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 Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPad 16 years ago today, marking over one and a half decades of the company's "revolutionary" tablet.
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Amazon is rethinking its grocery business, and as part of that, it will shut down all of its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores. The company will convert some locations into Whole Foods Market stores.
"While we've seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven't yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion," the company wrote in a blog post. Amazon added that it would help workers at Go and Fresh stores to find positions elsewhere within the company.
For now, Amazon is focusing its grocery efforts on Fresh deliveries, Amazon Now (a 30-minutes-or-less delivery option it recently introduced to compete with DoorDash and Instacart) and Whole Foods. It plans to open more than 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.
Amazon also says it will introduce new types of physical locations in the coming years. One concept it's considering is a "supercenter" that would offer a broad selection of goods from Amazon, including household items, groceries and "general merchandise." I dunno, that just sounds like a supermarket to me.
Meanwhile, the checkout-less Just Walk Out tech that the company implemented in Go and Fresh stores is still in use at third-party locations, including hosp
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The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.
As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.
The decision to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom is part of a broader effort to rely less on foreign software services — particularly US ones. Under the Suite Numérique project, France also plans to jettison the likes of Gmail and Slack for government use.
"The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said. "This strategy highlights France's commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or ser
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Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation's Online Safety Act and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts.
The move follows the Online Safety Act's Protection of Children Codes, which took effect last summer and require adult sites to use "highly effective" methods of age verification. Aylo claims the system is backfiring and shifting both adults and minors to noncompliant porn sites that don't verify age or moderate content according to Politico. Aylo's lawyers argued that only device-based age verification methods sufficiently protect user data.
Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said "anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February 2 will no longer be able to access [the sites] and they're going to be met with a wall," according to
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 Samsung aims to produce around 1 million units of its upcoming "Wide Fold" device, in an attempt to directly rival Apple's rumored foldable iPhone expected later this year.
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 Meta plans to test premium subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, the company has told TechCrunch.
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