The courses will cover skills including front-end and back-end development.
Meta is working with Coursera on new professional certificates.
Large tech companies are increasingly chipping in on boot camps and certificate programs to grow the tech talent pool. Meta is the latest, with the company announcing it’s rolling out new entry-level courses covering skills like front-end and back-end development on Wednesday.
Meta is partnering with Coursera to launch courses teaching development for front-end, back-end, iOS and Android as well as a fifth class on database engineering. The courses will be available on Coursera in June and July.
“We’re working to remove barriers, so that anyone regardless of education, background or experience can land a high-growth, in-demand job and grow a rewarding career,” Judy Toland, Meta’s VP of Global Customer Marketing, told Protocol. “People can learn the most up-to-date skills and break into tech more quickly than previously before. It’s one of the ways we’re helping to build a more inclusive and equitable job market.”
Toland said the programs were created by the company’s software engineers. Meta partnered with the online education platform to offer “affordable access” and scholarships to people with financial need so the courses will be as widely available as possible. “These career certificate programs are helping fuel the growth of a new generation of professionals and the fast pace of a career track in tech means more opportunities for upward mobility for all,” she said.
Meta had already introduced career certificate programs in social media marketing and marketing analytics. More than 63,000 people have taken the company’s certificates, and about 70% of people who took those courses reported a “positive impact on their career, life or business,” Toland said.
Meta isn’t the only company working with Coursera on upskilling and reskilling programs. Google designs and sells certificate programs through the education platform, and AWS works with the company to offer cloud training and other services. Coursera also works with IBM, Intuit and others on professional certificates.
Betty Vandenbosch, the chief content officer at Coursera, said the company’s partners are responsible for the content of the courses, meaning Meta will set out the goals, teachers, assignments and more. Vandenbosch said many of these courses are integrated into a university’s degree program (some of Meta’s certificates count toward college credit), which helps put participants on track to pursue a degree in whatever field they’re studying.
“The whole thing is a path to success,” she told Protocol.
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Sarah (Sarahroach_) writes for Source Code at Protocol. She’s a recent graduate of The George Washington University, where she studied journalism and criminal justice. She served for two years as editor-in-chief of GW’s independent newspaper, The GW Hatchet. Sarah is based in New York, and can be reached at [email protected]
San Francisco-based game development tools provider Unity is laying off hundreds of employees, according to a report from Kotaku.
Word of the layoffs appears to have begun surfacing earlier this week on the anonymous workplace platform Blind, with numerous users claiming to work for Unity saying management was pulling employees into Zoom meetings on Tuesday to announce they were being let go. Kotaku, citing multiple sources, now says the layoffs number in the hundreds.
According to Kotaku, Unity CEO John Riccitiello told employees two weeks ago that it was on solid financial footing and would not be resorting to layoffs. The cuts are affecting employees all around the globe, the report says.
Unity did not respond to a request for comment.
Unity employed as many as 3,300 people as of June 2020, the year it went public. However, the company’s stock price has fallen more than 40% since then, and more than 70% this year alone. The company also reported a loss of eight cents a share in its most recent quarterly earnings report and lowered its fiscal year guidance. Some employees have said the firm enacted a hiring freeze earlier this year, though it has not publicly said so.
Unity mainly competes with Fortnite creator Epic Games, which distributes its Unreal Engine platform for making high-fidelity 3D games. While a number of high-profile developers, including Electronic Arts subsidiary BioWare and The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, have signed up to use Epic’s new Unreal Engine 5, Unity mostly caters to the mobile and indie game market.
Despite its strong foothold in those segments, Unity does not develop games of its own and as a result does not have additional revenue streams outside its engine licensing business and other related software products.
Niantic is reportedly cutting between 85 and 90 staff members, or 8% of its workforce.
The company also canceled four of its upcoming projects: Heavy Metal, Hamlet, Blue Sky and Snowball. CEO John Hanke said in an email to employees that the company has been cutting costs in several areas as it is “facing a time of economic turmoil,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday, and that the company needs to “further streamline our operations” to weather “economic storms that may lie ahead.”
Niantic’s biggest title, Pokémon Go, has raked in more than $1 billion per year. But none the company’s subsequent games have achieved the same level of success. In a statement to Bloomberg, the company said it was cutting staff and production to “focus on our key priorities.”
Earlier this week, Niantic announced that it’s partnering with the NBA for an upcoming game called NBA All-World. The company said that this game is still in production.
Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital has reportedly received a court order to liquidate after creditors sued the company over unpaid debts.
A court in the British Virgin Islands signed an order to liquidate Three Arrows on June 27, Sky News first reported early Wednesday. The hedge fund had a reported $3 billion in assets under management as of April but has been hit hard by collapsing cryptocurrency values.
Three Arrows did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Partners from advisory firm Teneo will advise the liquidation process, according to Sky News.
On Monday, Voyager Digital said Three Arrows defaulted on a crypto loan worth $666 million.
The total value of the crypto market has sunk by about $2 trillion since peaking in November, falling below $1 trillion earlier this month for the first time since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.
Three Arrows, also known as 3AC, bet heavily on luna, the token tied to Terraform Labs’ UST stablecoin, helping lead a $1 billion purchase of the cryptocurrency in February. Three months later, UST lost its peg to the dollar and the value of luna sank, one of the most significant collapses of the current crypto crash.
