Overwatch hero Jesse McCree has a new name, and, no, it’s not Deadeye Dave. As promised, Blizzard has renamed the gunslinger in the aftermath of his real-life namesake leaving the studio back in August. As of October 26th, McCree will be known as Cole Cassidy.
“To make the new Overwatch better — to make things right — he had to be honest with his team and himself.” Blizzard said in a tweet. “The cowboy he was rode into the sunset, and Cole Cassidy faced the world at dawn.”
The real Jesse McCree left the studio after the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard for fostering a “frat boy” workplace. While not directly named in the complaint, McCree reportedly took part in the infamous "Cosby Suite" where Blizzard employees, including former World of Warcraft creative director Alex Afrasiabi, allegedly harassed women. When it first announced the name change, Blizzard said it wanted to find one that better represented Overwatch’s ideals. It also promised it would no longer name in-game characters after employees.
Alongside the name change, Blizzard is testing two potential changes to Cassidy’s kit. It may tweak his Deadeye ultimate to make it more deadly and allow players to use his Combat Roll in midair. The latter change should help with avoiding vertical knockback abilities from heroes like Doomfist and Wrecking Ball. You can try out the tweaks by launching Overwatch’s Experimental mode.
Facebook, ever on the search for ways to monetize its apps, recently introduced Catalogs and a basic cart to WhatsApp so users could shop directly from their chats. Now, the company is refining that process with the addition of Collections, essentially categorized lists that make it easier for WhatsApp users to find products.
With the new feature, businesses can now "organize items in their catalogs by category so customers no longer have to scroll through long lists of items to find what they’re looking for," WhatsApp said. From a user perspective, you'll now see categories for "men’s clothes, women’s clothes, shirts, pants" and more rather than just a list of products. As before, you can access a company's catalog through a sent link or shopping button in their header.
WhatsApp noted that the app has become more popular for shopping in Brazil and India since COVID-19 started. Facebook and WhatsApp have a mixed record in developing countries, however — Brazil, for example, suspended WhatsApp's fledgling mobile payment system late last year.
The new feature is now live in time for the holiday season. Businesses interested in using it can learn how to do it using the video supplied by WhatsApp, above.
Amazon is the Standard Oil of the 21st century. Its business operations and global reach dwarf those of virtually every other company on the planet — and exceed the GDP of more than a few countries — illustrating the vital importance innovation has on the modern economy. In his latest book, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society, author Azeem Azhar examines how the ever-increasing pace of technological progress is impacting, influencing — and often rebuilding — our social, political and economic mores from the ground up.
In 2020, Amazon turned twenty-six years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213 billion, it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Gruppe, America’s Costco, and every British retailer. Only America’s Walmart, with more than half a trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon was, by this time, far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was more than just an online shop, however. Its huge operations in areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media, and hardware added a further $172 billion in sales.
At the heart of Amazon’s success is an annual research and development budget that reached a staggering $36 billion in 2019, and which is used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum leaves other companies — and many governments — behind. It is not far off the UK government’s annual budget for research and development. The entire US government’s federal R&D budget for 2018 was only $134 billion.
Amazon spent more on R&D in 2018 than the US National Institutes of Health. Roche, the global pharmaceutical company renowned for its investment in research, spent a mere $12 billion in R&D in 2018. Meanwhile Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain — with annual sales in excess of £50 billion (approximately $70 billion) — had a research lab whose budget was in the “six figures” in 2016.
Perhaps more remarkable is the rate at which Amazon grew this budget. Ten years earlier, Amazon’s research budget was $1.2 billion. Over the course of the next decade, the firm increased its annual R&D budget by about 44 percent every year. As the 2010s went on, Amazon doubled down on its investments in research. In the words of Werner Vogels, the firm’s chief technology officer, if they stopped innovating they “would be out of business in ten to fifteen years.”
In the process, Amazon created a chasm between the old world and the new. The approach of traditional business was to rely on models that succeeded yesterday. They were based on a strategy that tomorrow might be a little different, but not markedly so.
This kind of linear thinking, rooted in the assumption that change takes decades and not months, may have worked in the past—but not anymore. Amazon understood the nature of the Exponential Age. The pace of change was accelerating; the companies that could harness the technologies of the new era would take off. And those that couldn’t keep up would be undone at remarkable speed.
