Technology

Twitter has just delivered its first major business update with new CEO Parag Agrawal at the helm. Its average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) rose to 217 million, a modest increase of 13 percent year over year, but below the 218.6 million some analysts expected, CNBC reports. Overall revenue from 2021 was $5.08 billion, an increase of 37 percent year on year. Although the lines are all pointing in the right direction, Twitter has been hoping to grow far more rapidly than this. By the end of 2023, Twitter has said it hopes to hit 315 million average monetizable daily active users. If it continues to add users at this rate each quarter, it will fall well short of this goal. However, despite the challenges facing Agrawal, the company is sticking with its previous goal. “There are no ch...

The trading price of Dogecoin nemesis Shiba Inu tokens has skyrocketed as the developers behind the cryptocurrency announced its plans to enter the metaverse. “In 2020 alone, the Metaverse was worth approximately $478.7 billion. That’s roughly the same size as the entire home services industry in the United States alone,” the Shiba Inu team remarked. “Like everything Shib does, we will lead this Metaverse sector. At this time, our early phase of development continues for the Shiba Inu Metaverse – Codename: Shiberse.” As for what the “Shiberse” will entail, the team says that investors will soon be able to purchase virtual land, named Shiba Lands, using LEASH, or the Doge Killer coin, and more will be announced as its plans begin to roll out. Since the announcements, the Shiba Inu token’s v...

Nintendo is bringing back some of its classic Wii Sports games in a new game called Nintendo Switch Sports. You’ll be able to play tennis, bowling, and chambara, like what you might remember from the Wii Sports games, but Nintendo is also adding soccer, badminton, and volleyball. Similar to how Wii Sports took advantage of the Wii remote’s motion-tracking technology to follow your tennis swing or when you threw a bowling ball, Nintendo Switch Sports will use the Switch’s detachable Joy-Con controllers to track your movement for playing the game. Nintendo Switch Sports launches April 29th. There will be an online play test ahead of the game’s release on February 18th-20th, though you’ll need an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription to be able to test it. During the test, you’ll be able...

Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced it had finally recovered almost all the Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack with its “largest financial seizure ever.” The DOJ was, however, immediately upstaged — when people discovered that one of the people accused of helping launder billions of dollars of Bitcoin had posted rap videos to the internet. She calls herself the “Crocodile of Wall Street.” I’ve lost track of how many hours I just spent immersing myself in her music, writing, and Content to get an idea of what her deal is. And let’s just say that even her wacky viral videos (which have now largely vanished from her YouTube channel) did not prepare me for the full razzle-dazzle. Anyhow, here’s just a taste of what I found to get us started: That was the longest 30 seconds of ...

New Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy’s first day is not off to a good start. The company, which announced a major leadership shakeup at its Q2 earnings call on Tuesday, held an all-hands meeting meant to welcome McCarthy. Outgoing CEO John Foley was also in attendance. The all-hands was referenced in a blog penned by Foley revealing he was stepping down. While this is par for the course when companies change leadership, CNBC is reporting the meeting was cut short when angry ex-employees — who were just terminated — crashed the party. Citing anonymous sources, the CNBC report says that current and former staffers flung accusations of mismanagement and vented about yesterday’s terminations. As part of cost restructuring measures, Peloton let 2,800 employees go globally. One staffer apparently said...

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch is getting a massive influx of new content, with Nintendo announcing that it’ll be steadily adding 48 remastered courses from previous Mario Kart games to the title over the next two years as part of its new “Booster Course Pass” DLC. Similar to how Nintendo released additional Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC characters, the reprised Mario Kart 8 Deluxe courses will be added in six waves of eight courses each released over the next two years. Given that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe current has 48 courses, the expansion pass will double the number of courses available to players once it finishes up in 2023. The first wave of courses is set to arrive on March 18th, and will include Coconut Mall from Mario Kart Wii, Choco Mountain from Mario Kart 64, and Toky...

