Month: January 2023
Amazon is closing its AmazonSmile charity platform
Amazon is shutting down its AmazonSmile charity program next month. The closure coincides with a variety of cost-cutting efforts announced by the e-commerce giant that includes laying off thousands of employees. The AmazonSmile program functioned like an overlay for the standard Amazon site, allowing users to shop as normal, but…
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Thursday’s top tech news: what does ‘funding secured’ mean anyway?
If the CEO of a publicly traded company were to tweet that they planned to take their company private, and said they had “funding secured,” you’d be forgiven for assuming that, well, they planned to take their company private and had secured funding to make it happen. “Not so fast,”…
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The Facebook Portal Died. This Is How It Almost Lived.
In November, Meta announced it would be discontinuing the Portal, its stand-alone video-chatting device. The decision came as Meta announced its first-ever mass layoffs amid a falling stock price and concern over its ambitions in the metaverse. Over the years, BuzzFeed News’ coverage of Meta and Facebook has been unflinchingly…
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This Little-Known AirPods Feature Allowed My 95-Year-Old Grandfather To Hear Me Again
As he neared 90, Aba’s world shrank. He spent his days reading and watching TV, listening to the sound through a pair of oversized wireless headphones over his ears with the volume cranked to the max. He still wore his hearing aids, but as his ears got worse and worse,…
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Amazon’s OSHA fine for warehouse safety violations could be about $60K
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has issued a citation against Amazon, alleging that the company violated safety laws and failed to keep workers in three warehouses safe. The regulator has also proposed $60,269 in penalties related to the violations — a drop in the bucket for a…
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Ted Lasso’s third season kicks off this spring
Apple announced that one of its biggest streaming series will return later this year. While we don’t have a specific date just yet, Apple says that season 3 of Ted Lasso will premiere on Apple TV Plus in the spring of 2023. We don’t know much about the new season…
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