Samsung’s midrange A-series phones get a Galaxy S23 facelift
The Samsung Galaxy A34 (left) and A54 (right). | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
Samsung’s Galaxy A34 and A54 are the latest additions to its popular midrange A-series. Although both phones offer a number of upgrades over last year’s models, the most striking thing for me is how much they both look like this year’s Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus.
The camera bumps of the A33 and A53 are gone, leaving three simple camera lenses per phone in their wake. It makes both look more premium to me, and Samsung is promising flagship-level support periods of up to four generations of major Android updates and five years of security patches.
The Galaxy A54 will go on sale on April 6th in the US starting at $449.99 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. In the UK the A54 is releasing this month starting at £449 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £499 for 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage.
Meanwhile, the Galaxy A34 will also be available this month in the UK starting at £349 for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £399 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Samsung is not announcing a US release for the Galaxy A34 at this time. We’ve followed up with the company for exact European pricing and release info.
Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
From the back, there’s little to tell the two phones apart.
Hold them in your hands and the flagship illusion disappears, these are obviously midrange phones. Both feel a little thick (8.2mm, presumably to make room for their large 5,000mAh batteries), and the A34 in particular has a plastic-feeling back panel. Both phones support fast-charging at up to 25W.
The phones each come with a main, ultra-wide, and macro camera on their back — though their exact specs differ. The A54 has a main 50-megapixel sensor, which is joined by a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro. Samsung boasts that this main sensor is bigger than the one found in its previous-gen model, which should make for better low-light photography. The A34, meanwhile, has a 48-megapixel main, 8-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro camera.
Around front the phones are more visually distinct. The A34 has its 13-megapixel selfie camera in a small teardrop notch, while the A54 has a hole-punch cutout containing its 32-megapixel front-facing sensor. Both have 120Hz, 1080p OLED displays with a peak brightness of 1000 nits, though the A34’s screen is slightly bigger at 6.6 inches, versus 6.4 inches on the A54.
Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
The Galaxy A54 has a hole-punch notch and a 6.4-inch screen... Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
... while the Galaxy A34 has a teardrop notch and 6.6-inch screen.
Internally, the A34 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor, while the A54 has one of Samsung’s in-house Exynos 1380 chips. Both phones have microSD card slots that support up to a 1TB cards.
Rounding out the specs, both phones feature a relatively robust IP67 rating for dust and water resistance (that’s technically enough for full submersion, though we’d recommend not putting that to the test yourself), 5G, and in-display fingerprint sensors. Exact colors vary by market, but in the UK the A34 is available in black, silver, lime, and violet, while the A54 will be sold in white rather than silver in addition to black, lime, and violet.
Stay tuned for our full review of the Samsung Galaxy A54.
Software engineer David Auerbach: ‘Big tech is in denial about not being in control’
The writer says that meganets – the huge tech networks already part of daily life – have led to groupthink and the breakdown of public discourse and that we must exert more influence on them
David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. He also teaches the history of computation at the New Centre for Research & Practice in Seattle, US. His new book is Meganets: How Digital Forms Beyond Our ControlCommandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He argues that widespread concern about artificial intelligence is legitimate, but the problem is already all around us, with huge tech networks that no one – neither governments nor their owners – is able to control.
Your book is concerned with the threat to social and economic stability represented by what you call meganets. How do you define a meganet? The definition I use for a meganet is a persistent, evolving and opaque data network that heavily influences how people see the world. It is always on and it consists both of a large server tech component as well as millions upon millions of users who are constantly active, using those services and influencing them. All these users play a small part in the collective authorship of how these algorithms run. The effect is contributing to a severe fracturing of society in which we are literally becoming unable to understand one another, as we split into like-minded self-policing groups that enforce unanimity and uniformity, and prevent any larger-scale societal consensus.
How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable. But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise.
Investigation launched into complaints of Tesla steering wheels coming off mid-drive
US regulators receive two complaints about Model Y SUVs with missing bolt in latest string of safety problems for company
US auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while being driven.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the investigation covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year.
Streams are made of this: will digital platforms change our musical memories?
So many of our most precious memories are anchored in particular songs. But does the easy availability of every track spell the end of that? Jude Rogers and her young son compare music notes
The second we get in the car, my son strikes up his familiar tune. “I want my playlist, Mum!” Put your belt on, young man. “Pleeease?” Some politeness for a change. Belt. Now.
I get a second’s sweet peace as I hear the clunk-click. Then the noise: “Mum! I need my playlist right now!”
Robots can help improve mental well-being at work—as long as they look right Robots can be useful as mental well-being coaches in the workplace—but perception of their effectiveness depends in large part on what the robot looks like.
Google-backed Anthropic launches Claude, an AI chatbot that’s easier to talk to
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has launched its AI chatbot, Claude. While the tool does much of what OpenAI’s ChatGPT can, Anthropic says its early clients report the tool’s “less likely to produce harmful outputs” and is “easier to converse with.”
Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has big tech backing: Google invested $300 million into Anthropic in February. The company’s chatbot — similar to ChatGPT — can provide summaries, answer questions, provide assistance with writing, and generate code. You can also tweak the chatbot’s tone, personality, and behavior, which sounds a bit more comprehensive than the “creative, balanced, and precise” settings Bing’s chatbot offers.
After working for the past few moths with key partners like @NotionHQ, @Quora, and @DuckDuckGo, we’ve been able to carefully test out our systems in the wild. We are now opening up access to Claude, our AI assistant, to power businesses at scale. pic.twitter.com/m0QFE74LJD
Overall, the goal of Anthropic is to develop an AI assistant that’s “helpful, honest, and harmless.” It also has no ability to access the internet, as Anthropic says it’s designed to be “self-contained.”
In addition to launching the standard version of Claude, Anthropic is also releasing Claude Instant, a cheaper, faster, and lighter model when compared to its full-featured counterpart. Anthropic already gave several companies access to Claude in the months leading up to its launch, including Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo, which recently announced its Anthropic and OpenAI-powered DuckAssist search tool. You can view pricing information for both models and sign up for access to Claude here.
App turns Oppo’s Find N2 Flip cover display into a ‘fully functional mini phone’
Images show an app drawer, browser, and YouTube running on the Find N2 Flip’s cover display. | Image: Jagan2
CoverScreen OS is a piece of software that attempts to turn the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s small 3.26-inch cover display into a “fully functional mini phone.” Crucially, this means being able to access the app drawer and launch “almost any app” on the cover screen, massively increasing the amount you can do on the foldable flip phone without having to open it up. The software is downloadable from the Google Play Store.
