1. Uber Announces New Layoffs Amidst Financial Difficulties
Uber recently announced another round of layoffs this Tuesday. The multinational transportation network company plans to let go of 435 people from its product and engineering team, or 8% of the total workforce.
The layoff was the result of Uber’s poor second quarter performance, which included around $5.2 billion in net losses.
“While certainly painful in the moment, especially for those directly affected, we believe that this will result in a much stronger technical organization,” an Uber spokesperson said.
The planned layoffs will not only affect Uber personnel in the United States, however. Regional offices in Europe, Africa, the Middle and the Asia-Pacific region, will also be affected.
According to Uber, 85% of the personnel to be laid off are in the United States, while 10% are in the Asia Pacific region. The remaining 5% will come from Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20859413/uber-job-layoffs-announcement-engineering-product-profit
2. Nvidia fights AMD’s GPUs with the GTX 1160 Super
According to rumors, Nvidia is planning to launch a new and improved variant of the GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. Although the company has yet to release any concrete information about their new product, it is expected to have a transfer rate of around 14Gbps as well as better memory. It is also expected to cost around $300.
Nvidia’s new graphics card is also rumored to be part of their new strategy against AMD. When released, the new GTX 1660 is expected to compete with AMD’s Radeon RX590 and other similar graphics cards. More importantly, it will also draw in the ray-tracing fans, which AMD does not seem interested in, and allow Nvidia to take back certain portions of the budget gamer market.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/rumors-suggest-nvidia-release-geforce-gtx-1660-super-gpu/
3. German Government to Invest in IBM’s Quantum Computing Research
IBM is about to receive $717 million dollars worth of investment from the German Government. IBM announced that it will install a new “Q System One” quantum computer (the first of its kind in Europe) at one of their German facilities, and will partner with the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research institute to ‘support the transition of quantum technologies from basic research into market ready applications.’
Quantum Computing has the potential to be used for molecular modeling, physics, machine learning, chemical simulations and data recovery. According to reports, the goal of the new partnership is to develop a ‘research community’ for quantum computing in Germany, and to act as a catalyst for “Europe’s innovation landscape and research capabilities.”
4. Facebook and Google’s Growing Anti-Trust Problems
Last Friday, the Attorney General of New York announced that she and seven other states as well as the District of Columbia will join together to launch new antitrust investigations into Facebook.
The announcement was soon followed by 50 attorney generals from 48 states, including Puerto Rico and DC, announcing that they will soon join Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in investigating Google.
Presently, two of the biggest tech platforms in the world are now facing 2 Congressional, 6 state and local, and 8 federal anti-trust investigations. While the reasons behind the investigations may vary(political bias and privacy issues among them), anti-competitive behavior seems to be the unifying theme for most of parties.
Facebook and Google have been accused of bias and anti-trust violations before, from accusations of Russian collusion to political censorship, and they have managed to survive such accusations relatively unscathed. However, these recent developments may prove devastating for the two tech giants.
