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The government says it is working "at pace" on a plan to prevent UK tech firms caught in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank from running out of cash. The Treasury said it wanted to "minimise damage to some of our most promising companies in the UK" after the US bank's failure on Friday. Firms could start to run into problems on Monday morning without intervention. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey "were up late last night" and have been "working through the weekend to come up with a solution" to the...

The aftermath of the pandemic-era tech boom has taken another San Francisco victim. Autonomous trucking software company Embark Trucks is laying off 230 workers and moving toward a total shutdown, the firm announced Friday, less than 16 months after it went public at a $5.2 billion valuation. Friday’s layoff round represented about 70% of the company, according to an email to employees from CEO Alex Rodrigues. Workers will receive severance pay through June 2, health benefits through the end of August and help figuring out visas, if needed, Rodrigues said. Embark is also shuttering offices in southern California and Houston....

The online job and social site listed the top skills in areas such as IT, as well as engineering, recruiting, sales, and marketing.LinkedIn today released an exhaustive list of skills employers prioritize when recruiting, posting, and hiring for jobs on the company's website.“It's true that topics like layoffs are trending on LinkedIn and conversations around 'recession' are up nearly 900% since last year," the company said in the report. "The rate of global LinkedIn member job change has flatlined for the first time since March 2021. No matter the setback, looming re-org, or change in strategy, learning in-demand skills can...

The Remote Kiss device, created by the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology in China, allows users to share kisses over a long distance with use of a set of silicon lips and a smartphone app. Photo courtesy of Taobao Feb. 27 (UPI) -- A Chinese company is selling a remote kissing device designed to allow long-distance lovers to share their smooches via a cellphone app. The Remote Kiss device, created by the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology, uses a set of silicon lips to replicate the pressure, movement and temperature of a kiss that is then replicated by...

A research team from the UK's Nottingham Trent University, the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales Canberra has developed a proof-of-concept display technology that could replace the LCD panels common to many of today's big-screen TVs. Though some modern high-end televisions may sport quantum-dot displays or OLED panels, many of the cheaper models available will use LCD (liquid crystal display) technology, polarizing filters and LED backlighting. But the researchers say that the limit has been reached for development of this kind of technology. "The capability of conventional displays has reached its peak and is unlikely to...

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), has sent subpoenas to five prominent U.S. Big Tech executives, demanding information on their censorship practices. “Today, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech,” the committee announced in a statement Wednesday.

"Marty,” a cleaning robot that has been a fixture at Giant Food in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, since 2019, experienced freedom briefly last week when it was able to leave the store. It made it all the way out to the parking lot before being recaptured and redirected.

Dell Technologies is the latest technology company to announce job cuts, saying Monday that it will be cutting about 5 percent of its workforce, or about 6,600 jobs. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Dell will cut 5 percent of its global workforce to respond to a “challenging global economic environment.” Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said in an email to employees that the company is facing market conditions that “continue to erode with an uncertain future,” which will require restructuring the organization and letting some employees go. “In the coming days and weeks, you’ll begin to...

James Pethokoukis asks, “Does ChatGPT mean the Technological Singularity is near? How would we know?” To answer the second question first, we probably wouldn’t. One of the characteristics of a singularity is that you can’t tell when you’re entering it. (And by the time you figure things out, it’s too late.) But looking at Chat GPT and the various AI Art programs that are appearing, I can’t help but see an irony: The jobs that are coming under attack first are the jobs that up to now have resisted technological replacement. For decades, traditional manufacturing jobs were gobbled up by...

Businesses are likely to sweat device assets for longer this year as they spend conservatively in a weakening economy, and this along with shrinking demand from consumers is leaving manufacturers in a tight spot. Gartner forecasts a perfect storm with fortunes declining for shipments of PCs, tablets and mobile phones 4.4 percent year-on-year in 2023 to 1.74 billion units. If accurate, that's just slightly more than 287 million computers, down 6.8 percent, some 2.9 percent fewer tablets to almost 133 million and 1.339 billion phones, down 4 percent. This is against a backdrop of a 36 percent revenue decline for...

Music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that it is slashing hundreds of jobs in the latest round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify said it would cut 6 percent of its staff, or about 600 workers, based on its last earnings report. “Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth,” CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a statement. Ek announced...

SAN FRANCISCO — When Lyft laid off 13% of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company. “It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.” Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said that he...

Jan 20 (Reuters) - Google's parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, it said Friday, as Silicon Valley reels from recent layoffs and faces a troubled outlook. Alphabet, whose shares rose 3% in pre-market trading, is making the cuts just as the U.S. company confronts a threat to its long-held perch atop the technology sector. For years Alphabet has attracted top talent to build Google, YouTube and other products that reach billions of users, but it is now locked in competition with Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) in a burgeoning area known as generative artificial...

I formed a Neighborhood Watch group and now need a messaging app. The police rep. mentioned WhatsApp but supposedly some people are moving away from it to Signal. Not knowing anything about social media I need some advice, our group already has Facebook which I don't have, don't do, and can't even seem to get, and someone else handles that Facebook account and it isn't used much by them I'm told. My first instinct is to use Signal, but I'm really in the dark about these things and once I sign-up someone else will be doing the mass communications on...

Suddenly in the last few minutes, Whenever I look at replies to a post I see the poster, time and subject title, but not the reply. Anybody else have that problem?...................

The Wi-Peep stands out due to its accessibility and portability. In addition, it was created by Abedi’s team using only a store-bought drone and a small amount of readily available hardware, costing only $20. The drone-powered device exposes vulnerabilities in WiFi security. A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo has created a drone-powered device that can see through walls using WiFi networks. The device, named Wi-Peep, can fly close to a building and then utilize the WiFi network of the inhabitants to quickly identify and locate any WiFi-enabled devices within. The Wi-Peep exploits a loophole the researchers call...

Key Points 8GB and 16GB make a big difference in performance. The key difference is the volume of RAM and how much stress you need to put on your PC. 16GB is the clear winner for any PC. 8GB and 16GB of RAM isn’t the usual comparison. Obviously, more RAM would be better, so we’re going to look at the comparison from a few different angles. We’re going to look at what 16GB can do that 8GB can’t. When does 8GB stop being enough? What are the differences in performance and available features? We’ll look at what we can and...

Ultrafast computer processing speeds are possible with optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies. Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic, working by shuffling around electrons. However, researchers have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. Aalto University scientists developed new optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds. Optical Chirality...

Blackrock has a grim presentation on investing in 2023. Particularly with regards to The Federal Reserve and their ability to stave-off a recession (comin’ at you!). Central bankers won’t ride to the rescue when growth slows in this new regime, contrary to what investors have come to expect. They are deliberately causing recessions by overtightening policy to try to rein in inflation. That makes recession foretold. We see central banks eventually backing off from rate hikes as the economic damage becomes reality. We expect inflation to cool but stay persistently higher than central bank targets of 2%. Those companies —...

Billionaire has spent almost six months in Japan after largely disappearing from public viewJack Ma, the Alibaba founder and once the richest business leader in China, has been living in central Tokyo for almost six months, amid Beijing’s continuing crackdown on the country’s technology sector and its most powerful businessmen. Ma’s months-long stay in Japan with his family has included stints in hot spring and ski resorts in the countryside outside Tokyo and regular trips to the US and Israel, according to people with direct knowledge of his whereabouts. Ma has largely disappeared from public view since he criticised Chinese...