The LGBTQ+ dating app is going public through a blank check firm or Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) called Tiga, Bloombergreports. They're merging to form a combined entity with a $2.1 billion valuation, which will give Grindr access to $384 million in funds to be used for debt payments, as well as to support growth areas and to launch new endeavors.
Grindr Chief Financial Officer Gary Hsueh told the media organization in an interview that the company had been approached by several SPACs in the past. It ultimately chose the SPAC route instead of a traditional IPO, he said, because it makes more sense. "[I]t had certainty and that’s even more important today than it was a year ago when the market was different," Hsueh explained.
As Bloombergnotes, SPACs became hot over the past couple of years after the pandemic made traditional IPOs much riskier than usual. They offer better returns and protections and could provide an easier route to become a public company. However, the market has become oversaturated of late, and at least one analyst told CNBC that the SPAC bubble is bursting.
At the moment, Grindr's revenue mostly comes from subscription, though it does earn some money from ads. It remains to be seen if a recent report that it sold user data would affect its future earnings: According to The Wall Street Journal, Grindr location data was for sale for at least three years, putting users' privacy at risk.
Last week, a group of Apple employees wrote an open letter criticizing the company's hybrid work-from-home policy, which requires employees to be at the office three days a week starting May 23rd. Now, Apple has lost director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow over the policy, according to a tweet from The Verge's Zoë Schiffer. Goodfellow may have been the company's most cited machine learning expert, according to Schiffer. "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," he wrote in a note to staff.
A group of Apple staffers called "Apple Together" opposed to the RTO (return-to-office) strategy cited multiple arguments against it. They noted that in-person collaboration isn't needed that often, thanks to apps like Slack. They also countered Apple's argument that in-person work allows for "serendipity" when people bump into each other, saying that Apple's siloed office structure makes that difficult.
It also noted that a daily commute "is a huge waste of time as well as both mental and physical resources," and that the policy will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce.
Mainly though, the group cited Apple's hypocrisy in the way it markets its products. "We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?" the letter states.
Apple, which brought in a Q3 record $97.3 billion last quarter, has been facing employee discontent of late. On top of issues around RTO, it's facing an NLRB complaint over hostile working conditions, and Apple Store employees are quietly attempting to unionize.
Yesterday, as Russia celebrated Victory Day, marking its role in defeating Nazi Germany, many of the country’s online platforms were defaced in protest of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
According to reports, Russians with smart TVs saw channel listings replaced with a message implicating them in the ongoing conflict. “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands,” the message read. “TV and authorities are lying. No to war.”
According to The Washington Post, the hack apparently targeted several of the country’s largest internet companies, including Yandex and Rutube, Russia’s alternative to YouTube.
Russia passed a law this year that bans any efforts to discredit the country’s military, but that hasn’t stopped some media outlets from protesting the war. Articles on Lenta.ru noted they had “not been agreed with the editorial leadership” and that “the Presidential Administration will punish the publication for publishing this.”
Sony announced it sold just two million PlayStation 5 units last quarter (Q4), bringing its overall total to 19.3 million. That's down considerably on the same quarter last year when it sold 3.3 million units. Game sales went up, though, with 70.5 million PS4/PS5 titles sold compared to 61.4 million a year ago.
While Sony contends with supply constraints, it’s expecting better days ahead. It forecast a 34 percent increase in sales next quarter to 929 billion yen ($7.13 billion) due to better parts supply and higher sales of third-party games. Sony is also launching PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium, its take on Xbox Game pass, in June. While PS Plus subscriber levels were flat, the new tiers could help draw more subscribers — and some might pay more than they do right now.
Kendrick Lamar’s new music video for The Heart Part 5 revolves exclusively around deepfake celebrity faces superimposed on Kendrick's body as he raps across topics including mental illness, murder and more.
Lincoln College was unable to access recruitment and fundraising systems for months.
Lincoln College says it will close this week in the wake of a ransomware attack that took months to resolve. While the impact of COVID-19 severely impacted recruitment and fundraising, the cyberattack seems to have been the tipping point for the Illinois institution.
Lincoln says it had "record-breaking student enrollment" in fall 2019. However, the pandemic caused a sizable fall in numbers. The college — one of only a few rural schools to qualify as a predominantly Black institution under the Department of Education — said it affected its financial standing. Barring a last-minute respite, the combination of the pandemic and cyberattack may have brought an end to the 157-year-old institution.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says they're on the way to Facebook as well.
As promised (or threatened), NFTs are coming to Instagram. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the app will this week start testing a way for users to display non-fungible tokens on their profiles.
