Sunday, February 2, 2020
Appliances, gadgets and more: All that has become cheaper and costlier in Budget
Success kid’s mom won’t stand for Steve King’s “meme” ad
Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) wanted supporters to fund his memes—but he may end up paying for them instead. On Monday, King and his campaign for reelection to the House of Representatives received a cease-and-desist letter from the attorneys of Laney Griner, the mother of 2011’s most ubiquitous meme, Success Kid: a baseball-shirted cherub clasping a fistful of sand with a look of utter triumph. King’s campaign had used the famous image of Griner’s son for an ad, emblazoning it with the phrase “FUND OUR MEMES!!!” and superimposing the baby over an image of the US Capitol. As soon as she found out, Griner made it clear she would not stand for it.
She may not have to. Even though the point of a meme is that it gets reused and remixed and reappropriated, and Success Kid in particular has been memed across the world for almost a decade, Griner could have the law on her side. “The question everyone is going to be asking is, can you copyright a meme? But that’s not the right question to ask,” says Derigan Silver, who researches internet law at the University of Denver. “[King] is using the original picture of this kid, which is clearly copyrightable.” To that end, Griner does, in fact, hold the copyright, and she wouldn’t be the first person to try to enforce their copyright of an image-turned-meme. Matt Furie, the artist behind the infamous Pepe the Frog meme, has taken around 75 people and entities to task (or court) for reproducing Pepe’s image without his permission.
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Poco X2 looks identical to the Redmi K30 in latest teaser video
Poco X2 is all set to be launched in India on February 4. Leading up to the launch, the company is revealing its features bit by bit. Poco X2 was recently confirmed to support 27W fast charging technology. Now, the company has posted a new teaser video showing the design of the upcoming smartphone. It indicates that Poco X2 may, in fact, be a Redmi K30.
The latest development comes from Poco India Twitter account that posted a teaser video revealing the phone in purple colour. It showcases a fingerprint scanner built in the power button. Plus, a slight hue of the back cameras can also be noticed. The arrangement and design seems similar to that of Redmi K30. All of this hints that the Redmi K30 may arrive in India as the Poco X2.
Poco has already confirmed that Poco X2 will come with a 120Hz refresh rate and feature a USB Type-C port, 3.5mm audio jack, and a side-mounted fingerprint sensor. If it turns out to be a rebranded Redmi K30 4G, then Poco X2 will feature a 6.67-inch full-HD+ display with a 20:9 aspect ratio and dual hole-punch selfie cameras, and it will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G chipset.
On the optics front, Poco X2 is touted to sport a quad rear camera with 64MP main camera, an 8MP shooter and two 2MP sensors. The notch could house 20MP + 2MP selfie shooters.
Poco X2 could pack a 4500mAh battery and have features like NMF and IR blaster
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Poco X2 Launch Date, Samsung Galaxy A51 on Sale, and More News This Week
Saturday, February 1, 2020
UK startup Exscientia and a Japanese pharmaceutical firm claim to have created the first human trial-ready drug using AI, which took under a year to develop (Rebecca Heilweil/Vox)
UK startup Exscientia and a Japanese pharmaceutical firm claim to have created the first human trial-ready drug using AI, which took under a year to develop — An OCD drug created via AI will be tested on humans. — The British startup Exscientia claims it has developed …
WeWork names commercial real estate veteran Sandeep Mathrani as its new CEO; SoftBank's Marcelo Claure will continue as WeWork's executive chairman (Peter Eavis/New York Times)
WeWork names commercial real estate veteran Sandeep Mathrani as its new CEO; SoftBank's Marcelo Claure will continue as WeWork's executive chairman — Sandeep Mathrani, a senior real estate executive, will take over the operator of shared office space, which was on the brink of financial collapse last year.
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Report: WeWork has a new CEO and he’s a real estate — not a tech — exec
If WeWork wanted to cement the impression that it no longer strives to be viewed as a tech company but rather as a real estate giant focused on leasing space to millennials and enterprise customers, it would probably choose a veteran from the real estate world.
