Category: Technology

At dawn on Wednesday, French antitrust authorities conducted a surprise raid on a company in the country that specializes in graphics cards — and according to The Wall Street Journal and Challenges business magazine, that company was NVIDIA. We reached out to NVIDIA for clarification and a spokesperson declined to comment. Here’s what we know for sure:

The French Competition Authority conducted a surprise raid early Wednesday morning on “a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” according to a brief press release from the regulator. The raid was tied to a larger investigation into the health of the cloud computing market, with a focus on identifying whether new companies were being unfairly squeezed out by larger, existing ones. The results of that investigation were published in June and they centered on three “hyperscalers,” Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

The results read, in part, “The likelihood of a new operator being able to gain market share rapidly appears limited, excluding companies who are already powerful in other digital markets.” NVIDIA is not mentioned in the original cloud investigation.

NVIDIA has seen significant financial success this year amid the AI boom. NVIDIA’s AI chips and data centers are in high demand, and the company crushed its most recent earnings expectations, pulling in $13.51 billion in the second quarter of 2023, compared with $6.7 billion in 2022.

As the French Competition Authority noted, a raid does not mean the targeted company is guilty of anticompetitive practices — but it’s a confident step from the regulatory body.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/looks-like-nvidia-got-raided-by-french-antitrust-authorities-205809329.html?src=rss 

Users will be able to edit, share and receive feedback on their Photoshop projects from anywhere on the web, Adobe announced Wednesday, regardless of whether an Adobe product is installed on their PC or tablet. The company is bringing its Photoshop on the web service out of beta and incorporating a few handy new AI features as well.

Adobe first introduced a feature-svelt online version of the popular Photoshop app in December, 2021. Originally, users could share their psd files but only if the recipient had a copy of Photoshop or Illustrator on their computer too. That changed with the introduction of Creative Cloud, which allowed for sharing without the need for a local install. The beta version of Photoshop on the web took that concept a step further by incorporating basic editing tools into the web UI geared towards “minor tweaks and quick edits” — the easy sort of stuff that took less time to fix than the program took to boot. The production version released Wednesday does all that and more.

“With this release we are starting with a focus on the needs of creators who are new to Photoshop with a streamlined user experience,” Adobe VP Pam Clark wrote in a blog post. “We have brought the majority of the most commonly used Photoshop tools to the web and have streamlined the user experience, to make it easier for newer users to navigate the app.”

Users will also be able to experiment with two new AI-driven tools, generative fill and generative expand. As their names’ imply, these will “allow you to add, expand, or remove content from your images non-destructively, while magically matching perspective, lighting, and style of your image,” Clark wrote. The features were first released as part of Firefly for the desktop edition of Photoshop. 

The Contextual Taskbar is also migrating over from the desktop. This on-screen menu will observe your workflow and suggest relevant next steps. But for all the new features to play with, a number of existing tools have yet to make the jump to the web, including the patch and pen tools, smart object support and the polygonal lasso, the the company insists that they will be added with future updates.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/adobes-photoshop-on-the-web-service-is-now-available-to-all-creative-cloud-subscribers-210034891.html?src=rss 

Fortnite maker Epic Games is laying off 16 percent of its staff — or about 830 employees. CEO Tim Sweeney said in an open letter to sent employees that Epic Games has been spending “way more money” than it earns. “We concluded that layoffs are the only way,” he wrote “and that doing them now and on this scale will stabilize our finances.”

For those impacted by the layoffs, the company says it will offer a severance package that includes six months base pay and healthcare. Epic Games is also offering to accelerate employee’s stock option vesting schedule through 2024, while giving two additional years to exercise the options. About two-thirds of the layoffs affected teams outside of core development.

Sweeney wrote that Epic had been making an effort to reduce costs by not only freezing hiring but also by cutting spending on things like marketing and events. And while the metaverse is still in a conceptual phase, Sweeney said he wants the company to focus on developing infrastructure for its games to exist in the metaverse ecosystem. For example, Epic teamed up with LEGO to build an “immersive digital experience” for kids.