CoverScreen OS has been available for awhile for the Samsung Z Flip 3 and 4. In fact, my colleague Allison tried it out on the Z Flip 4 last August. But while the app’s usefulness was limited on Samsung’s tiny 1.9-inch cover display, the Find N2 Flip’s portrait-oriented 3.26-inch, 720 x 382 cover display feels like it has a lot more potential.
When I reviewed the Find N2 Flip last month, I found myself getting frustrated by the limited functionality of its cover display despite being bigger than the cover display on Samsung’s flip phones. In practice I felt Oppo didn’t make the most of this larger screen real estate. The Find N2 Flip will only display the subject lines and not the body text of emails when you get a notification, for example, or only offer a few hours of weather forecasts rather than the whole day.
Image: Jagan2You can type using either a T9 or full Qwerty keyboard.
CoverScreen OS’s support for the Find N2 Flip is described as “experimental” and “initial” for now, but it has big ambitions. As well as the ability to launch full apps, it also aims to let you add widgets designed for the standard home screen. There’s support for a full Qwerty keyboard, voice typing, or an old-fashioned T9 keyboard. In a video demonstration, the developer demonstrates opening YouTube and then a web browser from the app drawer, and then typing into a text box using an onscreen keyboard.
Plus, according to the app’s developer, CoverScreen OS still leaves you able to use the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s default cover display functionality like system quick toggles and widgets. Just be warned that while it’s reportedly stable on Samsung’s flip phones, the app is a first preview version and still “requires some heavy sustained development effort to deliver a feature complete version,” according to its developers.
If you’d like to give CoverScreen OS a try, you can download it now over on the Google Play Store.
Sabrina Brier Is TikTok’s Latest Character Sabrina Brier is finding success online in the role of a 20-something in New York who’s trying to shed her basic suburban past.
USD Coin value falls after revealing $3.3bn held at Silicon Valley Bank
The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender
The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.
USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.
Sony wants to help low-vision users enjoy photography by shining lasers in their eyes
It’s like the eye-level finders of old medium format film cameras, but now for a compact digital camera — with lasers. | Image: Sony
Giant frickin’ laser beams get all the buzz and sci-fi love, but it’s our little laser bros that are putting in the work: taking measurements, entertaining our cats, and now, in the case of a Sony camera, helping people with vision problems see clearly through an electronic viewfinder and take pictures.
Sony is working with fellow Japanese company QD Laser to release the HX99 RNV Retina Projection Camera kit, a compact camera with an add-on retinal laser housing for projecting the camera’s focused live view image into the user’s eye. The low-power laser projection is designed to effectively bypass the focusing of the eye, helping users with visual impairments like shortsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism see a clear image.
It uses Sony’s existing DSC-HX99 compact camera, which is a somewhat middling model from 2018 with an 18-megapixel sensor and equivalent zoom lens of 24-720mm (30x magnification), combined with QD Laser’s Retissa Neoviewer projector. According to QD Laser’s specs, the Retissa Neoviewer uses an RGB semiconductor laser to display an image with an equivalent of 720p resolution and 8-bit color depth. This beamed image has an approximate 60-degree horizontal field of view with 60Hz refresh, and the housing’s battery has an estimated four hours of battery life. Tragically, it charges via Micro USB instead of USB-C.
Image: Sony
The Retissa Neoviewer has a plate and mount system designed specifically for the HX99 camera.
The extra kicker here is that while the DSC-HX99 camera normally costs $474.99 on its own, Sony is offering the kit with both the camera and laser projector for $599.99 — claiming it is bearing the majority of the cost in an effort to support the low-vision community. Sony is also encouraging users to try it before purchasing, as it may not be suitable for all visual impairments, and is offering appointments via phone or email. The camera and projector kit will be available in the US in limited quantities beginning this summer.
While this device is designed exclusively for the aging DSC-HX99, it isn’t technically limited to that camera. A spokesperson for QD Laser, Nori Miyauchi, said in a video interview with CineD on YouTube that other cameras can potentially work with it via HDMI. Of course, the housing for the Retissa Neoviewer looks tightly integrated to the dimensions and design of the DSC-HX99, potentially making it awkward to adapt to something like Sony’s popular Alpha line of interchangeable mirrorless cameras.
But hopefully this experiment means there can one day be a more universal model, allowing low-vision users to easily adapt it to the full-size camera of their choice.
An Indian tech company’s stock falls after it reveals a link to Silicon Valley Bank. Nazara Technologies, a mobile gaming company, said two of its subsidiaries had together more than $7.7 million in balances at the failed bank.
TikTok unveils European data security plan amid calls for US ban
Move comes as White House backs bill that could give it power to ban Chinese-owned app nationwide
TikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app.
The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company.
Lenovo has launched a new line of workstations co-designed with Aston Martin. They are impressive performers, using up to two of Intel's most powerful CPUs and up to four of Nvidia's most powerful professional graphics cards. The post Lenovo Builds a Workstation James Bond Would Love appeared first on TechNewsWorld.
ChatGPT could power voice assistants in General Motors vehicles
GM is reportedly using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service — which includes a ChatGPT API — to develop a virtual personal assistant for its vehicles. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The AI language models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT could soon be powering virtual assistants in General Motors vehicles. As reported by Reuters on Friday, an executive for GM has revealed that the American automaker is exploring potential uses for ChatGPT as part of a broader collaboration with Microsoft. Semafor similarly reported last week that “people with knowledge of the product” had specified GM was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service — which includes a ChatGPT API — to develop a virtual personal assistant for its vehicles.
GM Vice President Scott Miller provided some details for the project in an interview with Reuters last week, saying that “ChatGPT is going to be in everything.” Miller claimed that the chatbot could push things beyond voice commands currently used in vehicles by providing drivers with information about their vehicle’s features, such as advising the driver on what action to take when a diagnostic light appears on the dashboard or instructing the user on how to change a flat tire by displaying a video demonstration on the vehicle’s infotainment system.
Ford’s as-yet-unnamed assistant could also program functions like garage door codes, or integrating user schedules from a calendar to remind the driver of any upcoming meetings and tasks. According to Semafor, GM’s voice assistant won’t necessarily behave like ChatGPT or Bing Chat as the company plans to apply a “car-specific layer” to OpenAI’s tech.