Concerns about Three Arrows’ solvency have been circulating in the weeks since. The Financial Times reported on June 16 that the firm had failed to meet several margin calls. Kyle Davies, Three Arrows’ co-founder, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the firm is “committed to working things out and finding an equitable solution for all our constituents,” including the possibility of asset sales and a rescue by another firm.
Just months after committing to spend $925 million on carbon dioxide removal, a collection of major tech companies has announced its first purchases. The group, operating under the banner of Frontier, announced it had purchased nearly 2,000 tons of CDR services from five companies. It’s a small ripple in the CDR pond, but one Frontier hopes will turn into a wave to bring down the costs of removing carbon.
The five companies in question — Lithos Carbon, Calcite-Origen, AspiraDAC, RepAir and Travertine Tech — all use a variety of techniques to pull carbon from the sky. The partnership between Calcite-Origen, AspiraDAC and RepAir, for example, uses direct air capture, while Lithos Carbon and Travertine rely on improving rock weathering to pull carbon dioxide from the air. The group also gave Living Carbon, a synthetic biology company, an R&D grant to further work on carbon removal using algae and biopolymers. The five purchases plus the grant reflect Frontier’s approach to let a thousand carbon removal flowers bloom to see what sticks.
Frontier came online in April. Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey pooled $925 million to form what’s dubbed an advance market commitment. In essence, they’re promising to buy CDR services with the hopes of spurring innovation in the field, which can help bring down the cost. The First Movers Coalition, another collection of companies and governments, has similarly said it will buy hundreds of millions of dollars in CDR services with the same intent to kickstart the market and innovation.
Right now, sucking carbon from the sky is expensive. Among the projects in Frontier’s first purchases, the cost to remove a ton of carbon ranges between $500 and $1,800. That’s well above the holy grail of $100 per ton price point that would make CDR (relatively) affordable given the world will potentially need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year depending on how fast we collectively stop chucking the stuff into the atmosphere.
“We look for durable carbon removal solutions that have the potential to be low-cost and high-volume in the future, even if they’re not today,” Joanna Klitzke, who leads Strategy and Operations for Frontier, said in an email. She noted that while Calcite and Origen’s technique currently clocks in at $1,800, the duo projects it could dip below $100 per ton as it scales. (Calcite also recently won the first stage of the CDR XPRIZE, sponsored by Elon Musk, so clearly Frontier isn’t the only group that believes in the technology.)
Frontier is betting on that scaling happening, and the companies have until 2027 to deliver the agreed-upon tons. But Klitzke also said if some of these groups don’t hit their targets, Frontier is “comfortable” with that. “We’re the first customer for all six of these projects because we’re trying to help get as many projects as possible to the starting line,” she said.
The group plans to make larger, multiyear offtake agreements down the road in addition to smaller purchases, like the first round, to keep the innovation pipeline fresh. While Klitzke said R&D won’t be a major focus, Frontier saw Living Carbon’s technique as “an exciting pathway for carbon removal that we want to see develop,” and other grants may be forthcoming if the team dubs an early-stage carbon removal approach novel enough.
Frontier’s purchases are important given the almost certain need for some amount of CDR to keep the planet from heating to dangerous levels. But they are not a reason for decision-makers to be lulled into complacency around actually cutting emissions. The roughly 2,000 tons of removal services in Frontier’s first round of purchases is equal to less than two seconds’ worth of humanity’s yearly carbon emissions.
Scaling the cheap carbon-cutting solutions we already have today such as renewables, bike lanes and heat pumps has never been more important. Because ultimately, the cheapest ton of carbon to remove from the atmosphere is the ton that doesn’t end up there in the first place.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued Walmart, alleging the retail giant “turned a blind eye” to fraud worth hundreds of millions on its money transfer services.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Illinois Federal Court, says that Walmart did not properly train employees or put procedures in place to prevent fraud on transfer services offered within its stores, despite being aware of the risk for fraud. Nearly $200 million in payments subject to fraud complaints was sent or received at Walmart from 2013 to 2018, according to the FTC, citing fraud databases maintained by MoneyGram, Western Union and Ria. Another $1.3 billion in related payment could be tied to fraud, according to the FTC.
“While scammers used its money transfer services to make off with cash, Walmart looked the other way and pocketed millions in fees,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
The FTC said it found several instances where scammers relied on Walmart’s money transfers as a primary way to receive payments. That includes in telemarketing scams, IRS impersonation schemes, relative-in-need “grandparent” scams and sweepstakes scams, among others. Walmart offers transfers directly and through partnerships with MoneyGram, Ria and Western Union.
The FTC noted in the release that it has previously pursued cases against money transfer services alleging a failure to protect consumers from fraud, including against MoneyGram and Western Union.
In a statement published shortly after the FTC announced the case, Walmart called the complaint “factually flawed and legally baseless.”
“Claiming an unprecedented expansion of the FTC’s authority, the agency seeks to blame Walmart for fraud that the agency already attributed to another company while that company was under the federal government’s direct supervision,” Walmart’s statement said. “Walmart will defend the company’s robust anti-fraud efforts that have helped protect countless consumers, all while Walmart has driven down prices and saved consumers an estimated $6 billion in money transfer fees.”
The FTC said it will ask the court to require that Walmart return money to customers and impose civil penalties against Walmart.
Eric Schmidt described his first five years at Google as “pure, naive techno-optimism,” in that the company believed that applying American values like free speech is good for the world. But Google hit a brick wall when it bought YouTube.
“We learned the lesson that you cannot go and impose your American values on countries, even if you don’t like it,” Schmidt said at an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Tuesday. “And then we face this question of: Do you stay or leave?”
