"Meta is cutting prices for two of its virtual reality headsets as it continues trying to boost adoption for the nascent technology on which it has bet its future," reports CNN: The company announced Friday that it is slashing the price of its higher-end Meta Quest Pro headset by some $500, bringing its cost to $999, roughly six months after it was released. Meta is also lowering the price of its Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The price cut for the Quest 2 will go into effect in more than a dozen countries including the United States on Sunday. The Quest Pro price drop will take effect the same day in the United States and Canada and on March 15 in all other countries where it is sold.

"Our goal has always been to create hardware that's affordable for as many people as possible to take advantage of all that VR has to offer," the company said in a blog post.
Yahoo Finance believes Meta is lowering prices "because consumers are, well, just not buying as many as the company expected." The Verge agrees that the Meta Quest Pro was "an absolute boondoggle of a device" — but suggests that's not the whole story.

"if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well." Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president for VR, told staff that Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets thus far. That includes both the Quest and Quest 2.... That seems like a small number, but the Nintendo GameCube only sold 21 million consoles in its entire lifespan, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold approximately 20 million consoles thus far. So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well.
Their conclusion? "Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games.... And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it's kind of ignoring that core gamer audience."

An anonymous reader quotes an article from Fortune: Earlier this month, job advice platform Resumebuilder.com surveyed 1,000 business leaders who either use or plan to use ChatGPT. It found that nearly half of their companies have implemented the chatbot. And roughly half of this cohort say ChatGPT has already replaced workers at their companies....

Business leaders already using ChatGPT told ResumeBuilders.com their companies already use ChatGPT for a variety of reasons, including 66% for writing code, 58% for copywriting and content creation, 57% for customer support, and 52% for meeting summaries and other documents. In the hiring process, 77% of companies using ChatGPT say they use it to help write job descriptions, 66% to draft interview requisitions, and 65% to respond to applications.

Overall, most business leaders are impressed by ChatGPT's work," ResumeBuilder.com wrote in a news release. "Fifty-five percent say the quality of work produced by ChatGPT is 'excellent,' while 34% say it's 'very good....'" Nearly all of the companies using ChatGPT said they've saved money using the tool, with 48% saying they've saved more than $50,000 and 11% saying they've saved more than $100,000....

Of the companies ResumeBuilder.com identified as businesses using the chatbot, 93% say they plan to expand their use of ChatGPT, and 90% of executives say ChatGPT experience is beneficial for job seekers — if it hasn't already replaced their jobs.

Google has begun letting Android developers kick the tyres of its claimed reboot of ad-targeting -- announcing the launch of the first Beta for its "Privacy Sandbox," an adtech stack proposal which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, behavioral targeting capability on web users' eyeballs. From a report: A "small percentage" of eligible Android 13 devices will be enrolled in the trial of the beta from today as the adtech giant starts a gradual (but it says global) rollout of the beta -- which will "expand over time." (It's published developer guidance on participating in the beta here.) Ad partners for the trial include TechCrunch's parent Yahoo, mobile games maker Rovio, mobility firm Wolt, cross-platform games engine Unity and mobile marketing platforms AppsFlyer, InMobi Exchange and Adjust. "If your device is selected for the Beta, you'll receive an Android notification letting you know," Google adds in a blog post -- implying Android users will be opted in to the experimental, interest-based ad targeting (and will have to actively opt out if they don't wish their eyeballs to be guinea pigs).

Yahoo plans to lay off more than 20% of its total workforce as part of a major restructuring of its ad tech unit, executives told Axios. The cuts will impact more than 50% of Yahoo's ad tech employees -- more than 1,600 people. Axios reports: In an interview, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone stressed that the layoffs are not attributable to financial challenges, but rather, strategic changes to the company's Yahoo for Business advertising unit, which is not profitable. These changes will be "tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall," he said, which will allow the company "to go on offense" and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable. Yahoo as a whole is profitable and brings in roughly $8 billion in annual revenue, Axios has reported.

Roughly 1,000 positions will be eliminated Thursday, representing 12% of the total planned cuts at Yahoo. The remaining 8% or more of cuts will occur in the second half of this year. Lanzone said he couldn't provide the exact number of future cuts, but confirmed that the total number of layoffs would amount to more than 50% of the ad tech unit's current staff, and more than 20% of Yahoo's current staff.

As part of the changes, Yahoo will shut down a part of its advertising business called its SSP, or supply-side platform, which helps digital publishers sell automated ads against their content. It will also shut down its native advertising platform, called Gemini, and instead will leverage its newly-formed partnership with ad tech giant Taboola to sell native advertising on its own content instead. By moving to Taboola, Yahoo will be able to increase the number of advertisers competing for ad placements on Yahoo properties by 8x, Lanzone said. The company is opting to shut down the SSP business instead of selling it, in part because it didn't want to be locked into a post-sale agreement where it would be forced to use its SSP exclusively, Lanzone said. Working with many different SSPs will help Yahoo optimize its ad revenue.

Dispatchers for 911 emergency calls "are being inundated with false, automated distress calls from Apple devices owned by skiers who are very much alive," reports the New York Times: "Do you have an emergency?" [911 emergency dispatcher] Betts asked. No, the man said, he was skiing — safely, happily, unharmed. Slightly annoyed, he added, "For the last three days, my watch has been dialing 911."