“This shift is not just about one single capability like the evolution of voice commands, but instead means that customers can expect their future vehicles to be far more capable and fresh overall when it comes to emerging technologies,” a GM spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.
Microsoft already has a “long-term strategic relationship” with General Motors, having partnered with the automaker’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise in 2021 to use Microsoft’s Azure platform to develop GM’s autonomous vehicles. There’s no release timeline or even a formal announcement for General Motor’s ChatGPT integration plans as yet, and with details being so slim, it could be a while before we’re recreating scenes from Knight Rider in a new Chevrolet.
Go fishing with a record player using Jackery’s flagship solar generator
I don’t know why you’d want to bring your record collection while fishing in tights, but you be you, stud. | Image: Jackery
The absurdity of that promotional image aside, Jackery is actually a respected maker of big-ass portable batteries for anyone needing to recharge their lives when away from the grid. Today, the company is releasing details on its latest flagship product — the Explorer 3000 Pro — first revealed at CES in January alongside the lesser specced Explorer 1500 Pro.
The Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro comes loaded with AC and DC ports to charge almost anything you throw at it — including power tools, air conditioners, space heaters, microwaves, blenders, and all your gadgets — producing up to 3000W of sustained AC output with a 6000W peak. You also have the option of plugging up to 1400W of solar input into the unit to keep everything charged while on the go.
The 29kg (almost 64 pounds) power station is made portable by a telescoping handle and wheels to help you transport all 3024Wh of battery capacity. Unfortunately, Jackery’s still using NMC battery chemistry here instead of more advanced lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4, or LFP), which offers longer life and better performance.
Image: Jackery
You can plug up to six solar panels into the Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro to fully charge the battery in less than four hours if conditions are perfect (and they never are).
And as long as we’re complaining, Jackery also doesn’t provide an app to remotely monitor its solar generators. It also uses nonstandard eight-millimeter barrel connectors between its batteries and solar panels instead of industry standard XT60 / MC4. That means you’ll need to futz around with adapters to connect any third-party panels you might already own.
Otherwise, Jackery says the Explorer 3000 Pro can be charged from zero to 100 percent in three to four hours with perfect sun hitting six of the company’s 200W panels at a right angle. That charge time drops to 2.5 hours when plugged into an AC outlet pulling a maximum of 1800W, or 35 hours from a 12V / 8A car outlet.
As far as output jacks go, the Explorer 3000 Pro is fitted with 4x AC (120V, 2400W), 1x AC (120V, 3000W), 2x USB-A (Quick Charge 3.0, 18W), 2x USB-C (100W), and 1x car output (12V / 10A).
This is the third major bank that has fallen in the space of a week, and investors are spooked. The joint announcement that depositors will be protected above the $250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC appears to be meant to reassure banking customers that their money will not be frozen. Signature had $88.59 billion in deposits as of December 31, 2022. The New York Department of Financial Services has taken possession of the bank.
Signature was one of two banks that was widely used in cryptocurrency. Like Silvergate, which collapsed on March 8th, Signature had a network that let crypto companies transfer dollars in real-time. With both crypto banks gone, it may be harder to get back into dollars.
Additionally, the Fed’s announcement said that depositors at Silicon Valley Bank will also be made whole. That’s good news for crypto — since stablecoin provider Circle was keeping $3.3 billion of its reserves there. Circle operates USDC, a token that is always meant to be worth $1 — and an important part of crypto payments.
Also in the statement, the regulators said that depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, a non-crypto bank that failed on March 10 following a bank run, will have access to their uninsured deposits on Monday. The statement noted that in both cases, no losses would be paid for by taxes.
The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank
Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The fall of Silicon Valley Bank, explained
On the last night of its existence, Silicon Valley Bank was hosting VC Bill Reichert of Pegasus Tech Ventures, who was giving a presentation on “How to Pitch Your WOW! to Investors” to about 45 or 50 people. Mike McEvoy, the CEO of OmniLayers, recounted the scene for me. “It was eerie over there,” he said. He saw a number of people exiting the building during the event, looking subdued.
Roger Sanford, the CEO of Hcare Health and a self-described “professional Silicon Valley gadfly,” was also there. “Everyone was in denial,” he told me. “The band played on.”
The next day, the emblematic bank of the tech industry was shut down by regulators — the second-biggest bank failure in US history, after Washington Mutual in 2008.
What happened is a little complicated — and I’ll explain farther down — but it’s also simple. A bank run occurs when depositors try to pull out all their money at once, like in It’s a Wonderful Life. And as It’s a Wonderful Life explains, sometimes the actual cash isn’t immediately there because the bank used it for other things. That was the immediate cause of death for the most systemically and symbolically important bank in the tech industry, but to get to that point, a lot of other things had to happen first.
What is Silicon Valley Bank?
Founded in 1983 after a poker game, Silicon Valley Bank was an important engine for the tech industry’s success and the 16th largest bank in the US before its collapse. It’s easy to forget, based on the tech industry’s lionization of nerds, but the actual fuel for startups is money, not brains.
Silicon Valley Bank provided that fuel, working closely with many VC-backed startups. It claimed to be the “financial partner of the innovation economy” and the “go-to bank for investors.” Among those banking at SVB: the parent company of this here website. That’s not all. More than 2,500 VC firms banked there, and so did a lot of tech execs.
It fell in less than 48 hours.
What happens to Silicon Valley Bank’s customers?
Most banks are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a government agency that’s been around since the Great Depression. So of course, the accounts at Silicon Valley Bank were insured by the FDIC — but only up to $250,000. That’s how FDIC deposit insurance works.
That might be a lot of money for an individual, but we’re talking about companies here. Many have burn rates of millions of dollars a month. A recent regulatory filing reveals that about 90 percent of deposits were uninsured as of December 2022. The FDIC says it’s “undetermined” how many deposits were uninsured when the bank closed.
How bad could it get?
Even small disruptions to cash flow can have drastic effects on individuals, companies, and industries. So while one very likely outcome is that the uninsured depositors will eventually be made whole, the problem is that right now they have no access to that money.
The most immediate effect is on payroll. There are lots of people who are wondering if their next paycheck will be disrupted. Some people already know their paychecks will be; a payroll service company called Rippling had to tell its customers that some paychecks weren’t coming on time because of the SVB collapse. For some workers, that’s rent or mortgage payments, and money for groceries, gas, or childcare that isn’t coming.