This divergence between the old and the new is one example of what I call the “exponential gap.” On the one hand, there are technologies that develop at an exponential pace—and the companies, institutions, and communities that adapt to or harness those developments. On the other, there are the ideas and norms of the old world. The companies, institutions, and communities that can only adapt at an incremental pace. These get left behind—and fast.
The emergence of this gap is a consequence of exponential technology. Until the early 2010s, most companies assumed the cost of their inputs would remain pretty similar from year to year, perhaps with a nudge for inflation. The raw materials might fluctuate based on commodity markets, but their planning processes, institutionalized in management orthodoxy, could manage such volatility. But in the Exponential Age, one primary input for a company is its ability to process information. One of the main costs to process that data is computation. And the cost of computation didn’t rise each year; it declined rapidly. The underlying dynamics of how companies operate had shifted.
In Chapter 1, we explored how Moore’s Law amounts to a halving of the underlying cost of computation every couple of years. It means that every ten years, the cost of the processing that can be done by a computer will decline by a factor of one hundred. But the implications of this process stretch far beyond our personal laptop use—and far beyond the interests of any one laptop manufacturer.
In general, if an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won’t be too expensive in a couple of years. For companies, this realization has deep significance. Firms that figured out that the effective price of computation was declining, even if the notional price of what they were buying was staying the same (or even rising), could plan, practice, and experiment with the near future in mind. Even if those futuristic activities were expensive now, they would become affordable soon enough. Organizations that understood this deflation, and planned for it, became well-positioned to take advantage of the Exponential Age.
If Amazon’s early recognition of this trend helped transform it into one of the most valuable companies in history, they were not alone. Many of the new digital giants—from Uber to Alibaba, Spotify to TikTok—took a similar path. And following in their footsteps were firms who understand how these processes apply in other sectors. The bosses at Tesla understood that the prices of electric vehicles might decline on an exponential curve, and launched the electric vehicle revolution. The founders of Impossible Foods understood how the expensive process of precision fermentation (which involves genetically modified microorganisms) would get cheaper and cheaper. Executives at space companies like Spire and Planet Labs understood this process would drive down the cost of putting satellites in orbit. Companies that didn’t adapt to exponential technology shifts, like much of the newspaper publishing industry, didn’t stand a chance.
We can visualize the gap by returning to our now-familiar exponential curve. As we’ve seen, individual technologies develop according to an S-curve, which begins by roughly following an exponential trajectory. And as we’ve seen, it starts off looking a bit humdrum. In those early days, exponential change is distinctly boring, and most people and organizations ignore it. At this point in the curve, the industry producing an exponential technology looks exciting to those in it, but like a backwater to everyone else. But at some point, the line of exponential change crosses that of linear change. Soon it reaches an inflection point. That shift in gear, which is both sudden and subtle, is hard to fathom.
Because, for all the visibility of exponential change, most of the institutions that make up our society follow a linear trajectory. Codified laws and unspoken social norms; legacy companies and NGOs; political systems and intergovernmental bodies—all have only ever known how to adapt incrementally. Stability is an important force within institutions. In fact, it’s built into them.
The gap between our institutions’ capacity to change and our new technologies’ accelerating speed is the defining consequence of our shift into the Exponential Age. On the one side, you have the new behaviors, relationships, and structures that are enabled by exponentially improving technologies, and the products and services built from them. On the other, you have the norms that have evolved or been designed to suit the needs of earlier configurations of technology. The gap leads to extreme tension. In the Exponential Age, this divergence is ongoing—and it is everywhere.
Spotify is expanding US availability of its Car Thing, an $80 music and podcast player for vehicles. The company debuted the gizmo back in the spring on an invite-only basis and only charged users for shipping during a test phase.
Those who signed up for the Car Thing waitlist before now will get first dibs on the company's first hardware device. In addition, both free and Premium Spotify members in the country can now sign up for the waitlist, though the Car Thing requires a Premium subscription and a smartphone for connectivity. Everyone who signs up for the waitlist will eventually be offered a Car Thing.
Spotify worked on Car Thing for several years before it started shipping the device a few months ago. The idea is to bring infotainment features to almost any car, particularly older ones without newfangled touchscreens. Once you hook up Car Thing to your vehicle with the help of one of the included mounts, you can use it to play music and podcasts with either physical controls or "Hey Spotify" voice commands.
