other stuff
What else happened this week? Here’s some of the stuff people were reading about most:
WWDC rumbles: Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference kicks off on Monday, June 6, and rumors about what might be announced are already spreading fast. Brian Heater has a roundup covering what he expects to see at the event, and Sarah Perez took a deep dive into what’s likely changing in iOS.
Sheryl Sandberg steps down at Meta: After 14 years in the role, Sheryl Sandberg will no longer be the COO of the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta chief growth officer Javier Olivan will shift into the COO role; Sandberg will remain on Meta’s board of directors.
Amazon kills the Cloud Cam: Back in 2017, Amazon launched a little smart home camera called the Cloud Cam. Then it pretty much immediately bought two smart camera makers — Blink and Ring. Half a decade later, Amazon is ditching Cloud Cam in favor of the latter two. Cloud Cams will stop working at the end of this year; existing Cloud Cam users will get a free Blink Mini camera as a replacement, along with a free year of the Blink Plus plan. If you’re using a Cloud Cam, make sure you back up your saved videos before they disappear in December.
Amazon experiments with “invite-based” ordering to fight scalpers: If you’re a normal person just trying to casually buy something like a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X on Amazon, you’ve probably felt the disappointment of being beat to the punch by a billion bots. Amazon announced this week that it’ll roll out “invite-based” orders for select high-demand items; you’ll “request an invitation” and then Amazon will check things like purchase history/account creation date to determine who gets first dibs.
More layoffs: It was yet another brutal week of tech layoffs — 8% of Carbon Health; 14% of Loom; 10% of the Winklevoss twins’ crypto platform Gemini; 25% of social app IRL; 10% of TomTom and more.
And Tesla, too: First came word that Elon Musk will require “everyone at Tesla” to be in the office (rather than remote) for a “minimum of 40 hours” per week. Then came word of a company-wide hiring freeze, and plans to cut up to 10% of Tesla’s salaried workforce.
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