This is especially rough for startups. A third of Y Combinator companies won’t be able to make payroll in the next 30 days, according to YC CEO Garry Tan. An unexpected mass furlough or layoff is a nightmare for most companies — after all, you can’t make sales if the salesforce isn’t coming into the office.
Some investors are loaning their companies money to make payroll. Penske Media, the largest investor of this website’s parent company, Vox Media, told The New York Times that “it was ready if the company required additional capital,” for instance. That’s good, because Vox Media has “a substantial concentration of cash” at Silicon Valley Bank. Of course, one other problem is that a lot of investors were also banking at SVB, too.
Payroll isn’t the only expense a company has: there are payments to software providers, cloud services, and so on, too. I’m just scratching the surface here.
Does this have something to do with crypto?
SVB’s failure didn’t have anything directly to do with the ongoing crypto meltdown, but it could potentially worsen that crisis, too. Crypto firm Circle operates a stablecoin, USDC, that’s backed with cash reserves — $3.3 billion of which are stuck at Silicon Valley Bank. That stablecoin should always be worth $1, but it broke its peg after SVB failed, dropping as low as 87 cents. Coinbase stopped conversions between USDC and the dollar.
On March 11th, Circle said that it “will stand behind USDC and cover any shortfall using corporate resources, involving external capital if necessary.” The stablecoin’s value mostly recovered.
Oh, and bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi also has $227 million in funds stuck, too.
So if SVB doesn’t exist anymore, what takes its place?
In response to the collapse, the FDIC created a new entity, the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara, for all insured deposits for Silicon Valley Bank. It will open for business on March 13th. People who have uninsured deposits will be paid an advanced dividend and get a little certificate, but that isn’t a guarantee people will get all their money back.
The FDIC’s job is to get the maximum amount from Silicon Valley Bank’s assets. That can happen a couple ways. One is that another bank acquires SVB, getting the deposits in the process. In the best-case scenario, that acquisition means that everyone gets all their money back — hooray! And that’s the best-case scenario not just for everyone who wants to get their paycheck on time, but also because the FDIC’s greater mission is to ensure stability and public confidence in the US banking system. If SVB’s assets can only be sold for, say, 90 cents on the dollar, it could encourage bank runs elsewhere.
Okay, but let’s say that acquisition doesn’t happen. Then what? Well, the FDIC evaluates, then sells the assets associated with Silicon Valley Bank over a period of weeks or months, with the proceeds going to depositors. Uninsured deposits rank high on the pay-back scale, behind only administrative expenses and insured deposits. So even if a sale doesn’t happen soon, the odds are high that customers will get their money back, assuming they can stay afloat waiting for it.
How did we get here?
So this is actually bigger than startups and Silicon Valley VCs. To understand how this happened, we’ve gotta talk about interest rates. Since 2008, they’ve been pretty low, sparking a venture capital boom and some real silliness (see: WeWork, Theranos, Juicero). There’s been a lot of froth for a long time, and it got worse during the pandemic, when the money printer went brrr. Meme stocks?Crypto boom? SPACs? Thank Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, who settled on zero percent interest rate policy (ZIRP).
So if you are, let’s say, a bank specializing in startups, do you know what ZIRP world does to you? Well, my children, according to the most recent annual filing from SVB, bank deposits grew as IPOs, SPACs, VC investment and so on went on at a frenetic pace.
And because of all these liquidity events — congrats, btw — no one needed a loan because they had all this cash. This is sort of a problem for a bank. Loans are an important way to make money! So, as explained in more detail by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, Silicon Valley Bank bought government securities. This was a fine and steady way for SVB to make money, but it also meant it was vulnerable if interest rates rose.
Which they did! Powell started cranking up rates to slow inflation, and told Congress this week that he expects to let them get as high as 5.75 percent, which is a lot higher than zero.
So did Silicon Valley just flunk the prisoner’s dilemma?
Okay, this mismatch in risk in and of itself won’t tip a bank over. A good old-fashioned bank run did that. And at Silicon Valley Bank, there was no George Bailey to stop it.
Here’s how it happened. When interest rates rose, VCs stopped flinging money around. Startups started drawing down more of their money to pay for their expenses, and SVB had to come up with cash to make that happen. That meant the bank needed to get liquidity — so it sold $21 billion of securities, resulting in an after-tax loss of $1.8 billion. It also came up with a plan to sell $2.2 billion in shares to help shore itself up. Moody’s downgraded the bank’s credit rating.
In its slide deck explaining all this, Silicon Valley Bank talks about — I am not making this up — “ample liquidity” and its “strong capital position.”
Now, recall, another bank called Silvergate had just collapsed (for crypto reasons). Investors, like horses, are easily spooked. So when Silicon Valley Bank made this announcement on March 8th, people bolted. Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund advised its portfolio companies to pull out, ultimately yanking millions. And you know how VCs love to follow trends! Union Square Ventures and Coatue Management, among others, decided to tell companies to pull their money, too.
This bank run happened fast, in less than two days. Tech nerds can take credit for that one. It used to be that you had to physically go to a bank to withdraw your money — or at least take the psychic damage of picking up a telephone. That slower process gave banks time to maneuver. In this case, digitalization meant that the money went out so fast that Silicon Valley Bank was essentially helpless, points out Samir Kaji, CEO of investing platform Allocate. Customers tried to withdraw $42 billion in deposits on March 9thalone — a quarter of the bank’s total deposits on a single day.
It was over the next day. The share sale was canceled. Silicon Valley Bank tried to sell itself. Then the regulators stepped in.
While the bank run was ongoing, Becker told VCs, “I would ask everyone to stay calm and to support us just like we supported you during the challenging times.” As anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship knows, telling someone else to calm down is a way to ensure they lose their entire goddamn mind. I think it might have been possible to staunch the bleeding if Becker had been even halfway good at PR. Obviously, he’s not.
It turns out Becker also sold $3.6 million of shares in Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company on February 27th. This was a pre-arranged sale — he filed the paperwork on January 26th — but it does seem like curious timing! Becker was presumably aware of his own balance sheet, and a director of a regional Fed bank. He had to know the Fed was going to keep raising interest rates — I mean, if I knew it, he’d better have known it — and he had to know that would be bad news for Silicon Valley Bank.
