Elon Musk’s X has teamed up with Visa to roll out ‘X Money,’ a financial service designed to provide direct payment options and digital wallet integration for the platform’s users. According to a report from Reuters, this marks another step […]
The post X launches ‘X Money’ with Visa to offer direct payments in a push for Musk’s ‘everything app’ first appeared on Tech Startups.
Logitech sales boomed during the pandemic as people outfitted their home offices, and it’s getting a piece of the hybrid workplace with teleconferencing gear too. But Logitech’s also got a little-known corporate office management solution that could soon expand beyond conference rooms — using a pebble-shaped person detection device called the Logitech Spot.
It’s a millimeter wave radar sensor you can peel and stick up anywhere, letting companies invisibly see whether people are in a room. The company claims it’ll last four years on a single D-cell shaped lithium battery, no wires required at all.
It’s not just a radar sensor; it also measures particulates, VOCs, CO2, temperature, pressure, and humidity, so your company can get a health score for any given room. But the first clear draw is for companies to know whether workers are actually using their office space, and which rooms get used, as they make decisions about downsizing those offices, issuing return-to-office mandates, or reconfiguring them for hybrid work.
“They’re thinking about real estate footprint, what’s the right strategy,” Logitech for Business head of product Henry Levak tells me.
Levak says the radar sensors aren’t particularly powerful, when I bring up the idea that similar sensors could be used for pretty invasive snooping (like monitoring employees’ heartrate and breathing). The Logitech Spot is “initially” just reporting home whether a room is occupied, or not, and doesn’t even know how many people are in that room, he says. Logitech may also make the raw sensor data available to companies, though.
He says the radar can see roughly five meters away, and maybe up to two feet left or right, and could theoretically know the general placement of people in a room, but that’s about it. For larger rooms, companies are already widely using cameras to detect and track employees, he says, but this could be useful for smaller spaces where “you don’t want to have a camera pointed at people to see if they’re in the room or not.”
Each device can report back wirelessly via a LoRaWAN hub, using similar low-power long-range wireless tech to Amazon’s Sidewalk but without the peer-to-peer part. They’ve got Bluetooth as well.
Today, Logitech is marketing the Spot most immediately as a way to help automate meeting room reservations, hooking into the company’s existing solutions like its Logitech View interactive wayfinding touchscreen maps and its meeting room touchscreen controllers, as well as an array of partner workplace management software including Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
But like presence sensors in the smarthome, Levak says they could also automate all sorts of things and generate all sorts of insights. Things as simple as extending your room reservation if people are still using the room, or fixing the bad air quality or energy efficiency in a particular location. Or things as fancy as detecting whether a particular person has entered a particular room and setting their preferred temperature. Levak says you can use multiple Spots for larger rooms to help monitor temperature differentials, too.
Logitech hasn’t announced a price for the Spot yet, so it’s definitely too early to say if it’d be affordable for non-corporate use in, say, a smart home, but it does nominally require Logitech’s cloud to work. Levak says “some crafty person” could theoretically create a cloud connector using Logitech’s API’s, though. The Spot is scheduled to ship in the second half of the year.
Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Spotify wants to see 1 billion people paying for streaming music, double the more than 500 million customers who currently subscribe to Spotify and its competitors. In Spotify’s view, artists are lucky to have streaming services, “each doing its part to normalize the behavior of paying for music.”
On Tuesday, the streaming giant announced that it paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, with total contributions reaching almost $60 billion since its founding in 2006 — five years after Napster ceased operation. Spotify estimates that around 10,000 artists generated at least $10,000 per year on the platform in 2014. “Today, well over 10,000 artists generate over $100,000 per year from Spotify alone,” Spotify VP David Kaefer said in the blog post. “That’s a beautiful thing.”
In the blog, humbly titled “Getting the world to value music,” Kaefer describes the pre-streaming era of music as an exclusive club that made it difficult for new artists to enter the industry. “Now, you can record something today and have it on Spotify tomorrow,” said Kaefer. “Everyone’s invited.”
In November, Spotify reported it was on track to achieve its “first full year of profitability” and had €4 billion (about $4.1 billion) in total revenue for the preceding three months — a 19 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier. Next week, it will report earnings for the entirety of 2024.
Spotify reportedly has lower per-stream artist payout rates than rival services like Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music, and the platform’s streaming royalties and recommendation algorithms have been widely criticized by artists and policymakers over the years. Many artists claim that payouts are too small and that the focus on promoting big artists makes it hard for new musicians to be discovered on the platform.
Chris Macowski, Spotify’s global head of music communications, attributes competitors’ higher per-stream rates to “low engagement” on services where subscribers “listen to less music.” Spotify optimizes for “higher overall payout,” he says.
Spotify has released industry payout figures frequently over the last few years to push back against these criticisms. In December, a parody “Spotify Unwrapped” website that compared Spotify subscription fees to artist payouts was taken down by Spotify’s legal team.
Update, January 28th: Added comment from Spotify on per-stream payout rates.
The Federal Communications Commission is eliminating a Biden administration proposal that would have curbed apartment landlords’ ability to force residents into paying for a single internet service provider. As reported by Ars Technica, the new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, will instead allow landlords to implement bulk billing arrangements with ISPs that would make residents pay for internet, cable, and/or satellite television services from a specific provider even if they don’t want them.