Epic also said it is divesting Bandcamp, an online music platform it acquired in mid-2022; it’s coordinating a sale to Songtradr, a music licensing platform. SuperAwesome, a kid-friendly developer Epic acquired back in 2020, is being broken apart and partially spun out as well. Its advertising business will become an independent company, while the Kids Web Services segment and the parent verification and consent management toolsets will remain part of Epic.

While these moves to cut spending may help Epic Games stave off pressure from investors like Tencent and Sony, its flagship game Fortnite remains banned from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, which will continue to impact its bottom line. Not to mention the $520 million dollars in penalties it has incurred from the FTC and its efforts to have the Supreme Court overturn a ruling that cleared of antitrust violations.

Still, Sweeney says Epic’s “prospects for the future are strong,” thanks to Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. Next week, the company will be hosting Unreal Fest, and while some products and initiatives will continue to land on schedule, Sweeney says some may fall behind due to restrictions on resources. “We’re ok with the schedule tradeoff if it means holding on to our ability to achieve our goals, get to the other side of profitability and become a leading metaverse company,” he said in the memo.

The company says it will not cut any funding for its core businesses and it will continue to invest in games with Fortnite first-party development, as well as the Fortnite creator ecosystem.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/epic-games-is-laying-off-16-percent-of-its-workforce-and-selling-bandcamp-211830580.html?src=rss 

Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub won’t be able to get out of paying minimum wage to their New York City delivery workers after all, following a judge’s decision to reject their bid to skirt the city’s new law. The upcoming law, which is still pending due to the companies’ ongoing lawsuit, aims to secure better wage protections for app-based workers. Once the suit settles, third-party delivery providers will have to pay delivery workers a minimum wage of roughly $18 per hour before tips, and keep up with the yearly increases, Reuters reports.

The amount, which will increase April 1 of every year, is slightly higher than the city’s standard minimum wage, taking into account the additional expenses gig workers face. At the moment, food delivery workers make an estimated $7-$11 per hour on average.

New York Acting Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne put the law on pause back in July, when the three companies and the smaller delivery service, Relay Delivery, sued the city, arguing that the raised rates will have a negative impact on their services. With Moyne’s latest decision, it’ll now move forward. While Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub will have to comply once it takes effect, Relay will be given more time to renegotiate its contracts with restaurants, according to Reuters.

The move makes NYC the first US city to require a minimum wage for app-based deliveries, and others are likely to follow suit. The city previously pushed ride hailing apps to raise their minimum rates for drivers, forcing Uber and Lyft to raise their per-mile rates by just over 5 percent in 2022.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/uber-grubhub-and-doordash-must-pay-nyc-delivery-workers-an-18-minimum-wage-213145847.html?src=rss 

Footage captured by a food delivery robot in Los Angeles was used to arrest and convict two people after a failed attempt to steal it off the street earlier this year, according to 404 Media. Serve Robotics, which works with Uber Eats for last-mile deliveries in the area, shared videos of the incident with the Los Angeles Police Department both proactively and after a subpoena. Serve previously met with LAPD to “open a line of communication” between the two ahead of any potential troubles, emails obtained by 404 also show.

It comes at a time when public wariness around the technology is already high, with concerns about just how much the robots are recording and where that footage ultimately goes. Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani boasted about the resulting convictions on social media, tweeting, “Some genius once tried to steal one of our robots… It didn’t end well (for them).” In a follow-up blog post, Kashani takes a softer stance, attempting to explain how the company balances its approach to involving law enforcement with its responsibility to the public and fostering trust.

The company’s principles, according to Kashani, include “not using robots for surveillance or other purposes that violate the public’s sense of privacy,” and not putting unnecessary strain on public resources by calling in the police “to address every minor incident of robot vandalism.” In this case, in which the police were immediately notified and arrests were made, the robot got away on its own and was, as Kashani describes it, “unharmed.” The company turned in all relevant footage before deleting it.