What does this mean for startupland?
The venture capital ecosystem exists because once upon a time, banks wouldn’t loan startups money. Think about it: a 23-year-old nerd slapping together a startup in someone’s garage or whatever usually doesn’t own anything they can put up as collateral against a loan.
One way that Silicon Valley Bank bolstered startups was by offering risky forms of financing. For instance, the bank lent against money owed to a business’ accounts receivables. Even riskier: the company lent against expected revenue for future services. Silicon Valley Bank also offered venture debt, which uses a VC investment as a way of underwriting a loan. And it worked! These kinds of products helped build Silicon Valley into the powerhouse it is now, says Jonathan Hirshon, who’s done high-tech PR for the last 30 years.
Startups aren’t the only ones who need to raise money. Venture capitalists do too — often from family offices or governments. Silicon Valley Bank invested in a number of VCs over the years, including Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock.
This kind of gets us to one of SVB’s key problems: Silicon Valley is actually a small town. And while that meant SVB was the cool banker for the tech and life sciences startups here, that also meant its portfolio wasn’t very diverse. The incestuous nature of Silicon Valley startups means gossip is a contact sport, because everyone here is hopelessly entwined with everyone else.
I don’t know if this is going to lead to bigger problems. It could! A lot of other banks are also losing money on their securities. But the gossipy nature of Silicon Valley, and the fact that so many of these firms are entwined, made the possibility of a bank run higher for SVB than it was for other places. Right now, rumors are flying in WhatsApp groupchats full of founders scrambling for cash. I suspect, too, that we’ll start seeing scammers attempting to target panicky technology brothers, to extract even more cash from them.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I do know, though, that SVB’s leadership weren’t the only ones who fucked up. This was the second big bank failure in a single week, suggesting our regulators were asleep at the wheel. And who was the primary regulator for both banks? Why, our friends at the Fed,
Has the 3D printing revolution finally arrived? Car engines, bespoke medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and now even a whole street of houses… Is the all-conquering promise of 3D printing finally coming true?
Nori bricks, which were first fired in the Lancashire town of Accrington in 1887, quickly became legendary as the hardest brick ever produced. Their strength, derived from the chemical properties of the local clay, enabled megastructures to rise up around the world, including the Blackpool Tower in 1894 and the Empire State Building in New York in 1930. Their name is said to be a cock-up from when they meant to write “iron” on the works’ chimney.
This year a different, though equally pioneering, construction material is set to bring attention to the town, which is 20 miles north of Manchester and whose most recent claim to fame is being trash-talked in a 1989 advert for milk. On Charter Street, on a patch of disused land owned by the council, there are plans to build 46 net-zero-carbon homes, ranging from single-bedroom apartments to four-bed houses, all occupied by low-income families or military veterans. The homes will be made not from Nori bricks, but from 3D-extruded concrete. When the development is complete, potentially in late 2023, it will be the largest printed building complex in Europe.
‘Not going to beg’: why entrepreneurs of color are increasingly self-funding
Raising funds from investors is unfavorable for marginalized founders, who face racial bias in the world of venture capital
Rechelle Balanzat, an Asian-American founder, has led her startup Juliette, a self-funded, app-enabled dry-cleaning startup since 2014. As a double minority in tech, Balanzat said she faced gender bias with investors, and also encountered investors who inflicted racial bias. Investors would often expect Balanzat to speak with an accent and if not they were amazed she could speak English, she said.
Balanzat said her decision to self-fund her startup was born out of necessity. In fact, she is not the only founder of color that finds venture capital fundraising to feel more like a marathon than a sprint. In actuality, many report that the process can feel more like running on a hamster wheel, endless and with no positive outcome.
White House backs bill that could give it power to ban TikTok nationwide
The bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national security
The White House said it backed legislation introduced on Tuesday by a dozen senators to give the administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.
The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans.
Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I. Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.
USD Coin value falls after revealing $3.3bn held at Silicon Valley Bank
The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender
The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.
USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Sets Off Blame Game Between Crypto and Tech The implosion of the Silicon Valley bank led to finger-pointing, as executives and investors jumped on the crisis for their own messaging.
How to edit ProRAW photos on your iPhone
Edit your ProRAW photo like a pro. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Apple’s ProRAW camera feature is a powerful tool to have in your back pocket. An image taken in ProRAW mode combines the same great post-processing flexibility of a traditional RAW file with the benefits of multi-frame computational photography. Kind of the best of both worlds! But once you’ve gone through the steps to enable it on your iPhone and have taken your photo, that’s when the real work starts: processing and converting it to a shareable format like JPEG, PNG, or HEIF.
ProRAW files are saved in Adobe’s ubiquitous DNG format, which is compatible with virtually every RAW photo editing app under the sun. That means you have a lot of options, including just sending the file to a computer and using desktop software. But you don’t need access to a computer — you can process your image right on your phone, either using a third-party app or Apple’s own editing tools. Here’s how to go about it. (I followed these steps on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.3.1.)
Editing and sharing a ProRAW photo with Apple Photos
You don’t need to download a separate app to edit ProRAW DNG files — Apple’s own Photos app will do the job. A third-party app will give you a lot more control, but for quick and basic functions like boosting exposure, Apple’s app is just fine.
Open your RAW photo and tap edit in the top right of the screen
If you’re viewing your image in the camera app gallery, the edit options will appear at the bottom of the screen
Scroll through the adjustment options below your image and use the tools you would like
You can tap the three-ring filter icon at the bottom of the screen to apply a filter. This is not to be confused with Apple’s Photographic Styles, which are “baked in” to the capture process
If you need to rotate the photo, use the crop tool, the icon on the bottom right of the editing pane
Tap Done at the bottom right of your screen to save your changes. There’s no option to save it as a separate image, but you can always revert your changes to the original by opening it again in the Photos app, tapping the three-dot menu icon in the upper right, and choosing Revert to Original.
Once you’ve made edits to your RAW file, you can use the Photos app’s sharing functions to export a JPEG version of your image. You can email it, post it to Instagram, or put it on your digital picture frame — it’s your choice.
Once you’re happy with your edits, you can use any of the sharing functions, and the app will automatically share a JPEG.
