Silicon UK Pulse: Your Tech News Update: Episode 28
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse – your roundup of the latest tech news and developments impacting your business for the week ending 01/12/2023.
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse
This is your weekly round-up of the top tech news stories.
Every Friday, Silicon UK surveys the week’s tech news.
Stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your industry or sector.
I’m James Marriott with all the big technology news from the last week.
Welcome to Silicon UK Pulse
I’m James Marriott with all the big technology news from the last week.
Bad news for Elon Musk – it’s reported that X, formerly Twitter, will lose as much as $75m in advertising revenue by the end of the year.
It’s because of the exodus of advertisers on the platform after a row over antisemitic and other right-wing content appearing alongside big name firms.
That led to several pulling their ad spend on the app.
Musk is taking legal action over the initial report which highlighted the trend.
And at an event in New York this week he launched an incredible attack on those advertisers, including some rather rude words we can’t repeat here so I’ll paraphrase slightly
“I don’t want them to advertise. If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money, get lost.”
He also admitted the boycott could kill off the company.
Adobe’s $20bn acquisition of Figma appears to be at risk.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has reached a provisional finding about the troubled purchase.
It says the deal would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.
The CMA had announced in June that it would conduct a phase two investigation of Adobe’s deal to take over the design collaboration firm, announced in September 2022.
The US Justice Department is reportedly also preparing a lawsuit to block the merger.
Some good news for the UK car manufacturing industry this week.
Nissan has revealed a £3bn investment in the UK, as it expands its manufacturing capacity at its Sunderland factory.
The Japanese car maker announced a second and third electric model for UK production – Qashqai, JUKE and LEAF – they’ll all be 100%
The Sunderland site will now be made up of three gigafactories which it said is “great news for Nissan’s 7,000 UK employees and the 30,000 jobs supported in the UK supply chain.”
Amazon is cutting more jobs within its Alexa division.
It’s reported the firm has started laying off “several hundred” people in the department as part of broader belt-tightening measures at the E-commerce giant.
It comes on top of the 27,000 roles already axed over the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been handed a setback by European regulators over its proposed $1.4 billion acquisition of robot vacuum maker iRobot.
The firm signed a deal to buy Roomba robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for $1.7 billion last August.
And despite recent reports that Amazon was set to win unconditional EU antitrust approval, the European Commission has warned the deal could reduce competition in the market and sent them a ‘statement of objections.’
But it’s not all doom and gloom at Amazon – this week it became the latest tech giant to announce an AI chatbot.
It’s called Q and apparently, it’ll help businesses increase productivity by doing things like summarising long documents or group chats.
It’ll also answer customer queries, generate charts and graphs, analyse data, and do some coding as well.
Inactive Google accounts are due to start being deleted from – well, around about now.
Alphabet gave users a deadline of Friday morning to log in, otherwise accounts which have been inactive for at least two years will be deleted.
The move was announced back in May, because of efforts to minimise security threats and hacks.
Multiple alerts have been sent to the secondary email addresses associated with inactive accounts to give them plenty of time to log in or carry out one of a few actions which would trigger a reactivation.
The UK, US and more than a dozen of other countries have signed an agreement to bolster cybersecurity for artificial intelligence.
One US official described the deal as the first detailed international agreement on how to keep AI safe from rogue actors, pushing for companies to create AI systems that are “secure by design.”
The guidelines have been signed by agencies from 18 countries, “to raise the cyber security levels of artificial intelligence and help ensure that it is designed, developed, and deployed securely.”
A digital rights group has filed a complaint about Meta’s subscription plans.
None Of Your Business – or NOYB – has registered its opposition to the plans announced in October.
Users in the EU or EEC can pay between $10 and $13 a month to remove ads on Facebook and Instagram.
But the group says it opposes the concept and the cost, mainly on the basis of users having to pay to avoid being tracked for personal ads.
Uber is opening up its platform to black cabs in London next year.
Hackney carriages as they’re officially known have long been in dispute with the app.
At the moment, black cabs are the only vehicles that can pick up passengers from London streets or taxi ranks. They can also be booked via other apps – but not Uber.
Now though, that is changing in 2024 – but the announcement was reportedly dismissed by a group representing the majority of London’s black cab drivers, who claim there’s no demand for the move.
And it’s not often that footballer Cristiano Ronaldo would crop up in this bulletin – but this week he’s been in the tech headlines for all the wrong reasons.
He’s facing a class action lawsuit in the US for his promotion of cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
Claimants say his endorsement led to them losing money and are seeking damages of over £1bn.