"We're starting building for NFTs, not just in our metaverse and Reality Labs work but also across our family of apps." Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. "We're starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so that creators and collectors can display their NFTs."
A similar feature is coming to Facebook in the near future, and Meta is considering enabling NFTs in its other apps, such as Messenger and WhatsApp. Also in the works is a way for people to display 3D NFTs in Instagram Stories using augmented reality.
Forty years after it first began to dabble in quantum computing, IBM is ready to expand the technology out of the lab and into more practical applications — like supercomputing! The company has already hit a number of development milestones since it released its previous quantum roadmap in 2020, including the 127-qubit Eagle processor that uses quantum circuits and the Qiskit Runtime API. IBM announced on Wednesday that it plans to further scale its quantum ambitions and has revised the 2020 roadmap with an even loftier goal of operating a 4,000-qubit system by 2025.
Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release. Those products will be followed later that year by Condor, a quantum chip IBM is billing as “the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.”
This rapid four-fold jump in quantum volume (the number of qubits packed into a processor) will enable users to run increasingly longer quantum circuits, while increasing the processing speed — measured in CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) — from a maximum of 2,900 OPS to over 10,000. Then it’s just a simple matter of quadrupaling that capacity in the span of less than 24 months.
To do so, IBM plans to first get sets of multiple processors to communicate with one another both in parallel and in series. This should help develop better error mitigation schemes and improve coordination between processors, both necessary components of tomorrow’s practical quantum computers. After that, IBM will design and deploy chip-level couplers, which “will closely connect multiple chips together to effectively form a single and larger processor,” according to the company, then build quantum communication links to connect those larger multi-processors together into even bigger clusters — essentially daisy-chaining increasingly larger clumps of processors together until they form a functional, modular 4,000-qubit computing platform.
“As quantum computing matures, we’re starting to see ourselves as more than quantum hardware,” IBM researcher Jay Gambetta wrote on Wednesday. “We’re building the next generation of computing. In order to benefit from our world-leading hardware, we need to develop the software and infrastructure capable of taking advantage of it.”
As such, IBM released a set of ready-made primitive programs earlier this year, “pre-built programs that allows developers easy access to the outputs of quantum computations without requiring intricate understanding of the hardware,” per the company. IBM intends to expand that program set in 2023, enabling developers to run them on parallelized quantum processors. “We also plan to enhance primitive performance with low-level compilation and post-processing methods, like introducing error suppression and mitigation tools,” Gambetta said. “These advanced primitives will allow algorithm developers to use Qiskit Runtime services as an API for incorporating quantum circuits and classical routines to build quantum workflows.”
These workflows will take a given problem, break it down into smaller quantum and classical programs, chew through those processes in either parallel or series depending on which is more efficient, and then use an orchestration layer to “circuit stitch” all those various data streams back into a coherent result that classical computers can understand. IBM calls its proprietary stitching infrastructure Quantum Serverless and, per the new roadmap, will deploy the feature to its core quantum software stack in 2023.
“We think by next year, we’ll begin prototyping quantum software applications for users hoping to use Qiskit Runtime and Quantum Serverless to address specific use cases,” Gambetta said. We’ll begin to define these services with our first test case — machine learning — working with partners to accelerate the path toward useful quantum software applications. By 2025, we think model developers will be able to explore quantum applications in machine learning, optimization, finance, natural sciences, and beyond.”
“For many years, CPU-centric supercomputers were society’s processing workhorse, with IBM serving as a key developer of these systems,” he continued. “In the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of AI-centric supercomputers, where CPUs and GPUs work together in giant systems to tackle AI-heavy workloads. Now, IBM is ushering in the age of the quantum-centric supercomputer, where quantum resources — QPUs — will be woven together with CPUs and GPUs into a compute fabric. We think that the quantum-centric supercomputer will serve as an essential technology for those solving the toughest problems, those doing the most ground-breaking research, and those developing the most cutting-edge technology.”
Together, these hardware and software systems will become IBM Quantum System Two with the first prototype scheduled to be operational at some point next year.
Nintendo sold (PDF) 23.06 million Switch units overall for the fiscal year ending in March 2022, over 5 million units fewer than its previous year. The gaming giant originally thought it was going to sell 25.5 million units this fiscal year, but it lowered its forecast to 24 million (and then 23 million) because the continued global chip shortage has made it difficult to procure components. In fact, the company most likely expects to continue grappling with supply chain issues, because it has lowered its forecast to 21 million Switch units sold for its next fiscal year ending in March 2023.
Nintendo's sales were buoyed by the pandemic in previous years, with people purchasing new gaming consoles to get them through the COVID lockdowns. The Switch even became the company's best-selling home console ever after total sales eclipsed 103.54 million units in the third quarter. Nintendo noted in today's financial release that it has now sold a total of 107.65 million consoles.