How to export a ProRAW file from your iPhone
So what if you want to export the original RAW image? That’s a little tricky. Once you’ve made edits in the Photos app, you can’t easily share the original DNG file. The only exception is if you’re AirDropping your image to a Mac. If that’s the case, there’s a way to send both the original file and a JPEG with your edits. Here’s how:
Scroll to your photo in the Photos app and tap the share / export icon in the lower left
Tap Options at the top of the screen
Toggle All Photos Data on and press Done
Tap the Airdrop icon below the image and choose your destination
On the Mac, tap Accept and Save to Downloads when prompted. This creates a folder in Downloads with both the DNG file and your edited JPEG.
If you aren’t AirDropping to a Mac and you want to save your DNG file somewhere else, you’ll have to make a copy of your edited RAW and revert changes.
In the Photos app, scroll to your image and tap the three-dot menu icon in the upper right
Tap Duplicate, then tap the three-dot menu and select Revert to Original
Tap the export icon in the lower left and choose how you’d like to send your file
You can AirDrop your edited JPEG and original DNG file to a Mac by toggling All Photos Data on in sharing options.
If you want to share your original DNG file without AirDrop, you’ll need to duplicate your image, revert changes, and share that version.
If you want a PNG or HEIF of your image rather than a JPEG, you need to follow a couple of extra steps. You can either directly convert an unedited DNG or make your edits in Apple Photos first and then convert the resulting JPEG to a PNG or HEIF — not ideal if you want to minimize compression, but it works. Here’s what to do:
Scroll to the image in Apple Photos and tap the share / export icon
Scroll down and tap Save to Files
Pick the folder you want to save to and tap Save
Open the Files app and locate your image
Long press the image thumbnail and tap Quick Actions
Select Convert image
Choose your format (JPEG, PNG, or HEIF) as well as image size (Small, Medium, Large, or Original)
Your converted image will be saved to the same folder
To save your photo in another format, save it to Files and find the Convert Image option under Quick Actions.
You can convert a DNG to a JPEG, PNG, or HEIF file.
Editing a ProRAW photo with a third-party app
If you have a photo-editing app that you’d prefer to use instead of Photos, that’s not a problem. You can start by either opening the Apple Photos app or by opening the photo editing app you want to use.
If you start in Photos, do the following:
Find the image you want to edit and tap the export / share icon at the bottom left of the screen
Scroll through the suggested app icons just below the image. If your editor is there, tap the icon to open your file in the app
If you don’t see the app icon you’re looking for, tap the three-dot More icon for additional options
Exporting your RAW file this way will only work if you haven’t made any edits to the photo in the Photos app. If you edited it there first, it will export as a JPEG.
If you prefer to start in your photo editing app of choice, just follow that app’s procedure for importing a new image. For example, in Snapseed — my favorite free editor — that’s just a matter of opening the app, tapping the plus icon and choosing Open from Device.
This smart oven solved my work-from-home lunchtime conundrum
Tovala reinvents the TV dinner with its connected oven combined with a meal delivery service that cooks healthy, delicious meals in under 20 minutes. But as a smart oven, it’s a disappointment.
The one thing no one tells you about working from home is that you have to make your own lunch. And my midday eating habits have become dire. It’s hard to whip up something in 10 minutes that’s healthy, tastes good, and doesn’t exist between two slices of bread — I hate sandwiches, and I don’t live near any quick lunch spots. I’ve tried all sorts of “easy” options — ready-to-eat supermarket offerings to bland and soggy microwave meals — only to be disappointed, as I always am by TV dinner-style options. Then, I met the Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer.
Tovala’s latest oven is a $250 smart countertop appliance designed to cook the company’s fresh meal kits perfectly. A built-in scanner lets you just pop the food in, scan a QR code that comes with the kit, and in under 20 minutes, a tasty meal is ready. The oven can also scan a selection of store-bought groceries and works as a standard countertop oven.
The Tovala meals were really good, transforming my weekday meal experiences from an unsatisfying hassle to simple and yummy. I enjoyed Italian sausage and vegetable minestrone on Wednesday, tandoori spiced chicken breast on Thursday, a Korean BBQ salmon bowl on Friday (this was so tasty), and a sweet hoisin beef and veggie bowl the following Monday.
But I didn’t find the oven’s scan-to-cook feature all that helpful outside of Tovala’s meals. With no option to customize the preset cooking functions, I was occasionally left with food that was slightly undercooked for my taste. As an air fryer, the Tovala was nowhere near as good as my $100 Ninja, and it was also underwhelming as a smart oven. (Although, as a category, smart ovens are still finding their way.)
I tested Tovala’s newest model, the Smart Oven Air Fryer ($249). The Wi-Fi-connected oven can toast, air fry (it comes with a basket), bake, reheat, and broil. It’s the company’s third model following its launch on Kickstarter in 2017. Tovala also sells the Tovala Smart Oven Pro ($299, with the addition of a steam oven).
Tovala’s meal kits are what make the Tovala Smart Oven worth buying, and you can really only cook those meals with the Tovala oven — there are no instructions for cooking them any other way. You can buy the oven for just $99 if you sign up for six weeks’ worth of meals — which start at around $60 a week plus shipping — over six months.
It’s not that the Tovala oven can only cook Tovala meals — I could scan to cook various brand-name groceries, follow along with some recipes in the app to make my own dishes from scratch, or just use it as a regular oven. But it’s much better at cooking the Tovala meals than anything else, which makes this more of a meal kit subscription with a connected oven than a true smart oven.
While the concept of a smart oven is still being refined, I expected more than just preprogrammed recipes. The cooking function here is probably the smartest thing about it — custom cook cycles switch between multiple cooking modes and different temperatures automatically.
The Tovala comes with an air fry basket, a sheet tray, and an oven glove.
Compared to, say, a June smart oven, which uses AI to identify food and cook it accurately, the Tovala is less impressive (also several hundred dollars cheaper). The Tovala’s only smart home integration is Siri Shortcuts (no Alexa or Google Assistant voice control). App control is limited to sending a program to the oven and getting an alert when it’s done. You can’t start or stop the oven remotely or adjust temperatures on the fly as you can with other connected cookers.
I also couldn’t sync the oven with any of my favorite recipe apps or another meal delivery service — not even to send the correct temperature to the oven. Ecosystem lock-in isn’t unusual in the smart kitchen space, where cross-platform compatibility is fragmented and spotty. But all I want is a smart oven that I can send any recipe to and then cook it with the push of a button with no programming required. Why is that so hard?