That’s just what it has done, too, according to a new story from the WSJ that say the company, which was famously forced to pull its initial public offering last fall, has settled on Sandeep Mathrani as its new top banana.
Mathrani, has spent the last 1.5 years as the CEO of Brookfield Properties’ retail group and as a vice chairman of Brookfield Properties. Before joining the Chicago-based company, he spent eight years as the CEO of General Growth Properties. It was one of the largest mall operators in the U.S. until Brookfield acquired it for $9.25 billion in cash in 2018.
Mathrani also spent eight years as an executive vice president with Vornado Realty Trust, a publicly traded real estate company with a market cap of $12.5 billion. (Brookfield is slightly smaller, with a market cap of roughly $8 billion.)
Mathrani will reportedly relocate to New York from Miami, where according to public records, he owns at least one high-rise apartment that he acquired last year.
He’ll be reporting to Marcelo Claure, the SoftBank operating chief who was appointed executive chairman of WeWork in October in order to help salvage what Claure has himself said is at least an $18.5 billion bet on WeWork at this point by SoftBank.
Specifically, Claure told nervous employees at an all-hands meeting shortly after his appointment, “The size of the commitment that SoftBank has made to this company in the past and now is $18.5 billion. To put the things in context, that is bigger than the GDP of my country where I came from [Bolivia]. That’s a country where there’s 11 million people.”
Claure — who earlier spent four years as the CEO of SoftBank-backed Sprint — was reportedly trying to hire T-Mobile CEO John Legere for the CEO’s post. Legere later communicated through sources that he had no plans to leave T-Mobile, yet just days later, in mid-November, Legere, who joined T-Mobile in 2012, announced that he’s stepping down as CEO after all, though he will remain chairman of the company. (According to the Verge, his contract is up April 30.)
Sprint and T-Mobile were expected to merge, though 13 states, led by the attorneys general of New York and California, are suing to block the deal.
Either way, Mathrani is a stark contrast to WeWork’s cofounder and longtime CEO Adam Neumann, who was pressure to resign from the company after his sweeping vision for it as a tech company that would enable customers to seamlessly shift from one WeWork location to another — paying for ever increasing software and services as monthly or yearly subscribers — was met with extreme skepticism by public market investors.
Indeed, though SoftBank marked up the company’s value over a number of private funding rounds to a brow-raising $47 billion, public investors began raising questions about its real value — and WeWork’s governance — as soon as WeWork publicly released the paperwork for its initial public offering.
Between the in-depth look its S-1 provided into the company’s spiraling losses, the degree of control held by Neumann (not fully understood previously), and a series of unflattering reports about his leadership style, including beginning with the WSJ, it didn’t take long before the company was forced to abandon its IPO dreams.
No doubt it’s now Mathrani’s job to eventually resuscitate those.
According to the WSJ, SoftBank has already established a five-year business plan that it expects will get the company to profitability and allow it to be cash-flow positive by some time next year. Part of that plan clearly involved layoffs; it cut 2,400 employees in late November, shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. It has also been selling off companies that were acquired at Neumann’s direction but are seen as non-core assets. What WeWork does not intend to curtail, reportedly, are its efforts to open new locations, even if it acquires them at a slower pace than in previous years.
Govt's tax move on e-commerce cos likely to raise compliance costs
West Virginia governor to sign a bill that would allow voters with physical disabilities to vote via smartphone in 2020, becoming the first US state to do so (Kevin Collier/NBC News)
West Virginia governor to sign a bill that would allow voters with physical disabilities to vote via smartphone in 2020, becoming the first US state to do so — Cybersecurity experts have long railed against voting apps, saying that any kind of online voting unnecessarily increases security risks.
Meta launches quote post controls for all Threads users, who can allow quotes from everyone on Threads, only the people they follow, or disable quote posts (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch : Meta launches quote post controls for all Threads users, who can allow quotes from everyone on Threads, only th...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Andrew Tarantola / Engadget : An adapted excerpt from the book “Your Computer Is on Fire”, on how voice assistants like Siri and Alexa al...
