Technology

Warner Music Group is partnering with The Sandbox to bring live concerts and music experiences to the metaverse. The Sandbox, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, announced on Thursday that the new venture, called Warner Music Group LAND, will be a “combination of musical theme park and concert venue.” It will feature concerts and music experiencing featuring WMG’s global roster of artists and create new streams of revenue for the music giant. “Our partnership with The Sandbox adds a new layer of possibility in the metaverse with the ownership of virtual real estate,” said Oana Ruxandra, chief digital officer and EVP of business development at Warner Music Group. “As a first-mover, Warner Music has secured the equivalent of beachfront property in the metaverse. On the LAND, we’ll develop persis...

Reddit appears to be testing out a new feature that will soon allow its users to set an NFT as their own profile picture. The update is similar to when Twitter announced earlier this month that it would launch NFT profile pictures. TechCrunch reported that the feature will be similar to Twitter’s where the photos of the NFT itself would provide users information on the digital piece itself. Reddit provided a statement to TechCrunch explaining that the company is still in the very early stages of its NFT testing phase and that it has not yet been made available to the public users. “We’re always exploring ways to provide value for users and communities on Reddit. At the moment we’re testing the ability to use NFTs as profile pictures (avatars) and verify ownership. It’s a small, internal te...

Tesla’s Cybertruck and Roadster will be delayed to “hopefully next year,” the company’s CEO Elon Musk said in an earnings call Wednesday. The announcement confirms earlier reports that the electric pickup truck would miss its earlier production date of late 2022. “If we were to introduce new vehicles, our total vehicle output will decrease,” Musk said. “We will not be introducing new vehicle models this year.” When asked about what else is holding back the Cybertruck besides battery production, Musk said that the pricing and what people are willing to pay for the included tech is the main issue “How do we make the Cybertruck affordable?” he said. The Cybertruck originally had a starting price of $39,900 at its unveiling event in 2019. Musk was also asked about the availability of a $25,000...

Netflix keeps getting more expensive — and HBO seems to think that’s great news for its own business. During the earnings call for HBO Max parent AT&T on Wednesday, the company’s chief executive John Stankey said the higher price of competitors will help HBO grow in the US. “We said the market was going to come to us on pricing, and lo and behold, we are no longer the high-priced offer in the market,” Stankey said. “The nice part about that is we think it’ll allow us to have domestic growth as we move forward.” While he didn’t specifically cite Netflix, the company recently raised its prices across all of its plans, bumping its popular standard plan to $15.50 from $14 per month. Its 4K plan, meanwhile, now costs $20 per month. That means Netflix now outprices most major on-demand strea...

Samsung Electronics broke both its quarterly and annual records for revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021, making 13.87 trillion won (~$11.5 billion) in operating profit off 76.57 trillion won (~$63.6 billion) in revenue in the three-month period. The full-year numbers were 51.63 trillion won ($42.9 billion) in operating profit and 279.6 trillion won (~$232.4 billion) in revenue. Samsung attributes the 24-percent year-on-year revenue growth to increased sales of consumer products like premium smartphones, TVs, and appliances. The more profitable semiconductor business drove operating profit growth of 52 percent year on year, despite supply chain issues limiting production of RAM and flash storage. Looking to 2022, Samsung expects further growth in its mobile business with new flagship phon...

Small businesses will soon be able to use iPhones to accept payments without the need for Square-style extra hardware, according to a Bloomberg report. The feature has been anticipated since Apple bought contactless payment startup Mobeewave in 2020, and Bloomberg now says it could be coming via a software update “in the coming months.” Mobeewave previously worked with Samsung on similar NFC functionality, trialling a system called Samsung POS in the startup’s home country of Canada in 2019 before launching it worldwide. Samsung POS enabled Samsung phones to accept payments directly from contactless cards and NFC payment services like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay. Bloomberg’s report says it’s unclear if Mobeewave’s technology will be branded as part of the Apple Pay service, nor ...

Apple has identified and is rolling out a fix for the bug that intermittently prevented third-party apps from syncing in iCloud (via 9to5Mac). In a response to a developer on Apple’s community forum, Apple says it has “investigated this issue on the CloudKit backend, and have implemented a fix.” The company still didn’t specify exactly what went wrong — it said the errors “resemble request-throttling that may be affecting a specific user, or the container as a whole,” and vaguely blamed “an underlying issue” for causing the widespread syncing problems. Some users received a “Request failed with HTTP status code 503” error code As 9to5Mac reports, developers have been dealing with this issue since November, which hasn’t been publicly acknowledged by Apple until now. Developers note that the...

Though director Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth from 1976 was itself an adaptation of Walter Tevis’ sci-fi novel of the same name, David Bowie’s performance in the cinematic adaptation has become so iconic that Titan Comics plans to lead with it in its upcoming graphic novelization from writer Dan Watters and artist Dev Pramanik. Like the film before it, Titan’s The Man Who Fell to Earth will tell the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, a humanoid alien with Bowie’s signature heterochromatic eyes who comes to Earth on a desperate mission in search of water that his home planet desperately needs. In a press release about the new book, Watters reflected on how the original story was always a rumination on humanity’s relationship with Earth’s natural resources, and how he plans to revisit...

Brussels-based electric bike maker Cowboy now has an additional $80 million in funding to help fuel its expansion into the US and beyond. The company has raised over $120 million since its founding in 2017, putting it on track to “reach over 100,000 riders by 2023,” according to a press release announcing the new funding round. The capital injection propels Cowboy into the ranks of a select few boutique e-bike companies like Seattle-based Rad Power and Amsterdam-based VanMoof, who are riding a tidal wave of investment after interest in e-bikes exploded globally during pandemic lockdowns. In September, VanMoof announced that it was the “most funded e-bike company in the world” with a $128 million investment round that brought its total funding to over $182 million since its founding in 2009...

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) is moving forward with unionization efforts at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse after having “reached a sufficient showing of interest” to hold an election, according to National Labor Relations Board spokesperson Kayla Blado. The NLRB says that it’s scheduled a hearing for February 16th, after which the specifics and date for the election will be decided. This is only the second time Amazon’s warehouse workers have made it to this point in the unionization process, as Vice reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley pointed out on Twitter. On Wednesday, the ALU tweeted that its petition had been accepted and that “the fight is just beginning.” It’s been working to unionize Amazon workers in New York for a while: in October 2021, it filed with the NLRB to hold a union election for Ama...

Discord is experiencing a widespread outage, preventing many users from connecting to the communications app. The outage started at around 2:45PM ET and prevents users from joining calls or participating in text chats. “We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP,” says the official Discord Twitter account. Discord is used widely by the gaming community and currently has 150 million monthly active users. This latest outage appears to be affecting most users, with widespread reports of issues even connecting to the service. Some Discord users currently logged into the service may be able to continue to use text chat, or participate in calls. In a message in the Discord client, the company says: We have identified the underlying issue with the ...

On Tuesday, Apple quietly launched a Personal Safety User Guide to help “anyone who is concerned about or experience technology-enabled abuse, stalking or harassment.” The guide is a resource hub to help people figure out what their options are if they wish to remove someone’s access to shared information, as well as personal safety features available across the Apple ecosystem. Most notably, it includes a “Stay safe with AirTag and other Find My accessories” page at a time when an increasing number of people have come forward about being stalked with the devices. As pointed out by 9to5Mac, the hub is mostly repackaging a data privacy guide that was first published about a year ago. Overall, it’s a good thing to create an easily accessible resource to help people keep their information saf...