AT&T has announced that it’s offering a new tier of its low-cost Access from AT&T plan, which lets eligible customers get “up to 100 Mbps of symmetrical speeds” for $30 per month — a big upgrade from where the 10 or 25 megabits per second for $10 per month the plan used to max out. The $30 price-point may seem like a steep increase, but anyone who’s eligible and applies to the Affordable Connectivity Program can get up to $30 off their internet bill, which would essentially make the highest-tier Access plan free. Of course, the higher speeds are dependent on your address, with AT&T noting on its website that 100 Mbps is only available in limited areas. Your household income will also have to be under a certain amount to be eligible for Access from AT&T plans; for a one-pers...

Sony’s latest PS5 beta, which began rolling out Wednesday, adds support for a new “Hey PlayStation!” voice command you can use to open games, apps, and settings and control movies and songs. I’ve been able to test the new feature, and to my surprise, it actually works quite well, and I could see it being a genuinely useful way to navigate the console’s UI. One thing I was happy to see was that the voice command feature was opt-in — if that holds once the software update is released widely, that means you’ll have to actively choose if you want your PS5 to be listening to your voice. After I installed the beta, I had to dig into the PS5’s settings to a new “Voice Command (Preview)” section to turn it on. When you do, your PS5 will show you instructions on how to prompt the voice command feat...

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, an all-new tablet with a massive 14.6-inch screen, during its Unpacked event on Wednesday. The tablet, which is priced at $1,099.99 USD, was released alongside the S8 Plus and S8 devices, though it is the largest and most feature-packed of the trio. The display enlists an AMOLED screen with a 2,960×1.848-pixel resolution at 240 pixels per inch and 120Hz refresh rate. The Ultra’s screen measures 20% larger than the 12.4-inch screen on Samsung’s Tab S7 Plus and Tab S8 Plus. Additionally, the device is equipped with up to 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, two front-facing cameras and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Gen 1 chip, which is also used in the brand’s S22 phones. The two front-facing cameras, which include a standard wide lens and an ultrawide lens, have ...

Reddit Talk, the platform’s audio-only chatrooms, now support recordings. As outlined in a post on Reddit’s blog, this means you can now listen to previous talks as well as use playback tools that let you jump to certain timestamps, pause / unpause recordings, and fast-forward or rewind them. This should make it even easier for users to record and distribute live podcast-like sessions. Talk is coming to Reddit’s desktop app “later this month.”Image: Reddit Reddit also announced that it’s expanding Talk to the web and is bringing some handy features (that are already available on mobile) along with it. This includes the ability for listeners to raise their hands to speak and a way for moderators to mute users and remove them as speakers. The platform says it’s rolling out Talk for its deskt...

Fresh off of launching the much-anticipated Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Nintendo held its first Direct presentation of 2022. And it was a big one: the livestream was 40 minutes long and featured surprises like a portable take on No Man’s Sky, the return of Super Mario Strikers, and a Wii Sports revival. Oh, and Mario Kart 8 is about to get a whole lot bigger. If you weren’t able to catch the whole thing, here are the most important reveals. [embedded content] Super Mario Strikers is back Mario’s soccer spinoff is back after a long absence. Nintendo revealed Mario Strikers: Battle League, a sequel to the GameCube original, which looks to include the same wacky gameplay that makes it sort of like Mario Kart but for soccer. It also features support for up to eight players on the same console or ...

To close out a presentation that did not feature Mother 3 or Mario Kart 9, Nintendo debuted the trailer for a hotly anticipated Japanese RPG series that hasn’t had a new entry in several years. No, not The Sequel To The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: it’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3. The trailer felt very much like a Xenoblade game, featuring agonized possible 14-year-olds ruminating on the nature of war, weapons accented with neon lights, and lots of characters running in gorgeous valleys with unfathomably large structures in the background. According to Nintendo’s press release, “Players will step into the roles of protagonists Noah and Mio amid turmoil between the hostile nations of Keves and Agnus.” Though the trailer didn’t showcase any combat, the press release highlights that there...