Schmidt, former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter and IBM SVP and director of Research Darío Gil talked about tech’s role on a global stage at a panel moderated by former POLITICO Magazine editor Garrett Graff. They said the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic and other worldwide issues have tested tech’s ability to expand on a global scale.
Schmidt said a decade ago, tech companies likely would not have taken down false information about COVID-19. But when the pandemic began to spread and platforms began removing false information about the virus, companies set a precedent for taking down content — but without rules to guide it. “Now we’re in this horrific state where we’ve set the precedent that we’re willing to edit or change the textbook, change the content, but we don’t have any rules,” he said.
He said the U.S. lacks a government playbook for addressing misinformation. He cited the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill, which proposes a framework for removing harmful (but legal) information. “That’s an example of how Britain, which is certainly a democracy, is going to solve this problem. Who knows what harmful but legal harmful is? How do you decide?” Schmidt said.
Panelists also talked about tech’s response to the war in Ukraine. Slaughter, currently the CEO of New America, said the implications of tech companies cutting ties with Russia is “enormous.” Slaughter said tech companies are starting to act as “independent foreign policy actors” in their decisions on global issues, citing Airbnb’s program to house people fleeing Ukraine.
“Suddenly, you’re seeing corporate and civic actors playing a role alongside government,” she said.
Gil said that as companies and governments increasingly work together, they’re going to need to make decisions about which governments to work with. “You’re going to have to make and operate under the new regime of alliances between countries that have elevated technology as a key source of strategic and competitive advantage,” Gil said. “So I think the rules are going to be sharper.”
Gil added that companies need to make choices about “what you do with the most advanced technologies” and which technologies are of top concern. For Gil, the top five include semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum, cyber and biotech. “There is definitely a marked difference about what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it.”
The Biden administration’s hot electric vehicle summer continues to zip along. On Tuesday, the White House announced $700 million in commitments for EV charging from private companies. The cash will up U.S. charging manufacturing capacity to 250,000 chargers a year and increase the number of chargers out in the wild. Not too bad!
The announcement includes $450 million from Volkswagen and Siemens to backstop the Electrify America charging network. (Fun fact: It’s an outgrowth of Dieselgate.) Siemens represents the first outside investor to put money into the network, and the investment will spur the, in the White House’s words, “rapid deployment of up to 10,000 ultra-fast chargers at 1,800 charging stations.” Though the deployment doesn’t come with a concrete timeline, getting that many fast chargers in the ground could ease range anxiety, a top concern for would-be EV owners.
In addition, Siemens committed $250 million to expand its EV charger manufacturing operations in the U.S. All told, the company plans to crank out 1 million chargers over the next four years. The company and the White House didn’t specify how many of those would be fast chargers, but regardless, even slower chargers for home and errands could be key to making sure EV owners can always be on the go without the worry of their cars dying without a charger in sight.
The timing comes a few weeks after the Biden administration announced EV charging standards that could help make a national, more unified network of chargers a reality as opposed to today’s piecemeal approach. And hot EV summer will continue into August when states submit plans for how they’ll use the $7.5 billion in EV charging cash available through the bipartisan infrastructure law. That money is meant to spur private investments as well, and it seems to be doing just that. Which hey, isn’t it nice when something works as intended?
The money committed is vital for getting Biden’s vision of a 500,000-charger-strong network off the ground, but it’s also nowhere near enough for ensuring the end of the internal combustion engine for the sake of the climate. A number of think tanks have modeled what a true EV revolution would take finance-wise, and the answer is billions of dollars a year in sustained investment for at least the next decade.
Beyond charging infrastructure, tax credits and other policy tools are needed to bring down the cost of EVs so they’re accessible to all households. Investing in infrastructure like mass transit and bike lanes as well as improving mixed-use zoning so we don’t need cars to get everywhere in the first place are also strategies policymakers need to consider in order to help reduce transportation emissions and not put too much strain on the supply chain for critical minerals we’ll need as the world electrifies everything. (Oh, and those moves would also improve public health and quality of life.)
Meta said it’s working to correct enforcement errors that led to the removal of Facebook posts related to abortion pills and suspensions of user accounts behind the posts. The clarification came after Motherboard discovered that Facebook was instantly removing posts that said “abortion pills can be mailed,” which the FDA legalized in 2021.
“Content that attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, request or donate pharmaceuticals is not allowed. Content that discusses the affordability and accessibility of prescription medication is allowed,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted in response to the story. “We’ve discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these.”
Facebook’s policies prohibit “attempts to buy, sell or trade pharmaceutical drugs,” except when the seller is a “legitimate healthcare e-commerce business.” These policies have been constantly evolving over the years, particularly in light of the pandemic, which opened the door to telehealth services across the U.S. Now telemedicine is expected to play an important role in providing abortion care to people in states where abortion will be banned or severely restricted. And the ability to share information online about accessing abortion pills by mail is critical to that work.
Still, Facebook and other online platforms are now operating in uncharted legal territory, where individual states are seeking to outlaw mailing the abortion pill mifepristone, while Attorney General Merrick Garland has said such bans are prohibited. That could set up another legal fight between states and the federal government.
Even as Facebook works to correct whatever enforcement problems led to the abortion pill posts being blocked, Meta and other platforms must also grapple with what to do about abortion misinformation, including a slew of Facebook ads that claim abortion pills are reversible or dangerous, despite medical guidance to the contrary. Meta spokesperson Dani Lever previously told Protocol that ads and posts about abortion will be eligible for fact-checking by third parties.
