week of the first big winner: chipmaker Nvidia.
Driving the news: Nvidia opened trading Tuesday with a market capitalization that topped $1 trillion before closing just shy of that level. That placed it in an elite club that also includes Apple, Google/Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.
Twitter is worth one-third of the amount it was when Elon Musk and co-investors bought the social platform for $44 billion, according to a new disclosure from Fidelity.
Driving the news: In Fidelity's latest Twitter markdown, the financial services giant estimated in a monthly report of portfolio valuations that the company is now worth about $15 billion, or 33% of the October purchase price, per a Bloomberg assessment Tuesday.
