Adam Neumann’s bid to buy back WeWork essentially ended this week. A bankruptcy court on Monday approved a deal that gets WeWork out of debt. It could conclude its restructuring and leave bankruptcy by late May following a vote on the deal, thanks to $450 million in financing provided largely …
Read More »Give This Rich Dude $1 or The Onion Disappears Forever
There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he cofounded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company enabling businesses to communicate with customers via text messages and phone calls. Activist investors had been pushing for management changes and even a sell-off, and Lawson …
Read More »Sale or No Sale, TikTok Will Never Be the Same
The end of TikTok has begun. As the dust settles from a week of shockingly fast legislative action by the US Congress, it’s clear that TikTok next year will look much different from the TikTok we’re using today. When President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion dollar foreign aid package …
Read More »A Wave of AI Tools Is Set to Transform Work Meetings
Dan Siroker knows how to pivot. He once had an education startup that morphed into a successful online analytics company called Optimizely. More recently he created an AI company called Scribe.ai, dedicated to capturing data from apps like Zoom, then reintroduced it as a MacOS app called Rewind designed to …
Read More »Google Fires 28 Workers for Protesting Cloud Deal With Israel
Google fired 28 employees Wednesday after they participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government that also includes Amazon. Workers at both companies have claimed the deal makes advanced technology available to Israel’s security apparatus that could contribute to the killing and harming of …
Read More »Google Workers Detained by Police for Protesting Cloud Contract With Israel
Nine Google workers were removed by police from company offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, late Tuesday after staging an hours-long sit-in protest against a cloud contract with Israel’s government. The Sunnyvale protest occupied the office of Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud division, at a building close to …
Read More »Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract With Israel's Government
Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO …
Read More »Tech Leaders Once Cried for AI Regulation. Now the Message Is ‘Slow Down’
The other night I attended a press dinner hosted by an enterprise company called Box. Other guests included the leaders of two data-oriented companies, Datadog and MongoDB. Usually the executives at these soirees are on their best behavior, especially when the discussion is on the record, like this one. So …
Read More »This AI Startup Wants You to Talk to Houses, Cars, and Factories
We’ve all been astonished at how chatbots seem to understand the world. But what if they were truly connect to the real world? What if the dataset behind the chat interface was physical reality itself, captured in real time by interpreting the input of billions of sensors sprinkled around the …
Read More »Apple Store Employees Say Coworkers Were Disciplined for Supporting Palestinians
Nearly 300 current and former Apple employees have published an open letter alleging that several retail and corporate employees of the company have been disciplined or “wrongfully terminated” for expressing support for Palestinian people through pins, bracelets, or keffiyeh.The group, which calls itself Apples4Ceasefire, is planning a protest outside Apple’s …
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