“Posts debunked by our independent third-party fact-checking partners will appear lower in Feed, be filtered out of Explore on Instagram and be featured less prominently in Feed and Stories so fewer people see them,” Lever said. “We also prohibit ads that include misinformation, mislead people about the services a business provides or repeatedly use shocking imagery to further a point of view.”
Option Impact, a benchmark compensation product from Advanced-HR, has a new owner.
Pave, a fast-growing Option Impact competitor, announced Tuesday that it had bought Advanced-HR from Morgan Stanley. The acquisition came as Pave announced its $100 million Series C funding round led by Index Ventures.
The tech talent market is still highly competitive, and startup leaders rely on each other’s data to gauge how much they need to pay in order to recruit and retain employees. Pave’s selling point is that rather than surveying companies once a year, it integrates their HR software like BambooHR, Carta and Greenhouse so that customers can access real-time compensation data.
The purchase followed what Pave founder and CEO Matt Schulman described as a “very competitive bidding process” for Advanced-HR. In addition to the popular tool Option Impact, Advanced-HR’s product suite also includes Option Driver and the Venture Capital Executive Compensation Survey. Pave didn’t announce what it had paid for Advanced-HR.
“We view this as a kind of a space-race opportunity. It’s a question of who gets the data asset first,” Schulman told Protocol. “We have a strong conviction we’ll win this new content market that has opened up.”
Pave, which has grown to 150 employees and 2,500 customers since Schulman founded it in 2019, is now valued at $1.6 billion. Post-acquisition, Pave has more customers than any other compensation benchmarking database for private tech companies, Schulman said.
Those customers will now have access to Option Impact’s data from more than 2,200 startups within Pave, which Schulman said offers a better user interface, better integration and its own set of real-time comp data.
Pave and Option Impact have both historically served venture-backed companies up through the Series C or Series D phase. Later-stage companies are more likely to use compensation data from Radford, which is owned by the professional services giant Aon.
But Schulman said he ultimately aims to offer compensation data to more mature companies as well, given “how interconnected the labor market is.” As a Series C company, Pave is no longer just competing for engineers against seed-stage and Series A companies — it’s going up against Meta, DoorDash, Uber, Netflix and Amazon, Schulman said.
“We have an interest in understanding what people are getting paid in the early-stage market as well as the late-stage, public market,” Schulman said. “It is very valuable to have all that information in one place, instead of needing to go to different datasets with different standards, different frameworks, etc.”
In addition to Index Ventures, which now has a Pave board seat, Pave’s Series C round included investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the YC Continuity Fund, LocalGlobe, Craft Ventures, Original Capital, Backend Capital, Contrary Capital, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and former Facebook Vice President of HR Tudor Havriliuc.
FTX is reportedly exploring the possibility of buying Robinhood. The crypto exchange led by CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is looking into whether it could acquire the online brokerage, according to a Bloomberg report that cited unnamed sources.
No final decision has been made, the report said. Bankman-Fried also downplayed the report in a statement to Bloomberg saying, “There are no active M&A conversations with Robinhood.” In filings, Bankman-Fried revealed in May that he personally held a 7.6% stake in Robinhood.
Robinhood had no comment on the report, which sparked a rally in the company’s shares. The stock closed up 14% Monday, helped as well by a Goldman Sachs analyst report upgrading it from sell to neutral.
Goldman noted that Robinhood’s stock price had plunged about 29% since it was downgraded to sell in April and it was reaching “a reasonable fundamental floor for the value of the company.”
Backstage Capital, which invests in underrepresented founders, has cut all of its operational staff after it ran into fundraising challenges, according to founder Arlan Hamilton.
Hamilton spoke Sunday on her podcast about the changes, which reduced its staff from 12 to three. Besides Hamilton, the other two who remain are general partners Christie Pitts and Brittany Davis, who are working on a “special project,” Hamilton said.
In May, Backstage announced that it had stopped making new investments and would only make follow-on investments. But it said it was still seeking to raise a $30 million opportunity fund.
The firm, which has invested in 200 companies, has raised about $20 million over its six and a half years, Hamilton said on the podcast. Backstage was one of the earliest firms focusing on minority and underrepresented founders, who have traditionally faced challenges raising funding in the venture industry.
Backstage also raised close to $5 million in a crowdfunding campaign through Republic. That funding gave investors a stake in the Backstage management company, but not Backstage’s investment funds. The crowdfunding campaign’s disclosures anticipated that 30% of the money raised would go to paying off accumulated debt.
Hamilton, in the podcast Sunday, described challenges raising funds from entities including Apple, J.P. Morgan and PayPal, while praising Comcast for providing funding.
The firm’s operating budget was about $3.5 million to $4 million per year, Hamilton said in the podcast, adding that she would put up about a third of the funds herself. Hamilton has invested in 26 emerging managers as an LP, she said on the podcast.
“It’s not that I feel like there’s any sort of failure on the fund side, on the firm side. It’s that this could’ve been avoided if systems we work within were different,” Hamilton said on the podcast.
Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan of cryptocurrencies worth $666 million from Voyager Digital, the broker said Monday.
Voyager Digital said it has issued a notice of default to the hedge fund for failing to make payments on a loan of 15,250 bitcoin and $350 million USDC. Voyager ”intends to pursue recovery from [Three Arrows] and is in discussions with the company’s advisors as to legal remedies available,” the company said in a statement.
