An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In China’s popular online-streaming industry, virtual gift-giving is big. You can send your favorite live performer anything from a rose for 5 yuan (80 cents) to a space rocket for 500 yuan. The present is just a symbol, but the money is real — and that’s what’s made Kuaishou Technology so successful. […]…
Tag: E-Commerce
Microsoft Backs Direct Air Capture Player Climeworks
Microsoft this morning disclosed investments in more climate-related companies as part of efforts to make good on its year-old pledge to become “carbon negative” by 2030. From a report: One company the tech behemoth is staking is Climeworks, a firm looking to scale up deployment of direct air capture technology that removes CO2 already in the atmosphere. The size of the…
Walmart’s E-Commerce Chief Is Leaving To Build ‘a City of the Future’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Marc Lore, a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Jet.com to Walmart for $3 billion and then oversaw the transformation of the retail giant’s e-commerce business over the last four years, is leaving his full-time role with the company at the end of the month, he told Recode. His next big entrepreneurial swing…
GDPR: German Laptop Retailer Fined $12.6M For Video-Monitoring Employees
The data regulator for the German state of Lower Saxony has fined a local laptop retailer a whopping $12.6 million for keeping its employees under constant video surveillance at all times for the past two years without a legal basis. From a report: The penalty represents one of the largest fines imposed under the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) not…
Amazon Begins Removing QAnon Goods For Sale
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology. Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its…
Stripe ‘Will No Longer Process Payments’ For Trump’s Campaign Site
“It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use,” jokes TechCrunch. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Stripe Inc. will no longer process payments for President Trump’s campaign website following last week’s riot at the Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter. The financial-technology company handles card payments for millions of online businesses…
Tech’s Top Seven Companies Added $3.4 Trillion in Value in 2020
Tech’s biggest companies just wrapped up a huge year. From a report: The seven most valuable U.S. technology companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla and Nvidia — picked up a combined $3.4 trillion in market cap in 2020, powering through a global pandemic and broader economic crisis. Between continued optimism over iPhone sales, Microsoft’s growing Teams collaboration product, Amazon’s…
Amazon To Buy Podcast Maker Wondery
Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s acquiring podcasting company Wondery, expanding its catalog of original audio content. From a report: As part of the deal, Wondery will join Amazon Music, the e-commerce giant’s music streaming business. Amazon Music in September added podcasts to its platform, looking to carve out a share of the increasingly competitive podcasting market, in which Spotify, Apple and…
India Bans Another 43 Chinese Apps Over Cybersecurity Concerns
India is not done banning Chinese apps. The world’s second largest internet market, which has banned over 175 apps with links to the neighboring nation in recent months, said on Tuesday it was banning an additional 43 such apps. From a report: Like with the previous orders, India cited cybersecurity concerns to block these apps. “This action was taken based on…
‘Profitboss’ Is Saving Restaurants From Heavy Delivery App Fees
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Bay-area based startup Profitboss is pitching itself as the “easiest, fastest, and most convenient system to get back your customers from third party [services].” Free to restaurants, the service (which launched in 2018) lets restaurants open their own digital storefront. Profitboss CEO Adam Guild likes to compare his service to Shopify and the…