Indoor dining establishments across the world are getting battered by the ongoing omicron wave of the pandemic, but new data from SevenRooms—which makes software for restaurant reservations—indicates that the damage is not nearly as dramatic as it was when COVID-19 first struck. As omicron became the dominant strain in North America, restaurant reservation trends definitely reflected fresh hesitance among would-be diners, with cancellation rates jumping 16.6% in December and Januar
New data from parental control app Bark shows that suicidal ideation among teens is up significantly from last year. The data is in keeping with other statistics, including metrics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which revealed that teen girls in particular were showing up in hospital emergency rooms at a far higher rate during the pandemic than before. While the trend is disturbing, doctors say there are ways to combat the rise. It’s not just about COVID-19-related s
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