“We are working diligently and expeditiously to strengthen our balance sheet and pursue options so we can continue to meet customer liquidity demands,” Voyager CEO Stephen Ehrlich said in a statement.
Voyager stressed that it “continues to operate and fulfill customer orders and withdrawals,” noting that it had roughly $137 million in cash and “owned crypto assets on hand.”
The company had also obtained a revolving line of credit from Alameda Ventures, an affiliate of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. That line provides access to 15,000 bitcoin and $200 million in cash and USDC.
News of Three Arrow’s default underscored the gravity of the cryptocurrency market crash. The crypto market has shed $2 trillion in the past seven months as the price of bitcoin has plunged from about $67,000 in November to roughly $20,000 this week. Three Arrows had bet heavily on luna, the token tied to Terraform Labs’ UST stablecoin, in February, helping lead a $1 billion purchase of the cryptocurrency in February. That bet dragged Three Arrows and other firms down as UST and luna collapsed.
Goldman Sachs has joined efforts to assist the ailing crypto lending company Celsius, in what would be the biggest effort yet by a traditional financial institution to jump in amid a broad crypto crash. Several large crypto hedge funds, lending companies and brokerages have sought funding or credit amid a liquidity crunch in recent days.
Goldman is aiming to raise $2 billion to buy Celsius’ distressed assets if there is a bankruptcy filing, according to CoinDesk. The investors could be crypto funds or more traditional asset managers or distressed investors.
Celsius has already brought in law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal, the The Wall Street Journal reported, as well as Citigroup to advise on possible restructuring, per The Block. Citi and Akin Gump have recommended that Celsius file for bankruptcy, CoinDesk reported.
Celsius earlier this month stopped all withdrawals and transfers amid concerns about market conditions and liquidity issues, pushing the larger crypto market further down amid fears of contagion.
The lending company held an unknown amount of UST, the stablecoin that collapsed after losing its peg to the dollar, as well as staked ether, or stETH, which also has suffered from liquidity challenges amid a broader crypto crash.
Meanwhile, crypto lender BlockFi secured a $250 million line of credit from FTX. Publicly traded crypto broker Voyager Digital secured $485 million in loans from Alameda Research and limited customer withdrawals after announcing its exposure to another troubled hedge fund, Three Arrows Capital.
Los Angeles could become the first major city in the country to ban the construction of new gas stations because of the climate crisis.
The move was announced by Los Angeles city council member Paul Koretz, who is drafting the policy. If approved, the measure will ensure that there will be no additions to the nearly 600 gas stations already in the county. “We are ending oil drilling in Los Angeles. We are moving to all-electric new construction. And we are building toward fossil fuel-free transportation,” Koretz said in a press release. “Our great and influential city, which grew up around the automobile, is the perfect place to figure out how to move off the gas-powered car.”
Los Angeles is not the first city to consider this ban. Petaluma, a small city 40 miles north of San Francisco, implemented a ban on new gas stations last year. “The actual motivation for this was — and is — our climate emergency resolution and the fact that we’re really trying to shift the needle in our town,” Petaluma Mayor Teresa Barrett told the LA Times in March 2021 when the ban was first announced.
The new proposal has a degree of added urgency. Gas prices are soaring to record highs, and the spike in price has actually been a challenge for gas station owners. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, “the average fuel retailer today makes about 10-15 cents per gallon selling gas.”
The proposal comes amid a flurry of activity in recent years to bring about more widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in 2020 that requires all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035. More recently, the Biden administration set a national target of having 50% of all new auto sales being EVs by 2030. It has also begun to dole out money and roll out standards for a 500,000-strong EV charging network across the country.
A recent forecast from BCG found that up to 68% of new vehicles could be battery-electric by 2035. Though more bullish than other analyses, the BCG forecast shows why new gas stations aren’t only a risk to the climate. They could be a risk to owners, who could be left holding stranded assets as the EV revolution takes off full steam. It’s also a reminder policymakers will need to figure out what to do for existing gas station owners and workers as their customer base shrinks in the coming decades.
Six of Sony’s internal game development studios have issued public messages of support for abortion rights and condemnations of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday. It’s a notable shift for PlayStation, after Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told staff in May to “respect differences of opinion” on reproductive rights following POLITICO’s disclosure of details from a leaked draft opinion in early May.
The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog and God of War developer Santa Monica Studio issued public messages via corporate Twitter accounts both supporting abortion rights and pledging to provide assistance to employees to support out-of-state medical needs. Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games, Days Gone developer Bend Studio, Horizon Zero Dawn studio Guerilla Games and Ghost of Tsushima creator Sucker Punch Productions all posted general messages of support for abortion rights as well.
The game industry has been largely silent on the issue of abortion rights over the past month and a half, despite countless studios and publishers issuing statements of support and donating to various causes over the past few years, ranging from Black Lives Matter to anti-Asian hate. One of the first and only developers to speak out for reproductive rights was Destiny developer Bungie, which is in the process of being acquired by Sony. (Bungie also reiterated its support in a blog post on Friday and said it is now “implementing a travel reimbursement program for any employee to use when they or a dependent cannot get access to the healthcare they need where they live.”)
No other major studios with the exception of Microsoft-owned Double Fine spoke up in similar fashion. And despite Bungie’s statement, Sony reportedly prohibited its internal studios from making similar statements following Ryan’s email to staff.
Either that policy has changed given Friday’s news, or the studios have chosen to defy Sony headquarters.