While the Tovala does let you manually program any recipe to the oven using the app, its smart features work best with its own food. After testing the oven for two weeks, I would recommend buying it if you plan to use the meal kits at least occasionally, but not as a standalone smart oven.
Tovala’s fresh meals are excellent and easy to cook
You cook all the parts of the Tovala meal kit at the same time by just scanning a QR code and pressing start.
Tovala supplied me with eight meals during my test period, delivered fresh to my door in well-thought-out packaging. And everything was very good. Not only were the dishes easy to make but also there were actual flavor profiles, great texture combinations, and plenty of add-ons to make each meal look and taste varied and interesting.
The oven also cooked everything perfectly — doing a better job in a shorter time than I could have managed if I had tried to make any of these from scratch. I enjoyed what tasted like a home-cooked meal every lunchtime with little to no effort on my part. That’s a win in my book.
Unlike some meal delivery services, there’s no chopping, marinading, preheating, or prepping — you put it all in the oven at once, press a button, and out comes a perfectly cooked meal. It’s the microwave oven meal reimagined to taste better. This is clearly a need in the category; Blue Apron recently added ready-to-cook meals, and many services now offer prep-free options.
With Tovala, everything — carbohydrate, protein, veggies — goes in simultaneously (sometimes in different containers). The oven uses custom cook cycles that switch between multiple cooking modes and different temperatures to cook every part of the meal perfectly. Then, once done, you assemble it on a plate or bowl and eat.
For example, to make the pictured Korean BBQ salmon bowl, I unpacked the small brown box that contained everything I needed, including a recipe card, a piece of vacuum-wrapped salmon, a bag of broccoli, some sauce packets, and two aluminum trays, one of which had uncooked rice in it.
Following the directions on the included card (which are also in the Tovala app), I put the broccoli in the tray with the rice, put the salmon in the other tray, and covered it with the sauce. Both trays went in the oven, and I scanned the QR code.
Seventeen minutes later, out came perfectly cooked rice and just-right salmon. I assembled everything in a bowl, stirred in the provided sesame sauce, and added the optional toppings of pickled cucumbers and crunchy noodles.
The Korean BBQ salmon bowl was very good.
The app sent a notification to my phone when the dish was done — so I could keep working until the food was ready and then sit down and enjoy my meal rather than spending 20 minutes cooking and trying to eat quickly to get back to work. The one hiccup I had was that the scanning function only works with an internet connection. My Wi-Fi went down one lunchtime, and I couldn’t cook the meal kit by scanning the code. I did eventually find some instructions for cooking without Wi-Fi on the Tovala support site (and the oven still works as a regular oven without internet).
Overall, it was so easy that I wished I could use it for dinner, too, but the Tovala service isn’t designed for my family of four. You can only cook up to two portions at a time, making it best suited for one or two people. But it worked as a solo lunchtime option, and I was impressed with the quality and taste.
The meal service is also not cheap. Meals start at $10 each, and most are around $13. There’s a minimum of four meals per week (with a maximum of 16), and including the flat rate of $10 shipping, my four meals cost $60 to $70 per week, around $15 to $17 per meal. That’s much more expensive than a $4 Trader Joe’s frozen chicken tikka masala — but also way tastier and more filling. It’s also cheaper and, on balance, probably healthier than Uber Eats or Grubhub. The menu choices were limited, though, especially if you’re a vegetarian or on any restricted diet. It doesn’t appear to have the breadth of options of some bigger meal services.
As a smart oven, Tovala isn’t so hot
The Tovala is a pretty standard countertop oven.
While the oven costs $250 as a standalone purchase, you don’t need to use Tovala’s meal kits or commit to any subscription to use it, so it’s something of a bargain for a smart oven. The June smart oven starts at $900 and the Brava at $1,295. Then there are highly rated “smart” countertop ovens, like the Breville Smart Oven Pro, for around $300. These generally aren’t connected but are more advanced than your standard toaster oven, with preset cooking options, multiple cooking modes, and other features that make cooking easier.
However, all of these options are, first and foremost, very good ovens — the June (which I have tested) and the Brava (which I have not) deploy innovative heating techniques for faster cook times. (The Brava can cook three zones independently.) The Breville is a very well-reviewed oven. It’s a Wirecutter favorite, and my parents have one and love it.
Compared to these ovens, the Tovala felt a bit basic, which shouldn’t be surprising for the price. The times I ventured outside of the meal kits, the results were disappointing. My Eggo waffles were underdone — despite scanning the Eggo box, as were my MorningStar Mozzarella Sticks.
The Tovala’s air fryer mode was no match for my Ninja. The nuggets on the right were from the Tovala, and the ones on the left were from the Ninja.
Air frying was lackluster compared to my Ninja Air Fryer. I cooked chicken nuggets in both at the same temperature and for the same amount of time, and the Ninja won hands down. The Tovala specifically bills itself as an air fryer, so this was a disappointment.
Tovala also offers step-by-step recipes in its app for making dishes from scratch. There is a decent selection, and this would be handy for beginner chefs. I didn’t get a chance to test many of these out, as I was feeding four to six people each night, and this oven just can’t handle that. But I did use it for a few side dishes and found the reheat button useful — this also cycles through cooking modes and does a better job than my microwave at evenly reheating and crisping up leftovers.
The couple of Tovala recipes I did try weren’t super successful, however. My deviled eggs popped and leaked all over the oven, and when I tried a second batch, the preset cook cycle wouldn’t let me shorten the cooking time. And the air-fried carrots came out distinctly soggy rather than nicely crisp.
While I like the oven’s simple physical controls (no fiddly touchscreen), I found them a bit limiting. For example, I couldn’t dial in a specific temperature; it only allowed me to enter in temperatures in 25-degree increments, so 375 or 400 degrees Fahrenheit and nothing in between.
The Tovala Oven has simple, easy-to-use physical controls and a very handy reheat button.
For a single person or a couple who likes fresh food but is too busy to shop and cook, Tovala offers a useful solution if you’re fine with a more basic countertop oven outside of cooking Tovala meals. (This is not the oven to try if you want to give air frying a whirl.) While there are plenty of other meal kit options out there, the added convenience of an oven that’s specially programmed to cook your meal to perfection takes all the prep and guesswork out of the process.
As a lunch option for a busy work-from-home mom, the Tovala is very tempting. If it could replace my Ninja, this would be a must-buy for me. But my chicken nugget eater roundly rejected Tovala’s attempts to cook her favorite food, and I don’t have room for two countertop ovens. And what is parenting, if not many small sacrifices?
