Technology

A San Francisco federal appeals court upheld a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to allow Impossible Foods to use “heme,” the additive the company says makes its products “taste like meat.” Had Impossible Foods lost this legal battle, it could have dealt a heavy blow to the company. Genetically engineered heme is what sets its products apart from other competitors like Beyond Meat that don’t use the ingredient. Heme is what sets its products apart from other competitors The FDA used a weaker legal standard than it should have to approve the use of heme, the nonprofit Center for Food Safety argued in a lawsuit it filed last year. It said the FDA made its decision based on safety standards for food additives rather than on standards for color additives, which stipulate that there ...

UK-based EV startup Arrival is working with Uber to develop an electric car that will be “purpose-built” for ride-hailing. Arrival plans to put the car into production in late 2023 and says it will not be exclusive to Uber. Instead, the startup says the goal is to create an affordable vehicle that would appeal to the millions of ride-hailing drivers around the world. It’s another vote of confidence in Arrival, which just became a publicly traded company in March after merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Founded in 2015, Arrival is also developing electric delivery vans (with UPS as a customer) and buses. It also has backing from Hyundai and Kia. Arrival and Uber released a handful of renderings of the new car’s interior and said a final design will be revealed by t...

I. At 8AM PT on Friday, a bleary-eyed Basecamp CEO Jason Fried gathered his remote workforce together on Zoom to apologize. Four days earlier, he had thrown the company into turmoil by announcing that “societal and political discussions” would no longer be allowed on the company’s internal chat forums. In his blog post, Fried said the decision stemmed from the fact that “today’s social and political waters are especially choppy,” and that internal discussions of those issues was “not healthy” and “hasn’t served us well.” The public reaction had been furious, and Fried said he was sorry for the way the new policies had been rolled out — but not for the policies themselves. Behind the scenes, Fried had been dealing with an employee reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaini...

Epic Games launched its courtroom war against Apple in an extremely on-brand way: with CEO Tim Sweeney describing the metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. It’s “a real-time, computer-powered 3D entertainment and social medium in which real people would go into a 3D simulation together and have experiences of all sorts,” Sweeney explained to a courtroom partitioned by plastic barriers and a series of teleconferencing hotlines. Sweeney called Fortnite ‘a phenomenon that transcends gaming’ The metaverse is Sweeney’s chosen metaphor for Fortnite, the battle royale game that Apple banned from its iOS App Store last year. Epic sued in retaliation, and today, both companies delivered opening statements before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Epic put Sweeney on the stand for hours of e...

Both Apple and Epic have released their opening presentations on why they feel they should win this week’s trial, which is set to determine the future of the App Store. In the documents, which you can look through below, each company lays out its case. The lawsuit started when Apple removed Epic Games’ Fortnite from the App Store after Epic bypassed Apple’s system for in-app purchases. But it’s turned into a much deeper examination of Apple’s walled-garden approach to technology, and whether some of the walls the company puts up might violate antitrust law. We took a deeper look at the companies’ legal strategies in advance of the trial, but you can see the same arguments play out in these presentations. Epic uses metaphors of brick walls and gas stations to argue that Apple’s control over...

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates have announced that they’ll be ending their marriage after 27 years together, explaining in a joint statement that they “no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.” Bill Gates is best known as the founder of Microsoft, who leveraged his fortune at the helm of that company working together with Melinda Gates to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. The Gates Foundation has since grown to become one of — if not the largest — charitable foundations in the world, with an endowment of almost $50 billion. Bill had previously stepped away from his positions at Microsoft as CEO (in 2000), a full-time employee (in 2008), and a member of the company’s board in order, he claims, to better focus on philanthropy. Meli...

I know there’s a ton of other Apple news happening today, but if you’re reading it on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch (okay, that last one may be a stretch), you should probably pause and update that device — today’s update fixes a security issue that Apple says may have been actively exploited. The updates contained in iOS / iPadOS 14.5.1, macOS 11.3.1, and watchOS 7.4.1 are meant to fix arbitrary code execution exploits present in WebKit, Apple’s framework that renders most of the web content you see on your device (unless you’re using, say, Chrome or Firefox on Mac). In normal language, the updates patch a hole that let malicious websites run unchecked code on your device, so it’s not the type of update you want to put off. If you have an older device, such as an iPhone 5 or 6, iPad...

Amazon made history as the first all-digital streamer to acquire exclusive rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, and now the NFL has announced that Amazon will be streaming games sooner than expected — starting with the 2022 season. The NFL’s previous announcement set the start of Amazon’s exclusivity in 2023. Now Amazon gets its exclusive rights even sooner and for even longer thanks to a new 11-year contract matching the NFL’s other partners, including CBS, NBC (and Peacock), and Fox. That means 2021 will mark the final season with Fox broadcasting Thursday Night Football. One important note: Amazon’s exclusivity doesn’t extend to local markets. You should still be able to watch Thursday Night Football on an over-the-air broadcast if your team is playing, according to CNBC. Amazon...

PlayStation is now partnering with Discord, the popular online communication service, with a promise to “bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year.” Details on what that would actually entail are slim, and Sony’s announcement just says that the two companies are “hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network.” Whether that means a full-fledged Discord app coming to PlayStation consoles or a more limited integration (like connecting PSN and Discord accounts to more easily chat with friends off platform) has yet to be announced. As part of the new partnership, Sony is also investing an unspecified amount of money into Discord as part of its Series H investment round as a minorit...

An internal presentation at Epic Games showed ambitious promotional plans for the game, including a basketball mini-game and a planned “Party Royale” featuring Zion Williamson and LeBron James. Made public as part of the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial, the document comes from a quarterly business review performed in June 2020. In addition to detailing the game’s revenue and promotional outlook, the presentation lays out a new kind of “experimental” venture to be built inside of Fortnite, including plans to implement a basketball mini-game as part of a broader NBA partnership. One slide describes the project as “a Fortnite version of arcade basketball,” which would allow players to take to the courts as an alternative to the traditional Battle Royale. A subsequent slide teases the release of t...

After a meteoric rise to popularity in 2018, Fortnite generated more than $5 billion in its first year for Epic Games, new financial documents reveal. The document, made public as part of Epic’s court battle with Apple over the latter’s App Store practices, shows that the game brought in more than $9 billion total for Epic in 2018 and 2019. The document doesn’t break down how much Epic specifically profited from Fortnite, but the company reported more than $5.5 billion in profit from the two-year period. In the document, the company provided predictions for 2020, but since Epic doesn’t usually publicly provide financial statements, it’s hard to tell how accurate the predictions ended up being. The revenue from Fortnite far outshone any other businesses that Epic ran at the time — “other ga...