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Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been brainstorming ideas for what could be the next Twitter.
Among the ideas Meta’s workers discussed during a virtual brainstorming session was an expanded rollout of a feature called Instagram Notes, where people can share short messages on their photo-sharing site with their followers and friends. Others said Meta should build a text-focused app using Instagram’s technology or add another feed to Instagram.
“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in a post seen by The New York Times. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”
A race is on to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on chaos surrounding its new owner, Elon Musk—the tech mogul who bought the social media company for $44 billion in late October. Since then, questions have swirled about how viable Twitter might be as Mr. Musk has laid off thousands of employees, started changing content rules for the platform and proclaimed that the company is so financially fragile that bankruptcy is possible.
Sensing opportunity, all manner of people and companies have jumped in to fill what they say could be an inevitable breach.Apart from employees at Meta, former Twitter workers have begun projects for what they say could be the next Twitter. Start-ups like Post and niche services like Mastodon and Hive Social have also reared their heads, as has the microblogging platform Tumblr.Read more...
Rolls-Royce and European airline easyJet have successfully tested a hydrogen jet engine — a technology that could one day help erase aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The ground test marks “the world’s first run of a modern aero engine on hydrogen,” Rolls-Royce said in a press release yesterday.
Aviation is considered one of the most difficult industries to clean up because it’s much harder to make electric planes than electric vehicles. Batteries charged with renewable solar and wind energy are still too bulky for long flights. So airlines and plane manufacturers are working to develop planes that can run on cleaner fuels like hydrogen, which produces water vapor instead of carbon dioxide when burned.
The two companies used a converted Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A regional aircraft engine for the ground test conducted in the UK. The European Marine Energy Centre produced the fuel for the test at a hydrogen production and tidal test facility on Eday in the UK’s Orkney Islands. Since the hydrogen was made with wind and tidal power, it’s called green hydrogen.
Both Rolls-Royce and easyJet have made company commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and are looking to green hydrogen to help them reach climate goals. But for now, green hydrogen is still in short supply and prohibitively expensive to make. Some governments including the Biden administration have begun to invest heavily in producing more of it.Read more...
If there's one thing that's true about the world we live in today, it's that companies have to keep up with the times. And that means they have to be ready for anything—and everything.
In fact, sustainability challenges executives on several immediate fronts: as concerns from investors, consumers, and employees; as a regulatory issue; and as something integral to both efficiency gains and long-term business value. That's why it's no surprise that the World Economic Forum made the connection between digital technology and corporate sustainability initiatives at COP27.
Quite simply, technology can serve as a force multiplier in the effort to create a greener economy and society. Notable gains are already being made across industries and companies using artificial intelligence (AI) to overcome very real challenges and concretely meet sustainability goals.
83 percent of C-suite leaders and investment professionals expect an increase in shareholder value from environmental, social, and governance programs. Yet companies must also show sustainability’s impact on their company’s bottom line—that is: reporting on how initiatives will improve productivity, reduce costs, increase revenues.All while measuring progress against benchmarks and over time, transparently, to stay credible and accountable to customers and shareholders. It’s a tall order and a global imperative at this point. Read more...
It has been a long time since a software release has consumed the tech community as much as ChatGPT, the latest offering from OpenAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk.
This chatbot, trained on massive pools of data and now able to answer any query you might have, gained more than a million users in less than a week. Post after post on Twitter revealed the inanimate interface crafting eloquent, believable prose on whatever topic was asked of it. Economist Tyler Cowen even got it to write a passable poem in iambic pentameter about economist Thomas Schelling’s theory of deterrence for foreign policy.
ChatGPT is far from perfect. It struggles with facts from time to time—as Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal discovered when he asked it to write his obituary—and The Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost rained on everyone’s parade by observing that the chatbot doesn’t “truly understand the complexity of human language,” ensuring that “any responses it generates are likely to be shallow and lacking in depth and insight.”
But to Bogost’s boss, those imperfections won’t hinder the disruption this technology poses to a key part of the internet: search.
In an enthused video post, Thompson argued the chatbot would resolve most people’s general questions about the world, such that it will quickly overtake Alphabet’s Google algorithm. Rather than “Googling” something and waiting for a variety of ad-supported answers to come back, people will simply ask a chatbot and get an immediate answer.Read more...
Blockchain storage is fast emerging as a credible competitor to the cloud. One definite advantage offered by blockchain is that its distributed nature of storage makes it a more secure form of storage compared to storing your data on the cloud.
But blockchain technology has been continuously plagued by significant energy usage and a large carbon footprint. Cryptocurrency, in particular, has been a sore point with environmentalists. Bitcoin, for instance, is famed for consuming more electricity in a year than entire nations. At a time when a United Nations agency just reported that the last eight years had been the warmest ever recorded in modern times, the future of the energy-intensive blockchain technology may get inextricably linked with its ability to offset its carbon footprint.
With debates raging around responsible consumption, companies, including the historically ESG-resistant FAANG, have now turned around to commit to definite targets around their ESG goals. Morgan Stanley even declared that ESG-focused metrics might dictate the next decade of investment to understand a company's growth potential.
But while investment choices get dictated by ESG metrics, it behooves us to remember that the ethical choice may be easier for some than others. While some of the largest multinational companies like Apple and Google can afford to pivot to ESG with relative ease, the same is not necessarily true for companies focused on blockchain, including even the more prominent players. Read more...
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