“I have ended the FCC’s consideration of a Biden-era proposal that could have increased *by 50 percent* the price that some Americans living in apartments pay for Internet service,” FCC chair Brendan Carr says on X. In a press release, Carr calls Biden’s Bulk Billing proposal “regulatory overreach” and claims it “would have artificially raised the cost of Internet service.”
As Ars mentions, the FCC already bans bulk billing deals that include exclusive service rights, but there isn’t much incentive for other providers to set up a connection that would compete with the service residents already pay for.
If the proposal published last March stood, then Bulk Billing would still have been allowed. Then-FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel claimed it would have reduced broadband costs and increased provider choices for apartments, condos, public housing, and other multi-tenant dwellings by allowing residents to opt out of paying for the buildings’ shared provider.
The latest iPad Pro is the most powerful iPad on the market, and as such, it comes at a high cost. Thankfully, you can currently pick up the 11-inch iPad Pro at Amazon with Wi-Fi and 256GB of storage starting at an all-time low $849 ($150 off) at checkout, or at Best Buy for the same price if you’re a My Best Buy Plus or Total member. The 13-inch variant is also on sale at Amazon and Best Buy starting at $1,099 ($200 off), which matches the larger tablet’s lowest price to date.
As the highest-end iPad in Apple’s lineup, the iPad Pro comes with a number of premium features. It runs on Apple’s powerful M4 processor, allowing it to accommodate demanding games and video-editing software, and it’s the first iPad to feature Apple’s new “Tandem OLED” setup, which essentially pulls together two OLED panels to create gorgeous colors and deep, inky blacks. Both size configurations are also remarkably thin and lightweight — the 13-inch model is a mere 5.1mm thick (!) — making them extremely portable.
In addition to the new hardware, both models also support Apple Intelligence, so you can take advantage of AI-generated text and email summaries, make your own emoji, add events to your calendar using a photo, and easily access ChatGPT, among a litany of other features. Both tablets are also compatible with the Apple Pencil Pro, which, unlike the USB-C Apple Pencil, offers pressure sensitivity and a “Barrel Roll” gyroscope, so you can quickly turn your digital brush or pen by twisting the stylus as you draw.
YouTube TV wants to be your cable replacement, but the entry commitment is much easier than what cable companies require. That includes the hardware needed for YouTube TV.
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It's only been a week since Chinese company DeepSeek launched its open-weights R1 reasoning model, which is reportedly competitive with OpenAI's state-of-the-art o1 models despite being trained for a fraction of the cost. Already, American AI companies are in a panic, and markets are freaking out over what could be a breakthrough in the status quo for large language models.
While DeepSeek can point to common benchmark results and Chatbot Arena leaderboard to prove the competitiveness of its model, there's nothing like direct use cases to get a feel for just how useful a new model is. To that end, we decided to put DeepSeek's R1 model up against OpenAI's ChatGPT models in the style of our previous showdowns between ChatGPT and Google Bard/Gemini.
This was not designed to be a test of the hardest problems possible; it's more of a sample of everyday questions these models might get asked by users.
© Aurich Lawson
DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts. DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its lead in the AI race […]
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David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto “czar,” said in an interview on Fox on Tuesday that there’s “substantial evidence” that Chinese AI company DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models, a process that Sacks compared to theft. Sacks, who didn’t cite the source of this “evidence,” suggested that DeepSeek used responses from OpenAI models to […]
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Google added themed icons to Android quite a few years ago at this point, but many apps have still not yet adopted them. One long holdout, Microsoft Teams, has finally changed that though, as the latest Android update adds themed icons support.
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Climate change helped to set the stage for the devastating Los Angeles fires this month, a new study by 32 researchers shows.
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires broke out in early January and soon killed at least 28 people, destroying 16,000 structures. Hot, dry conditions and extraordinarily powerful winds fanned the flames.
Those conditions were made about 35 percent more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels warming the planet, according to the study. Fire risk will only grow unless the pollution causing climate change stops.
“Realistically, this was a perfect storm when it comes to conditions for fire disasters,” John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at the University of California, Merced, said in a press call today.
“This was a perfect storm when it comes to conditions for fire disasters.”
In today’s climate, the extreme weather that drove January infernos can be expected about every 17 years, according to the study.
The study was conducted by the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international collaboration of scientists that researches the role that climate change plays in disasters around the world. They look at historical weather data and climate models to compare real-world scenarios to what likely would have happened if the planet wasn’t 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today, on average, than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
If the planet warms by another 1.3 degrees Celsius, which could happen in 75 years under current policies, the kind of weather that exacerbated the fires this month becomes another 35 percent more probable.
The length of the dry season in the region has already grown by about 23 days, according to the researchers. That increases the chances of arid weather coinciding with the powerful Santa Ana winds that typically pick up in cooler months.
While those winds return each year, they were catastrophically strong this month — reaching hurricane strength at upwards of 100 miles per hour. For now, scientists don’t have enough research to know how climate change affected the Santa Ana winds, specifically. Their research only shows that fire season is encroaching more into windy season because of climate change, and that made these fires more likely.
Nothing is prepping for a launch event in March and it’s expected that it’ll see the launch of either Nothing Phone (3), Phone (3a), or perhaps even both. As the rumor mill continues to swirl, a new teaser hints at the first telephoto camera on a Nothing Phone, while the Nothing Phone (3a)’s specs may have leaked including a bigger display.
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