“We believe that bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom are fundamental human rights,” wrote Santa Monica Studios on Twitter earlier Friday. Naughty Dog Co-president Neil Druckmann also posted a screenshot to his account showing a $10,000 donation to NARAL and thanked Sony for matching his donation, indicating Sony may now have a company-wide policy in place for matching donations to abortion rights groups.
Insomniac’s public statement may be the most noteworthy, however, because its chief executive explicitly told employees in May that Sony was prohibiting them from speaking out about the issue, according to a report from The Washington Post. “[Sony Interactive Entertainment] will not approve ANY statements from any studio on the topic of reproductive rights. We fought hard for this and we did not win,” Insomniac CEO Ted Price told employees in an email last month.
In a separate response to employees, Price said there would be “material repercussions for us as a wholly owned subsidiary” if Insomniac or its employees tweeted support for abortion rights or disclosed a $50,000 donation Sony permitted the studio to make to the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project. “Among other things, any progress that we might make in helping change [Sony Interactive Entertainment’s] approach would be stopped dead in its tracks. We’d also probably be severely restricted from doing important public-facing work in the future,” Price wrote at the time.
Now, Insomniac is speaking up. “We are human beings who make games,” the studio wrote in a tweeted image. “Reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy are human rights.”
Yelp is closing its New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., offices as the company embraces remote work.
In a Thursday blog post, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said employees were barely using those three offices. Yelp is also trimming its real estate footprint in Phoenix, he said.
“The most telling signal for us that people strongly prefer remote work has been the under-utilization of our offices,” Stoppelman wrote.
Only 1% of Yelp’s global employee base goes to the office every day, Stoppelman said, and employees were using less than 2% of the available workspaces in New York, Chicago and D.C. Those three offices will close July 29, he said.
Stoppelman has previously been a vocal advocate for remote work, going toe-to-toe with Founders Fund partner Keith Rabois last month when Rabois tweeted that he wanted to fund “IRL startups.”
Stoppelman tweeted that wanting to fund in-office startups was “equivalent to ‘looking to fund startups running Windows95,’” encouraging Rabois to “live in the future and fully embrace remote.”
Yelp downsized its San Francisco headquarters to three floors of a building in September of 2021. Before the pandemic Yelp was squeezed by the tech giants for both real estate and talent in San Francisco, although the picture looks very different now.
In the blog post, Stoppelman insisted that remote-first was best for Yelp and that even a hybrid model is a mistake when it requires employees to show up at the office regularly.
“It requires employees to live near an office, potentially driving up their housing costs, and to endure unpaid time spent commuting,” Stoppelman said. “It also means hiring is artificially constrained by geography, translating to a smaller and less diverse pool of talent.”
Yelp’s workforce is now distributed across every U.S. state and four countries, Stoppelman said, and has two remote C-level executives who don’t live near a Yelp office. The company has seen a “strong surge” in interest from job applicants, many of whom cited remote work as part of their interest in working at Yelp, he said.
Netflix is laying off hundreds of workers in its second round of layoffs in roughly a month, according to a report from CNBC on Thursday.
The streaming service has been struggling of late with a declining stock price due to slow growth and subscriber cancellations. “Today we sadly let go of around 300 employees,” Netflix said in a statement to CNBC. “While we continue to invest significantly in the business, we made these adjustments so that our costs are growing in line with our slower revenue growth. We are so grateful for everything they have done for Netflix and are working hard to support them through this difficult transition.”
Netflix has been reducing its workforce since it reported disastrous Q1 earnings in April showing the platform had lost 200,000 subscribers globally in the fist quarter of 2022. In May, the company let go of about 150 employees and additional contractors, with the company citing cost cutting.
That followed a marketing restructure in April unrelated to the earnings that nonetheless resulted in nearly two dozen layoffs, including some employees of Netflix’s entertainment website Tudum. As Protocol reported last month, dozens of these employees came from marginalized backgrounds, representing a substantial step back for Netflix’s diversity efforts.
Now, Netflix is adding hundreds more employees to the list as it tries to cut costs. The company is also exploring other options to salvage its revenue decline and slowing growth, including an ad-supported version of the service and a crackdown on password sharing.
Update June 23, 3:18PM ET: Clarified that Netflix’s layoffs in April were part of a marketing restructure unrelated to its Q1 earnings.
Instagram is testing using facial analysis tools to verify age on the platform, Meta announced in a blog post Thursday.
People will be able to verify their age on Instagram by submitting a picture of their ID card, taking a video selfie or by asking mutual followers how old they are. For the video selfies, Meta has partnered with Yoti, which analyzes facial features to verify a person’s age without disclosing their identity. After the selfie is shared between the two companies, it’s deleted, Meta said.
“Understanding someone’s age online is a complex, industry-wide challenge,” Erica Finkle, director of Data Governance at Meta, said in the post. “Many people, such as teens, don’t always have access to the forms of ID that make age verification clear and simple.”
The company is also expanding its AI tools to ensure that the experience is tailored appropriately. That includes preventing underage users from accessing age-restricted features like Facebook Dating or Mentorship.
Meta has been facing major public pressure to make its platforms safer and less toxic. Privacy bills, like the one being proposed in California, and the Children’s Code in the U.K. might be adding to the pressure, too.
Correction: This story was updated June 23 to clarify that the tools use facial analysis.
EBay was once known as a marketplace for trendy collectibles like Beanie Babies. Now it’s going deep into the new world of NFT digital collectibles.