Even though global lockdowns aren't as regular, parts continue to be harder and harder to get, so the company's forecast must also reflect that reality. Analysts and industry execs previously expected the chip shortage to persist throughout 2023, but Intel chief Pat Gelsinger recently said that the issue could drag on until 2024.
Nintendo also expects lower net sales and net profit overall in its next fiscal year. In FY2022, it reported net sales of 1,695 billion yen (US$13 billion) and an operating profit of 592 billion yen (US$4.6 billion). Next year, it expects its net sales to fall to around 1,600 billion yen (US$12.3 billion) and its annual operating profit to fall to $500 billion yen (US$3.8 billion).
Despite the lower hardware sales, Nintendo has claimed the highest annual software sales for a single hardware family. It sold 39 million Switch games in its 2022 fiscal year, led by Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearlwith 14.65 million units sold. Pokémon Legends Arceus, which sold 6.5 million copies in seven days, has sold 12.64 million units so far. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 9.94 million units, while Kirby and the Forgotten Land sold 2.1 million units in just over two weeks.
In 2020 Erica Synths released the SYNTRX, an ode to the legendary EMS Synthi A. It wasn’t what exactly you’d call practical. It was large, niche and quite expensive at around $3,000. But, I was unabashedly head-over-heels for it. Now Erica is taking the same core concept and putting even more of its own unique twist on the instrument in the SYNTRX II. Plus, it’s slashing the price to a more reasonable $2,179.
The unique 16x16 patch matrix is still here, as are the trio of oscillators – one of which is specifically tuned for modulation – and the joystick. Though, this time you can record the joystick’s motions for on-board sequencing and modulation. There’s also a ring modulator that, if it’s anything like the one on the original, should be surprisingly musical. Plus a multi-color noise generator, the trapezoid envelope generator, and even an analog VU meter.
The SYNTRX and SYNTRX II, unsurprisingly, are more alike than they are different. But that’s not to say there haven’t been some significant updates. For one, they’re quite visually distinctive. While the original kept the same basic layout and cream-colored aesthetic of its EMS inspiration, the SYNTRX II is a darker affair that ditches the speakers and oversized tuning knobs for a more monolithic appearance.
I will miss those tuning knobs. They were pure joy to use. But I’m slightly sadder to see the spring reverb get the boot. Instead Erica Synths is including DSP-based reverb and delay effects. I have faith in the company’s ability to deliver high quality effects, but I was still surprisingly enamored with the spring reverb on the original.
One last major upgrade worth mentioning is the ability to use the grid as a piano-roll style sequencer. The original had very limited ways to control the actual pitch of the synth built-in. But now it’s looking a little more like a self contained instrument.
The SYNTRX II looks to continue Erica Synths’ strong history of making instruments that are just weird enough and encourage experimentation. But it also makes some of its more experimental impulses more accessible. Even if it’s hard to call a nearly $2,200 synthesizer “affordable”.
Sony announced that it sold just 2 million PlayStation 5 units last quarter (Q4), bringing its overall total to 19.3 million. That's down considerably from the same quarter last year when in sold 3.3 million units. The company did manage to boost game sales, though, with 70.5 million PS4/PS5 titles sold compared to 61.4 million a year ago, including 14.5 million first party games compared to 7.9 million in Q3.
Overall, its Game & Network Services (GSN) division earned 665 billion yen ($5.1 billion) this quarter, up slightly over last year. Sales for the full 2021 year were flat, up just 2 percent over 2020, and profits also changed little.
Those numbers mean that the PS5 is falling even further behind the PS4 in sales, having now sold 3.1 million fewer units than the PS4 at the same point in time. Sony warned that this was coming, blaming the lack of sales not on customer demand but its inability to build enough units due to the ongoing chip shortage.
The good news is that Sony expects things to perk up quickly. It forecast a 34 percent increase in sales next quarter to 929 billion yen ($7.13 billion) due to better parts supply and higher sales of third-party games. Sony is also launching PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium, its take on Xbox Game pass, in June. While PS Plus subscriber levels were flat, the new tiers could help draw subscribers next quarter and beyond.
It might seem hard to believe, but until now Roland hasn’t had a true competitor to Korg’s seemingly ubiquitous Volca line. Sure, the Boutique range is portable and battery powered, but they’re also twice the price of a Volca. And that’s without the keyboard accessory. Now, though, the company finally seems to be taking the entry level seriously with the Aira Compact series.
