ShinyShiny snippets: Tech giants announce disappointing financial results
Three of Silicon Valley’s largest companies posted disappointing financial results on Thursday, compounding concerns about a slowdown in the tech sector. Recession fears have hit both corporate and consumer spending globally, leading to the likes of Apple, Alphabet and Amazon all signalling a tough recovery from the highs of 2021. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported subdued quarterly revenues as spending on digital advertising was reduced amid economic uncertainty. Revenue from Google’s advertising business, which includes Search and YouTube, dropped from £52bn to £48bn. Shares in the company fell by more than 5% in after-hours trading. Sky News
Samsung Display looks to be going all in on QD-OLED displays, after it was revealed that the manufacturer is set to increase its production of panels featuring the tech by a massive 50%. According to think tank UBI Research (via OLED-info), Samsung Display will be increasing the number of QD-OLED panels it produces from 30,000 monthly units currently to 45,000 in 2024. This is in stark contrast to LG Display, which makes the traditional OLED panel found in practically all the best OLED TVs available today, which was reported to have halted investment in production improvements in 2023.
Billionaire Bill Gates has said he would rather pay for vaccines than travelling to Mars, which he does not think is a good use of money. “It’s actually quite expensive to go to Mars. You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 (£814) per life saved,” he told the BBC. “And so [that] just kind of grounds you, as in – don’t go to Mars.” Fellow entrepreneur Elon Musk has said he wants to colonise Mars, while Jeff Bezos has also joined the “space race”. SpaceX, the rocket company co-founded by Mr Musk in 2002, has made it an ultimate goal to send crewed flights to Mars and eventually colonise the Red Planet. BBC
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, shocked hi-tech professionals at a major cybersecurity convention in Tel Aviv on Wednesday when he revealed that the opening part of his speech was written by artificial intelligence software. In a recorded video greeting for Cybertech Global Tel Aviv 2023, Mr Herzog said: “I am truly proud to be the president of a country that is home to such a vibrant and innovative hi-tech industry. “Over the past few decades, Israel has consistently been at the forefront of technological advancement, and our achievements in the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data are truly impressive. Sky News
Netflix has mistakenly launched a set of guidelines for cracking down on password sharing to global users. The streaming service said the guidelines being trialled in Chile, Peru and Costa Rica had been posted accidentally across its help centre pages including in the US on Wednesday, but had since been taken down. “For a brief time yesterday, a help center article containing information that is only applicable to Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru went live in other countries. We have since updated it.” Since last year Netflix has been trialling “paid sharing” in the three countries where an account holder pays for an extra person, located outside the account holder’s home, to access the service. The Guardian