The commerce site has acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin, which bills itself as a destination for rare digital art. Terms were not disclosed.
Despite the recent crash in crypto and NFT prices, more traditional ecommerce companies and big brands are seeking to jump into the quickly growing market. Shopify also announced plans Wednesday to enable NFTs as a way to unlock special products and perks for customers at Shopify merchant stores.
EBay has been seeking to move deeper into digital assets. It recently launched its own hockey NFT collection with NFT company OneOf, which uses the Tezos and Polygon blockchains.
U.K.-based KnownOrigin, founded in 2018, recently raised a $4.8 million series A funding round.
TikTok made several new commitments to its advertising and consumer practices, promising to better protect children from hidden ads and inappropriate content. The platform’s new pledges come after a complaint filed in February 2021 from the European Consumer Organisation that alleged TikTok broke EU consumer rules.
The video-sharing app agreed to let users report ads and offers that could “push or trick children into purchasing goods or services”; ban the promotion of inappropriate products or services like “get rich quick” schemes; allow users to switch on a toggle when they publish content with brand-related keywords; review videos from users with more than 10,000 followers to ensure they abide by TikTok’s content and community guidelines; and update policies surrounding purchasing products and receiving gifts.
Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders said the new commitments will help users understand what ads are being served up to them on the platform and distinguish them from non-paid content. Regulators will continue to monitor TikTok’s practices, Reynders said, “paying particular attention to the effects on young users.”
“[Consumer Protection Cooperation Network] authorities will, in particular, monitor and assess compliance where concerns remain, such as whether there is sufficient clarity around children’s understanding of the commercial aspects of TikTok’s practices,” the commission wrote in a release. The CPC may also take action on a national level to “ensure that EU standards are respected and to guarantee that all platforms abide by the same rules,” the release states.
TikTok’s pledges didn’t make the EU completely happy. BEUC Deputy Director-General Ursula Pachl said there are still “significant concerns” about TikTok’s impact on consumers even a year after talking with the platform. “We welcome that TikTok has committed to improve the transparency of marketing on their platform but the impact of such commitments on consumers remains highly uncertain,” Pachl said.
Meta has agreed to settle a long-standing lawsuit filed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development alleging discrimination in Facebook’s housing ad system. As part of the settlement, Meta vowed to change the way ads for housing, as well as employment and credit opportunities, are delivered on its platforms, and to pay a $115,054 fine.
“Discrimination in housing, employment and credit is a deep-rooted problem with a long history in the US, and we are committed to broadening opportunities for marginalized communities in these spaces and others,” Roy Austin Jr., Meta’s vice president of civil rights, wrote in a blog post.
The case, which was originally brought under then-HUD secretary Ben Carson in 2018, accused Facebook of allowing advertisers to discriminate on the basis of race and other protected characteristics when they were targeting housing ads. It also accused Facebook itself of discriminating through the actual delivery ads. Research has found that even when housing and employment ads are targeted in a neutral way, Facebook’s algorithms can wind up skewing which demographics actually get to see the ads.
As part of the settlement, Meta is committing to institute what it’s calling a “variance reduction system” to ensure that the intended target of an ad and the actual audience to which an ad is delivered align. “Today’s announcement reflects more than a year of collaboration with HUD to develop a novel use of machine learning technology that will work to ensure the age, gender and estimated race or ethnicity of a housing ad’s overall audience matches the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity mix of the population eligible to see that ad,” Austin wrote in his statement.
Meta is also agreeing to do away with functionality called Special Ad Audiences that allows advertisers to target lookalike audiences of users for housing, employment and credit related ads. The company has previously removed certain ad targeting categories from housing, employment and credit related ads and added them to its public ad archive.
“This settlement is historic, marking the first time that Meta has agreed to terminate one of its algorithmic targeting tools and modify its delivery algorithms for housing ads in response to a civil rights lawsuit,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
Austin himself is a veteran of the DOJ’s civil rights division. He joined Meta last year after a damning civil rights audit called Facebook out for everything from its failure to police former President Trump’s posts to its history of enabling housing discrimination through ads.
Under Austin’s leadership, Meta is undertaking a novel study that will analyze its impact on users of different races. “Are Black users treated differently than other users? Being able to measure that and be very transparent and forthright about the fact we are measuring that was incredibly important to me,” Austin told Protocol earlier this year. The techniques Meta has created to analyze users’ races as part of that work will be crucial to the company’s ability to vet the existence, or lack thereof, of discrimination in its ads.
Meta now has until the end of the year to implement the changes, at which point the Department of Justice will have an opportunity to approve the changes. “If Meta fails to demonstrate that it has sufficiently changed its delivery system to guard against algorithmic bias, this office will proceed with the litigation,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York said in a statement.
Crypto lender BlockFi has secured a $250 million revolving credit line from FTX, a deal that comes as a broader market meltdown has forced other lenders to freeze withdrawals.
Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of FTX, tweeted Tuesday that the exchange is entering the partnership to allow BlockFi to “navigate the market from a position of strength.” BlockFi Founder and CEO Zac Prince said the credit “further bolsters our balance sheet and platform strength.”
But the agreement comes as crypto lenders Celsius Network and Babel Finance have recently suspended customer withdrawals, citing pressures on their liquidity. That has raised questions about BlockFi’s position. Prince acknowledged on Thursday that BlockFi liquidated an unnamed “large client” that failed to meet its obligations but said BlockFi would “continue to actively lend and operate normally across our global suite of products and services.”