These new $199 instruments borrow tech from their big siblings in the Aira line, like the VT-4 Voice Transformer and the TR-8 Rhythm Performer. The T-8 is a drum machine that uses Roland’s Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) to recreate sounds from the 808 and 909, and the J-6 Chord Synth does the same, but for the Juno-6. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with having more portable budget synths and drum machines, it’s the E-4 Voice Tweaker that really stands out. It brings pitch correction, a harmonizer, vocoding, plus pitch and formant shifting and a looper to the world of mobile music hardware.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
Before we get too far into specifics, though, let’s go over what all three have in common. They’re all quite tiny, for one. While they’re only slightly smaller than a Volca, the cumulative effect is obvious. On the back are ⅛” MIDI in and out jacks, as well as a USB-C port that’s used for charging the internal lithium ion battery, but can also handle MIDI and audio over USB. Across the top are ⅛” sync in and out jacks, as well as mix in and out jacks, which allow you to daisy-chain multiple devices together.
The ability to connect all three Aira Compacts, without the need for an external mixer, is undeniably huge. When you’re trying to craft a portable music making setup the less gear and cables, the better.
T-8
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
The T-8 is definitely the most straightforward of the three, and probably the most immediately usable. While it has more advanced features, anyone who’s ever used a step sequencer before should immediately be able to start putting together basic beats. While I guess I should be thankful that you get 32 steps instead of a measly 16, it doesn’t feel like it would strain the hardware terribly to go for a full four bars.
Thankfully, there are some tools at your disposal to switch things up. There is a fill mode, plus step looping for creating instant custom fills by just holding down a few buttons. There’s also per-step and master probability options for introducing a touch of unpredictability, plus substeps, send effects, accent and velocity parameters. In some ways, it’s a more capable sequencer than you’d find on a Volca Beats. That said, Korg has automation in the form of Motion Sequencing, which the Aira Compacts lack.
The sounds aren’t particularly flexible without a lot of menu diving, though. From the front panel you can change the tuning and decay of the kick and snare – just the tuning of the clap and tom, and just the decay of the open and closed hihat. If you have a preference for a 707 kick and snare, tough. You get what Roland gives you, which is a mix of sounds from the TR-808, 909 and 606.
You can add overdrive, or switch the bass synth from saw wave to square wave, or swap out the clap for a second tom if you feel like slogging through the T-8’s somewhat arcane menu. But without a manual handy the cryptic eight-segment LED screen is difficult to decipher.
At least things like probability, velocity and effects are easy to manage. A lot of parameters require using the shift function, but it’s hardly the end of the world.
The bass synth is a nice addition. It’s based on the TB-303 and can handle acid basslines with relative ease. Again, there’s not a ton of versatility there. It does what it does, and don’t expect much more. I do wish that you could use the synth’s filter as another send effect, though. It would be nice to route the entire drum pattern through it for buildups and breakdowns.
J-6
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
The J-6 is a somewhat more confounding beast. It’s a four-voice synth, based on the Juno-6. You can play the keyboard normally, but the rubber keys aren’t exactly great for playing in realtime. Instead you’re meant to use it in chord mode, where each key automatically plays a chord. You can switch between 100 different sets (confusingly labeled “genre” on the actual device), each of which contains 12 chords. And, in addition to just punching in the chord progressions manually, there are nine different “styles” with 12 variations each for playing arpeggios and rhythmic chord stabs.
This is great for quickly knocking out something that sounds pretty decent on its own, but I’d be lying if I said I had any idea what was going on. What chords are in what sets? Is there any logic to which variations are lumped together?
The J-6 is also bound to disappoint anyone who wants to design their own synth sounds. There are 64 presets and, if there is a way to design a patch from the ground up I haven’t found it yet. The only controls you have over the synth engine itself from the front panel are filter cutoff and filter release. If you press shift those knobs control the resonance and attack of the filter.
Honestly, though, that’s fine. All 64 sounds here are pretty solid, even if a few of them are a little samey sounding. On something this small, with so few hands-on controls, I’d rather Roland just give me a small excellent palette to work with than force me to spend three hours menu diving.
E-4
Lastly there’s the E-4. It is an absolute blast. Full stop. It’s not that it doesn’t have flaws, it’s just that frankly they don’t matter much. Do I wish Roland had gone with an XLR input as opposed to a ¼”? Of course I do. Would phantom power have been a nice touch? Sure. But damn it, every time I fire this thing up I have trouble putting it down. The combination of auto pitch correction (you know, the generic version of AutoTune) and synthetic harmonies turn anyone into instant Bon Iver. And if you’d rather get your funk on, there’s a solid sounding vocoder with more waveforms than I can count.
