Author: pekandesigns

South Park famously annoyed the world by triggering Echo and Google Home devices with familiar wake words. When Amazon’s at the wheel, however, the company is able to ensure that Alexa stays quiet using a method called acoustic fingerprinting. In the lead-up to the Super Bowl, the company’s offered a (relatively) easy-to-understand breakdown of why […]

Foxconn is even more aggressively cutting back its growth ambitions around the world than we previously thought. In addition to the news yesterday that Foxconn intends to scale back its plans for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, leaving that state in something of a lurch, we have now learned that the Taiwanese company intends […]

Intel, it seems, didn’t have to look too hard to find its new CEO. Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. Swan, the seventh CEO in Intel’s 50-year history, will also be joining the chipmaker’s board of directors. Prior to this gig, Swan had been Intel’s CFO, […]

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video. Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial […]

On the back of a strong showing for portfolio company Spotify going public last year and several biggies like Airbnb also slated to list very soon, VC firm TCV has announced its latest and biggest-ever fund, the $3 billion TCV X, which has now closed and will start getting invested “soon,” the company tells me. […]

China’s internet firms are getting pally with giant state-owned automakers as they look to deploy their artificial intelligence and cloud computing services across traditional industries. Ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, which owns Uber China, announced earlier this week a new joint venture with state-owned BAIC. Hot on the heels came another entity set up between Tencent and the […]

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volume, will now let you spend money you don’t have after it added support for credit cards from Visa and Mastercard. Credit card usage in crypto is controversial. Aside from the risk — ask anyone who bought crypto last year… — top exchanges have gone back and […]

Social media platforms are being urged to be far more transparent about how their services operate and to make “anonymised high-level data” available to researchers so the technology’s effects on users — and especially on children and teens — can be better understood. The calls have been made in a report by the UK parliament’s […]

We’ve written extensively about LG’s struggling mobile business, which has suffered at the hands of aggressive Chinese Android makers, and now that unit has dragged its parent company into posting its first quarterly loss for two years. The Korean electronics giant is generally in good health — it posted a $2.4 billion profit for 2018 […]