technology
‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots
CEO James Daunt explains how Barnes & Noble is different than Amazon. Share this story *:last-child>*:last-child]:mb-0″> Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here! To put it another way, they were hiring in various executives one after another from other retailers, each of them bringing a very rational chain-retail philosophy, which is that you try to run a very consistent retail operation and that you use your scale and leverage for both operational efficiencies and purchasing efficiencies. That works pretty much across the board, whether you’re Best Buy, Staples, Zara, H&M, whatever it is. Each of those seeks to put an identical store pretty much in front of its customers in a very coherent, ve...
Biden administration reportedly demanding that TikTok sell or face a ban
/ TikTok is under intense scrutiny over user safety and whether the app poses a national security risk. CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before Congress next week.
Match Group’s CEO says he spent $50K in three months on Clash of Clans
/ Suddenly Tinder Platinum doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.
SpaceX Starlink rolls out $200 per month ‘global’ satellite internet package
/ Formerly known as Starlink for RV, you can now get satellite internet service that follows you across any continent and most countries.
You can play with Microsoft’s Bing GPT-4 chatbot right now, no waitlist necessary
Microsoft/ Tech / Microsoft opens up access to Bing Chat just a day before it plans to detail AI-powered features in Office apps.
T-Mobile is buying Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile for up to $1.35 billion
/ Mint Mobile already relied on T-Mobile for its network. Now it, along with Ultra Mobile and Plum, will be owned by the carrier once the deal closes. T-Mobile is buying Mint Mobile, the budget-friendly mobile carrier that’s partially owned by Ryan Reynolds. In a post published on Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that the deal’s valued at up to $1.35 billion and comes as T-Mobile looks to build out its prepaid phone offering. The acquisition should close later this year and involves a 39 percent cash and 61 percent stock purchase of Mint’s parent company, Ka’ena Corporation. The price could change, however, as it depends on Mint’s performance. Once the deal closes, Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim will join T-Mobile to continue managing the brand, which T-Mobile says “will gener...
Microsoft signs fourth Call of Duty deal in fresh bid to win over regulators
/ Microsoft is strategically signing cloud gaming deals to help win over regulators concerned about its proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition.
Three months later, Epic is still silent about free ‘Unreal Tournament 3 X’
/ ‘We have no new information to share on this,’ says Epic.
Google-backed Anthropic launches Claude, an AI chatbot that’s easier to talk to
/ Anthropic says its chatbot is ‘less likely to produce harmful outputs’ than some of its competitors, like Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing.
Will you be the bearer of Magic: The Gathering’s One Ring?
Gaming/ Entertainment / For its Lord of the Rings Magic: The Gathering set, Wizards of the Coast has printed a special, one-of-a-kind, The One Ring card and hidden it in special packs. a:hover]:text-gray-63 [&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a:hover]:text-gray-bd dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-gray [&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-63 dark:[&>a]:text-gray-bd dark:[&>a]:shadow-underline-gray”>Image: Wizards of the Coast The card for Tom Bombadil — who is either whimsical or boring depending on who you ask — artfully captures his love of storytelling and song by allowing you to play Saga cards over and over again. a:hover]:text-gray-63 [&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a:hover]:text-gray-bd dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-gray [&>...
Waze is adding electric vehicle charging stations to its route planning tool
/ The Google-owned navigation tool says its EV charging locator will be the most accurate thanks to its crowdsourced map editing feature.
Microsoft Edge now has a Bing AI chatbot sidebar
Microsoft/ Tech / Microsoft brings its AI-powered Bing sidebar out of testing and into stable versions of its Microsoft Edge browser. a:hover]:text-black [&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a:hover]:text-gray-e9 dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-gray-63 [&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-13 dark:[&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-63″>The new Bing sidebar in Microsoft Edge.