One of the obvious goals of almost every computer vision project is to enable a machine to see, and perceive, the world as a human does. Today, Facebook has started talkingabout Ego4D, its own effort in this space, for which it has created a vast new data set to train future models. In a statement, the company said that it had recruited 13 universities across nine countries, who had collected 2,200 hours of footage from 700 participants. This footage was taken from the perspective of the user, which can be used to train these future AI models. Kristen Grauman, Facebook’s lead research scientist, says that this is the largest collection of data explicitly created for this focus.
The footage was centered on a number of common experiences in human life, including social interaction, hand and object manipulation and predicting what’s going to happen. It’s, as far as the social network is concerned, a big step toward better computing experiences which, until now, have always focused on sourcing data from the bystander’s perspective. Facebook has said that the data sets will be released in November, “for researchers who sign Ego4D’s data use agreement.” And, next year, researchers from beyond this community will be challenged to better train machines to understand what exactly humans are doing in their lives.
Naturally, there is the angle that Facebook, which now has a camera glasses partnership with Ray Ban, is looking to improve its own capabilities in future. You probably already know about the perils of what this potential surveillance could entail, and why anyone might feel a little leery about the announcement.
Facebook is ramping up its fight against leakers following the disclosures of whistleblower Frances Haugen. According to The New York Times, Facebook is limiting access to some internal groups that deal with “sensitive” issues like safety and elections. That the change, which was made to prevent further leaks, immediately leaked is both highly amusing and emblematic of some of the bigger issues the company is currently facing.
Ever since Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower, one of the more noteworthy aspects of her story is that the documents she provided to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission were widely accessible to employees. The documents included slides detailing the company’s research into teen mental health, as well as numerous memos about how the company has handled rules for VIPs, misinformation and other thorny issues.
As The Times points out, the reason these documents were so readily available is because Facebook has long had an open culture that promotes sharing. And employees themselves often take to its internal communication platform, Workplace, to discuss controversial issues facing the company.
But now the social network is moving away from that openness. The company is making some internal groups private, and will remove employees “whose work isn’t related to safety and security,” according to the report. “Sensitive Integrity discussions will happen in closed, curated forums in the future,” the company told employees in a memo.
On one hand, the fact that news of the change immediately leaked would seem to back up that the company is in fact more leaky than it has been in years past. But it could also signal increasing unrest among employees, some of whom are reportedly concerned that walling off teams that work on important issues could ultimately do more harm than good.
It also underscores just how much Facebook is still reeling from Haugen’s disclosures. In addition to the Senate hearing last week, Haugen is expected to brief the select committee investigating the Jan. 6th insurrection, as well as European lawmakers investigating the company. The SEC also appears to be investigating her claims.
One week after a massive Facebook outage that took all of the social network’s apps offline for more than six hours, Instagram says it’s testing notifications that will alert users to “temporary issues” like outages or other technical issues.
The new alerts would appear in users’ Activity Feed, alongside other in-app notifications. The messages could be used to let users know about specific issues, like Story uploads not working, or a more widespread problem, like the two outages last week. Importantly, Instagram says it doesn’t plan to alert users to every issue, but ones that may be a source of widespread confusion.
“We won’t send a notification every single time there is an outage, but when we see that people are confused and looking for answers, we’ll determine if something like this could help make things clearer,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. The company added that it’s testing the feature in the US “for the next few months.”
Instagram
Separately, Instagram also showed off a new “account status” section of its app, which is meant to alert users to “what's going on with your account” more generally. Instagram says it’s starting with notifications about posts that are removed and when an account “is at risk of being disabled” due to rule violations.
According to Instagram, the feature is meant to make it easier for users to understand why a post may have been removed, and whether or not they may be in danger of losing an account altogether. While the app has notified users in the past when a post is labeled or removed, the company hasn’t always done a good job letting people know which policy they violated. The Oversight Board has repeatedly told Facebook it needs to do a better job at explaining rules to users, and account status could help them do just that.
Account status could also help the app address a more Instagram-specific issue: concerns over “shadowbanning.” Instagram says that “in the coming months” it plans to update account status to let people know “how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram.”