For Palestinian Tech Worker in Israel, Pride, Frustration and 4-Hour Commute Moha Alshawamreh is among the few Palestinians who work in Israel’s tech industry. His commute shows both the inequities of life in the West Bank and an exception to them.
Tesla cuts prices for its most expensive electric vehicles to drive demand
Cuts range from 4% on performance version of Model S to 9% on more expensive Model X
Tesla has cut prices on its two most expensive electric vehicles in the United States, according to the company’s website, days after its chief executive, Elon Musk, said recent price cuts on other models had stoked demand.
The price cuts, Tesla’s fifth adjustment since the start of the year, ranged from 4% on the performance version of the Model S to 9% on the more expensive Model X.
Meta is cutting its Reels Play bonus program on Instagram and Facebook
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Short-form video creators on Instagram and Facebook will soon lose one way of making money on the platforms.
Meta is ending its Reels Play bonus program, which rewards content creators when they hit certain goals for views on their videos. The change, first reported by Business Insider, will affect creators on Facebook and US creators on Instagram. The company won’t offer any new or renewed Reels Play bonus deals, but will honor existing commitments over the next 30 days, according to Business Insider.
“We are evolving the test of our Reels Play bonus on Instagram and Facebook as we focus on investing in a suite of monetization solutions to help creators earn steady streams of income,” Paige Cohen, a Meta spokesperson, told The Verge in an email. “We will look into ways to run the program in a more targeted form, for example in potential new markets.”
The Reels bonus program has had its ups and downs since Meta launched it in 2021 to try to compete with TikTok. Initially, creators saw huge payouts — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. But over the course of 2022, some creators reported that payments had been shrinking and that it was becoming harder to make the same amount in bonuses.
Cohen noted that creators can still earn money through things like subscriptions and brand partnerships. The Reels bonuses were part of Meta’s two-year, $1 billion pool of money that the company promised would go to creators through 2022.
Similar incentives at other companies have also slowly been shrinking. There was something of a gold rush on Snapchat in 2020 when the company announced it would pay $1 million a day for hit content on its TikTok-esque feature, Spotlight. That amount was gradually cut over the course of 2022, and other monetization methods like ad revenue sharing were introduced. YouTube initially offered cash payouts to get creators to make content for its TikTok clone, Shorts, but announced it was moving to a revenue sharing model last fall.
Other companies like TikTok are retooling creator funds and incentivizing new types of content. The short-form video app recently announced an updated fund that only rewards creators who make videos longer than one minute. Monetization directly from platforms has been an issue: under the original TikTok fund, some creators reported low earnings even for viral videos.
Starbucks sold 2,000 NFTs in 20 minutes — coffee not included
Image: Starbucks
It’s been more than a year since NFT sales peaked — and then collapsed — but that’s not stopping enterprising multi-billion dollar corporations from trying to get in on the action.
Starbucks launched its first paid collection of NFTs today, a group of 2,000 digital “stamps,” each priced at $100. Starbucks calls its NFTs “Journey Stamps,” a less technical-sounding term that the uninitiated might use as a way to explain what they just spent money on. And people did buy them — CoinDesk reports that the “stamps” sold out in under 20 minutes.
The coffee company first launched its NFT and Web3 push in December, when it opened up a new membership program called Starbucks Odyssey. An extension of the existing Starbucks rewards program that gives customers perks like free drink upgrades, Odyssey promises to deliver new benefits and “immersive coffee experiences that [customers] cannot get anywhere else” as members complete games, quizzes, and make purchases. Rewards might include virtual classes, access to merchandise, or a trip to a Starbucks coffee farm at higher membership tiers. Free coffee, notably, isn’t listed as a possible reward. Purchasing an NFT gives members additional “points” that they can use to level up their tier.
Dozens of big brands have wrung the NFT towel dry over the past couple years. A non-exhaustive list: Taco Bell, Nike, Adidas, Paramount, GameStop, a bunch of celebrities via a revamped LimeWire, the NBA, CNN, and the list goes on. What’s particularly odd about the Starbucks NFTs is that they’re coming so late, though the most devout Starbucks and crypto fans did scoop them up. According to Nifty Gateway, 1,164 people own an NFT from the new collection.
As a casual Starbucks drinker, seeing a new membership program made me think of one thing: how my Starbucks “stars” are worth less now under the updated rewards program that the company announced earlier this year. You could call it shrink-flation for the original virtual coffee tokens. And when times are tough for rewards programs, I suppose selling off a slew of new digital tokens makes sense — especially when there are people who’ll buy them.
Best podcasts of the week: Civil rights activist James Meredith reflects on his remarkable life
In this week’s newsletter: The first Black student at the University of Mississippi looks back at segregation and his activism and legacy in Breaking Mississippi. Plus: five of the best Oscars podcasts
Northern News
Widely available, episodes weekly “Mum Finds Soggy Whole Potato in her Packet of Cheese and Onion Crisps!” That’s just one of the headlines that “northerners-in-London” comedians Amy Gledhill and Ian Smith are catching up on in local newspapers from back home in the opener of this fun, breezy series. As they check in on the happenings up north, they’re joined by guests such as Maisie Adam, Isy Suttie, Tim Key, Phil Wang, Rosie Jones and Nick Helm. Hollie Richardson
When Quitting Videos Go Viral On TikTok and YouTube, workers are sharing their stories of leaving their jobs, giving them a sense of power over often untenable situations.
Green gold: Torrefied biomass to replace coal and oil In February, the Estonian-based startup New Standard Oil successfully commissioned their first industrial-scale prototype for drying and torrefaction of biogenic feedstock operating with superheated steam at atmospheric pressure. The energy-efficient process was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart, Germany, and produces valuable raw materials for the chemical and energy industries: basic chemicals, biocoal and water.
Sensitive personal data of US House and Senate members hacked, offered for sale
Breach in the systems of DC Health Link, a health insurance company, led to 170,000 records being compromised
Members of the House and Senate were informed Wednesday that hackers may have gained access to their sensitive personal data in a breach of a Washington, DC, health insurance marketplace. Employees of the lawmakers and their families were also affected.
DC Health Link confirmed that data on an unspecified number of customers was affected and said it was notifying them and working with law enforcement. It said it was offering identity theft service to those affected and extending credit monitoring to all customers.
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