To many people, much of the tech and gaming industries’ recent obsession with the metaverse feels oddly familiar. The metaverse experiences that have been trotted out with great fanfare look a lot like Second Life, the online virtual world created by Linden Lab back in the early 2000s. Second Life is now in its 19th year of operation. Even though it has fewer than a million monthly active users, it’s managed to remain profitable.With more and more attention and investment being giv
We’ve all done it. You sign up for a new social media site or are trying to buy something online and when the terms of service agreement pops up, you breeze past it faster than you blaze through a yellow light when you’re 20 minutes late to an appointment. Problem is: Those dense, dry, boring legal documents sometimes give companies the right to do a lot of things with your personal information. And in your haste to post or purchase, you sign away your rights without realizing it.
More than 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November and, in the arsenal of resources corporations will tap into to understand this attrition and stem the bleeding, creator-based social media platforms have become increasingly important. Because, while LinkedIn remains the internet’s bastion of polite society and Glassdoor its anonymous complaints department, many leavers—especially Millennials and Generation Z’ers—are turning to TikTok and YouTube to publicly
The surprise announcement Monday morning that Take-Two Interactive Software was acquiring Zynga shocked people—not just because of its unexpected nature, but because of the high premium the publisher of Grand Theft Auto put on the company behind Words With Friends. With an offer that represented a 64% premium to Zynga’s closing price on Friday, it would be the most expensive takeover in the video game industry’s history—50% more than Microsoft paid for ZeniMax and nea
Neeva, an ad-free Google search alternative that launched last June, will finally make good on plans to charge a subscription fee for its service. But instead of immediately throwing a paywall in front of prospective users, the startup is launching a free tier. Neeva’s free version will also be ad-free, but it’ll come with monthly usage limits and restrictions on certain features, such as Slack integration. Those who pay $5 per month for a Neeva Premium subscription will get extra
As 2022 begins, there’s more attention on early-stage startups than ever before. According to Crunchbase, venture investors bet $201 billion on 8,000 early-stage startups last year; that’s way up from the $101 billion invested in 2020. (VCs bet $643 billion on startups overall in 2021—10 times the amount invested in 2012.) The success of a promising early-stage startup, of course, depends on many things, including personalities, external forces (such as pandemics), and good
Over the quarter of a century that I’ve been covering CES in Las Vegas, I’ve used a lot of words to describe this annual tech-industry gathering. Until this year, “efficient” was not one of them. But with the resurgent pandemic deflating CES 2022’s attendance to what the Arlington, Va.-based Consumer Technology Association reported Friday as “well over 44,000 attendees”—down from 171,000 in in January 2020, shortly before COVID-19 struck&#x
In August 2019, Brittany Tomlinson uploaded a TikTok of herself trying kombucha for the first time.
@brittany_broski Me trying Kombucha for the first time #foryoupage #foryou #fyp #AllBrandNew ♬ original sound – Brittany
Her face whiplashed back and forth between utter disgust and thoughtful contemplation that it might not be all that bad, a reaction that had all the makings of a global meme. Tomlinson became known as “the kombucha girl” and found herself floo
Most boardrooms are ruled by the bottom line. Too many CEOs can recite a decade’s worth of earnings records but can’t hold a meaningful conversation about the communities they operate in or the customers they serve. However, in the last few years, that attitude has started to shift. More leaders understand that being good and being profitable are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, the former is a critical component to the latter. This is something we’ve known to be
The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities, and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely from one virtual environment to another. It can also involve augmented reality, a blending of virtual and physical realities, both by representing people and objects from the physical world in