T-Mobile has slashed $10 off the wireless home internet service it launched in April. From $60, it now costs $50 a month, which is the same price it charged customers during the product's pilot program that started back in 2019. The service gives customers access to a gateway router/modem device that converts T-Mobile's 4G LTE and 5G networks into WiFi with typical download speeds of 35 to 115 Mbps. It has no annual contract, no data caps and, as the carrier keeps repeating in its announcement, no hidden fees and charges.
That $50 a month includes taxes and rental for the gateway, which customers have to return if they decide to cancel. They'd have to install it themselves, but the carrier says it will take them as little as 15 minutes. T-Mobile started testing the wireless home internet service in rural and underserved areas a couple of years ago in an invite-only trial for 50,000 homes. It rolled out access to the pilot program to over 130 cities across the US before the service's official launch.
Those interested will have to take note, however, that the price only applies if they pay via AutoPay. Without automatic billing, the price goes up to $55, which is still $10 less than the $65 it used to cost.
Amazon is reportedly aiming to bring some of the tech it uses at cashierless Amazon Go stores to your kitchen. According to Insider, the company has been working on a smart fridge that can monitor items and help you order replacements if you're running low on something.
The team behind the Amazon Go systems is said to be heading the charge on the project, which has been in the works for at least two years. The Just Walk Out tech used at Go stores tracks what shoppers put in their carts and automatically charges them when they leave. Members of the Amazon Fresh and Lab126 hardware teams are reportedly involved with the fridge project too.
The fridge would monitor the items inside and keep tabs on your purchasing habits, according to the report. If you run low on something you buy frequently, the fridge would notify you and make it easier to order more from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, which could give the company's grocery division a boost. The fridge could offer recipe suggestions too, which may prove useful if you forget about an item that's about to expire.
Amazon wouldn't make the fridges itself, Insider's sources said. It's looking to team up with an appliance manufacturer. There's a possibility that Alexa voice control could be included. That's said to not be a major concern, but given Amazon's propensity for stuffing Alexa into nearly every other type of product, including home robots and its own TVs, it wouldn't be a surprise if the fridge has voice assistant support.
The company has reportedly spent upwards of $50 million per year on the project so far. Even so, there's no guarantee that the fridge will come to market as it's possible Amazon will shelve the plans. If the fridge does come to market, it likely won't come cheap. An Amazon spokesperson told Engadget the company doesn't comment “on rumors or speculation.”
The concept isn't entirely new. In 2016, Samsung revealed a fridge that can help you keep track of what's inside without having to open the door. You can even order groceries using the built-in touchscreen. Amazon's fridge would take the idea a little further, though, since it would flag items that you're about to run out of and help you order more through the company's own grocery ecosystem.
Amazon is having a huge sale on AirPods right now, slashing up to 35 percent off some models. Of note are the AirPods Pro, Apple's best sounding earbuds, which are back down to $179. That's $70 off their normal price and only $10 more than the record low that we saw during the holiday shopping season last year. Also discounted are AirPods with the wireless charging case, which are down to an all-time low of $129, and AirPods with the standard case, which are on sale for $109. Amazon claims these are "limited time" sales, so it's unclear if these discounts will be available after today.
While we thought we might hear about new AirPods during Apple's event last month, the tech giant didn't announce anything new in that department. That means all of these models are a few years old at this point, but they remain some of the best true wireless earbuds you can get if you live within the Apple ecosystem. AirPods Pro earned a score of 87 from us for their improved sound quality, better fitting design with IPX4 water resistance and convenient features like hands-free Siri access. They're far and away the best sounding Apple earbuds you can get, and they do a good job of blocking out surrounding noises with active noise cancellation and Transparency Mode.
Regular AirPods are better for those who already liked the fit of Apple's EarPods, which used to come with each new iPhone. They have decent sound and good wireless range, plus a solid five-hour battery life, too. But what sets any pair of AirPods apart is their fast pairing and switching between Apple devices. The H1 chip inside allows them to recognize which device you're actively using and switch to it, so you can go form taking a call on your iPhone to listening to music from your Mac.
Aside from the AirPods Pro, the kicker in Amazon's sale is the wireless charging case — they originally cost $199 but have been hovering at $159 for months. The last time we saw them close to this $129 record low was in early August. And that means you're only paying $20 extra for the wireless charging case, which is a great deal.
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