BlockFi also recently laid off 20% of its staff in response to a “dramatic shift in macroeconomic conditions.” The company has raised about $1 billion from venture capital investors over its five years in business, according to Crunchbase.
BlockFi’s “customer assets are appropriately managed, with no debt/risk from [Three Arrows Capital], Celsius, etc,” Bankman-Fried tweeted. The credit line will be “contractually subordinate to all client balances across all account types,” according to Prince.
Bankman-Fried recently suggested that large, well-financed crypto companies such as FTX should help contain the losses of the recent crypto sell-off.
“I do feel like we have a responsibility to seriously consider stepping in, even if it is at a loss to ourselves, to stem contagion,” he told NPR. “Even if we weren’t the ones who caused it, or weren’t involved in it. I think that’s what’s healthy for the ecosystem, and I want to do what can help it grow and thrive.”
Alameda Research, a crypto company also run by Bankman-Fried, recently extended two credit lines, one for about $200 million and the other for about 15,000 bitcoin, to crypto broker Voyager Digital.
The solar panel market is a mess. An ill-timed Commerce Department probe has wrought uncertainty beyond the already-fraught supply chain, but at least some U.S. developers are trying to right the ship a bit.
A group of solar development heavyweights has promised to purchase up to $6 billion worth of U.S.-built panels over the course of four years. The plan is to source up to 7 gigawatts of domestically made panels per year, an amount equivalent to more than a quarter of all the solar capacity installed nationwide in 2021. The developers — AES Corp., Clearway Energy Group, Cypress Creek Renewables and D.E. Shaw Renewable Investment — created a pact to formalize the commitment, known as the U.S. Solar Buyer Consortium, according to a scoop from The Wall Street Journal published on Tuesday.
In theory, this attempt to lure manufacturers stateside could ease some of the reliance on solar panel imports from China and Southeast Asia, which are currently the subject of tariffs and the aforementioned probe. The past several months have made it clear that relying on a few countries for the majority of imports is a precarious proposition for an industry with a Biden administration-backed mandate to grow as quickly as possible.
David Zwillinger, chief executive of D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments, told the Journal that “the last year and a half have been challenging” and that major projects have been hit by delays. Indeed, utilities have delayed plans to decarbonize because the Commerce Department probe has created an uncertain solar panel market.
Even with the new $6 billion guarantee, though, the financial calculus is tough for would-be solar developers and stateside manufacturers. Experts told the Journal that given that the building blocks of solar panels (polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells) are mostly produced in China, U.S. manufacturers will likely have to import those raw materials. That could make the panels produced here more expensive compared with the cheaper Chinese counterparts.
Just a few weeks ago, President Joe Biden took action to reduce the effect of the solar probe on U.S. developers, giving Southeast Asian panel suppliers a two-year reprieve from any new tariffs via his emergency authority. The president said this would give the domestic solar industry time to ramp up as well, and the new pile of guaranteed cash on the table could be an added incentive.
Cypress Creek CEO Sarah Slusser said the new consortium will start taking bids from potential suppliers immediately, with an eye toward identifying partners in the coming three to four months.
Microsoft will remove controversial automated tools that predict a person’s age, gender and emotional state from its Azure Face API artificial intelligence service that analyzes faces in images, according to a report published by The New York Times on Tuesday.
The technology giant said the AI features, which have been criticized as potentially biased and unreliable, will no longer be available to new users beginning this week and will be phased out for existing users within the year, the newspaper reported.
Microsoft also will restrict the use of the facial recognition tool as it adheres to a new “Responsible AI Standard,” a Microsoft-produced document that dictates requirements and tighter controls for its AI systems following a two-year review. Those requirements, according to The New York Times, were designed to prevent Microsoft’s AI systems from having a detrimental effect on society by ensuring they provide “valid solutions for the problems they are designed to solve” and “a similar quality of service for identified demographic groups, including marginalized groups.”
A team headed by Natasha Crampton, Microsoft’s chief responsible AI officer, will review any new technologies that could be used to make decisions about a person’s access to employment, education, health care, financial services or a “life opportunity” before they are released, The New York Times reported. Some companies have started to market AI tools that claim they can assess a person’s emotional state, which has set off alarm bells among privacy advocates.
“The potential of AI systems to exacerbate societal biases and inequities is one of the most widely recognized harms associated with these systems,” Crampton said in a blog post on Tuesday.
“The Responsible AI Standard sets out our best thinking on how we will build AI systems to uphold these values and earn society’s trust,” she said. “It provides specific, actionable guidance for our teams that goes beyond the high-level principles that have dominated the AI landscape to date … The Standard details concrete goals or outcomes that teams developing AI systems must strive to secure.”
Copilot, GitHub’s AI code suggestion tool, is now available for everyone, the company announced on Tuesday. Anyone can use the pair programmer for $10 a month or $100 a year. It will be free for students and organizers of popular open source projects.
Copilot, built with OpenAI’s Codex tool and Microsoft-owned GitHub’s code database, launched almost exactly a year ago as a technical preview. From the jump, the program both wowed and terrified developers with its scarily useful blocks of code. It can autocomplete repetitive code, offer lists of potential solutions and turn comments into code. The tool could revolutionize coding education, style and workplace practices. Making it general access moves it one step closer to becoming mainstream in the workplace.
You can start using Copilot with a 60-day free trial. GitHub announced it will be offering Copilot to companies later this year.