You can also enable all the effects simultaneously, so you can auto pitch your vocals, generate harmonies, and then feed your newly chorded voice through the vocoder to create a choir of robots. Then slap on some reverb, delay or chorus to add even more depth, and start turning the Scatter knob to glitch yourself out in realtime. And yes the vocoder will follow the pitch of auto correct if you use it, or you can control it via MIDI keyboard.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
There is also a 24-second looper with the ability to overdub, so if you don’t like the preset harmonies, you can record your own backup vocals. Just remember to set your preferred effects first because pitch, harmony and vocoder are applied before recording. You can still use the reverb and Scatter to mangle your loop after the fact, though. Oh, and yeah, the E-4 has Scatter. It’s still not great, but it does work better on vocals than it does drum patterns.
Wrapup
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
Roland is bringing some serious firepower to the world of tiny, dirt-cheap music gear. It’s borrowing features and tech from its more expensive instruments that start at $400, and bringing it down to almost impulse purchase levels. In fact, there’s a very good chance I’m gonna go out and buy that E-4 Vocal Tweaker real soon. The sub-$300 range is increasingly important for synth makers, and Roland’s first salvos shouldn’t be dismissed as the company merely playing catch up.
The management at Raven Software, the Activision Blizzard subsidiary that develops Call of Duty games, has reportedly been trying to convince its employees to vote against unionization. According to The Washington Post, the Raven management has been sending out messages and holding town hall meetings ahead of the election deadline on May 20th.
During a meeting held on April 26th, company leadership suggested that unionization might not only impede game development, but also affect promotions and benefits. After that meeting, The Post says management sent employees an email with a message that's more direct to the point: "Please vote no." The Raven employees the publication talked to said the company's efforts were ineffective, though, and that they still voted yes for unionization.
This saga began late last year when Raven suddenly laid off around a third of the group's QA testers after months of promising better compensation. Activision Blizzard workers staged a weeks-long strike in support of the QA employees, and unionization efforts started at the same time. Since then, Activision has been trying to dissuade workers from forming a union.
Activision VP of QA Chris Arends reportedly told team members in a Slack meeting that a "union doesn't do anything to help us produce world-class games, and the bargaining process is not typically quick, often reduces flexibility, and can be adversarial and lead to negative publicity." The National Labor Relations Board granted the quality assurance testers' permission to hold a union vote in April, though, and workers have been sending in their ballots by mail over the past month. We'll soon find out if Activision's alleged union-busting efforts are effective soon enough: The NLRB will be counting the ballots via video conference on May 23rd.
The parent company of Tinder and Hinge has sued Google. In a complaint (PDF link) filed Monday with a federal court in California, Match Group alleges the tech giant broke federal and state antitrust laws with its Play Store guidelines.
The lawsuit concerns a policy Google plans to implement later this year. In the fall of 2020, the company “clarified” its stance on in-app purchases, announcing it would eventually require all Android developers to process payments involving “digital goods and services” through the Play Store billing system. Google initially said it would begin enforcing the policy on September 30th, 2021, but later extended the deadline to June 1st, 2022.
Match alleges Google had “previously assured” the company it could use its own payments systems. The company claims Google has threatened to remove its apps from the Play Store if it does not comply with the upcoming policy change by the June 1st deadline. Match further claims Google has preemptively started rejecting app updates that maintain the existing payment systems found in its dating services. “Ten years ago, Match Group was Google’s partner. We are now its hostage,” the company says in its complaint.
“This lawsuit is a measure of last resort,” Match CEO Shar Dubey said in a statement the company shared with Engadget. “We tried, in good faith, to resolve these concerns with Google, but their insistence and threats to remove our brands’ apps from the Google Play Store by June 1st has left us no choice but to take legal action.”
In a statement Google shared with Engadget, the search giant said Match is eligible to pay a 15 percent commission on in-app purchases, a rate the company noted is the lowest among “major app platforms.” Google also pointed out that the “openness” of Android allows Match to distribute its apps through alternative app stores and sideloading if the company “doesn’t want to comply” with its policies. “This is just a continuation of Match Group’s self-interested campaign to avoid paying for the significant value they receive from the mobile platforms they’ve built their business on,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget.
The lawsuit comes at a time when both Apple and Google face significant regulatory pressure from lawmakers around the world to change their app store policies. In February, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the Open App Markets Act. Should the legislation become law as it stands, it would prevent both companies from locking third-party developers into their respective payment systems.
In March, Google announced it was partnering with Spotify to test third-party billing systems. Notably, Match says that pilot offers “nothing new for developers or users.” The company also said Google rejected its request to be included in the program and would not share the criteria for inclusion.