It remains unclear how long Serve keeps its robots’ recordings under normal circumstances, and its vagueness around the videos’ potential use doesn’t inspire much confidence. In a statement to 404 Media, Serve’s head of communications, Aduke Thelwell, said it is the company’s policy to “regularly delete camera feed unless otherwise required, and to comply with subpoena requests.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-food-delivery-robots-footage-led-to-a-criminal-conviction-in-la-190854339.html?src=rss 

Scientists at the University of Washington have developed flying robots that change shape in mid-air, all without batteries, as originally published in the research journal Science Robotics. These miniature Transformers snap into a folded position during flight to stabilize descent. They weigh just 400 milligrams and feature an on-board battery-free actuator complete with a solar power-harvesting circuit.

Here’s how they work. These robots actually mimic the flight of different leaf types in mid-air once they’re dropped from a drone at an approximate height of 130 feet. The origami-inspired design allows them to transform quickly from an unfolded to a folded state, a process that takes just 25 milliseconds. This transformation allows for different descent trajectories, with the unfolded position floating around on the breeze and the folded one falling more directly. Small robots are nothing new, but this is the first solar-powered microflier that allows for control over the descent, thanks to an onboard pressure sensor to estimate altitude, an onboard timer and a simple Bluetooth receiver.

As for the why of it all, the lil baby Starscreams can be equipped with a wide variety of sensors to make surveys as they soar around the sky, so in theory they could gauge temperature, humidity and air quality conditions, among other types of data. Produced at scale, this would be a highly-cost effective way to keep tabs on atmospheric conditions.

The current design only allows them to transition in one direction, from the tumbling state to the falling state, but researchers can control multiple microfliers at the same time, making them disperse upon launch to cover a wider area. They’re working on perfecting the reverse transition to allow the robots to transform back from the falling position to the folded position, which should better allow the microfliers to make precise landings even in turbulent wind.

It’s good to see new robots that don’t resemble a Dr. Who death machine or a headless dog with a thirst for blood. Let’s hear it for innovation! In the meantime, the University of Washington researchers will have plenty of funds to further develop this microflier concept, thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Google fellowship program, among others.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/these-flying-origami-inspired-robots-change-shape-in-mid-air-184653938.html?src=rss 

Beyerdynamic is no stranger to the gaming community, as the company’s wired headsets are regularly seen at professional esports events and the like. However, it’s never released a wireless gaming headset, until now. The company just revealed the Beyerdynamic MMX 200 and this headset’s packed with modern features, all without frustrating wires to get in the way.

The company says the MMX 200 offers the “same competitive advantage” of its wired cousins, thanks to 40mm high-performance drivers that provide expanded detail across the entire frequency range. There’s also an integrated digital signal processor (DSP) that promises to add more oomph to the sound, helping to create the “ultimate gaming experience.”

Gaming is more than just listening, however, especially when you’re playing with friends. You also have to trash talk. The MMX 200 features a detachable boom mic with an integrated 9mm condenser capsule that Beyerdynamic says will make listeners think your voice is coming from a podcast studio. That’s quite a lofty promise, as the microphones that typically accompany gaming headsets are, in a word, trash.

Being a wireless headset, connectivity options are extremely important. To that end, the MMX 200 integrates with a wide variety of audio codecs and features Bluetooth 5.3, along with a low-latency wireless adapter. There’s even an interesting hybrid mode that allows the headphones to connect via an analog wired connection and Bluetooth at the same time.

The advertised battery life is certainly impressive, allowing for 35 to 50 hours of use per charge. This metric doesn’t even include idle periods, so the real-world battery life could creep even higher. You can also charge the headset during use, which is always a nice time-saver and a feature more companies should implement. As with most gaming headsets intended for prolonged use, there are some comfort-forward features here, like memory foam padding on the earpads and a light clamping force that shouldn’t squeeze your head like a grape.

All of the components have been designed for self-repair, with replacement parts available. Additionally, Beyerdynamic doesn’t really trade in gimmicks, so there’s no RGB lights or anything like that. The MMX 200 headphones are available today for $250 straight from the company or via Amazon.

While this is Beyerdynamic’s first wireless gaming headset, it’s not the company’s first foray into wireless audio. It released a pair of wireless earbuds last year, called Free Byrd.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/beyerdynamic-releases-its-first-ever-wireless-gaming-headset-172641714.html?src=rss