Winter has brought a decent amount of snowfall to [Colorado]'s ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners have been debilitated in collisions. As of September, these devices have come equipped with technology meant to detect car crashes and alert 911 dispatchers. It is a more sensitive upgrade to software on Apple devices, now several years old, that can detect when a user falls and then dial for help. But the latest innovation appears to send the device into overdrive: It keeps mistaking skiers, and some other fitness enthusiasts, for car-wreck victims.

Lately, emergency call centers in some ski regions have been inundated with inadvertent, automated calls, dozens or more a week. Phone operators often must put other calls, including real emergencies, on hold to clarify whether the latest siren has been prompted by a human at risk or an overzealous device. "My whole day is managing crash notifications," said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County's emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

"Apple needs to put in their own call center if this is a feature they want," she said.
Apple acknowledged this was occuring in "some specific scenarios," the Times reports — but a spokesperson also "noted that when a crash is detected, the watch buzzes and sends a loud warning alerting the user that a call is being placed to 911, and it provides 10 seconds in which to cancel the call."

But the Times points out that "skiers, in helmets and layers of clothing, often do not to detect the warning, so they may not cancel the call or respond to the 911 dispatcher."

In 2017 the New York Times covered research co-authored by John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas, into Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, "one of the largest and least regulated exchanges in the industry." Mr. Griffin looked at the flow of digital tokens going in and out of Bitfinex and identified several distinct patterns that suggest that someone or some people at the exchange successfully worked to push up prices when they sagged at other exchanges. To do that, the person or people used a secondary virtual currency, known as Tether, which was created and sold by the owners of Bitfinex, to buy up those other cryptocurrencies.
To reach this conclusion, the paper's two authors "sifted through an incredible 200 gigabytes of trading data, equal to the troves that the Smithsonian Institution collects in two years," according to a new article in Fortune, "and followed sales and purchases from 2.5 million separate wallets."

The researchers ultimately concluded that a single, still unidentified, Bitcoin "whale" triggered nearly 60% of Bitcoin's one-year rise in 2017 from under $1,000 to over $19,000. But more importantly, Fortune now reports that Griffin "suspects that a similar dynamic is operating today." Toward the end of 2022, another mystifying trend caught Griffin's eye. Despite the crypto crash and myriad other negative forces, every time Bitcoin briefly breached the $16,000 floor, it bounced above that level and kept stubbornly trading between $16,000 and $17,000. Almost unbelievably, as the crypto market has continued to unravel into 2023, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction, trading up 35% since Jan. 7 to $23,000.

"It's very suspicious," Griffin told Fortune. "The same mechanism we saw in 2017 could be at play now in the still unreal Bitcoin market."

For Griffin, the way normally super-volatile Bitcoin went calm and stable in the stormiest of times for crypto fits a scenario where boosters are uniting to support and juice its price. "If you're a crypto manipulator, you want to set a floor under the price of your coin," added Griffin. "In a period of highly negative sentiment, we've seen suspiciously solid floors under Bitcoin."

It's important to note that no definitive proof of chicanery has so far emerged. "The space is bigger now so it's harder to dig the data," says Griffin. "Sophisticated players may be expert at hiding their identities." We have seen credible leaks asserting that major market participants call meetings of the sector's elite when they fear a crypto leader plans to make what they consider a reckless, industry-endangering move. But no evidence has surfaced that the players are gathering to coordinate buying of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Fortune data editor Scott DeCarlo ran a detailed analysis and found, among other things, that Bitcoin "at peak FTX-induced turmoil showed both its smallest swings ever by a wide margin, and divergence from low to high that was one-fourth to one-fifth its average over the past six years." And they're not the only ones asking questions: In a blog post on Nov. 30 titled "Bitcoin's Last Stand," European Central Bank Director General for market operations Ulrich Bindseil and ECB adviser Jürgen Schaaf dismissed Bitcoin's resurgence as "an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance." Two leading figures on Wall Street told this writer on background that Bitcoin's price action, by resisting a flood of bad news, looks phony and different from a normal free market ruled by independent buyers and sellers.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader wired_parrot for submitting the story.

Intel, struggling with a rapid drop in revenue and earnings, is cutting management pay across the company to cope with a shaky economy and to preserve cash for an ambitious turnaround plan. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger is taking a 25% cut to his base salary, the chipmaker said Tuesday. His executive leadership team will see their pay packages decrease by 15%. Senior managers will take a 10% reduction and mid-level managers a 5% cut. Intel shares climbed 0.1% in premarket trading in New York Wednesday. The stock lost almost half its value last year. "As we continue to navigate macroeconomic headwinds and work to reduce costs across the company, we've made several adjustments to our 2023 employee compensation and rewards programs," Intel said in a statement. "These changes are designed to impact our executive population more significantly and will help support the investments and overall workforce needed to accelerate our transformation and achieve our long-term strategy." The move follows a gloomy outlook from Intel last week, when the company predicted one of the worst quarters in its more than 50-year history. Stiffer competition and a sharp slowdown in personal-computer demand has wiped out profits and eaten into Intel's cash reserves. At the same time, Gelsinger wants to invest in the company's future. He's two years into a turnaround effort aimed at restoring Intel's technological leadership in the $580 billion chip industry.

Fortune reports on what happened next: As questions piled up over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the entire company in a meeting on Monday to answer questions, and announced then that top executives would take a pay cut this year as part of the company's cost reduction measures, Business Insider reported. Pichai said that all roles above the senior vice president level will witness "very significant reduction in their annual bonus," adding that for senior roles the compensation was linked to company performance. It was not immediately clear how big Pichai's own pay cut would be.
Reuters also points out that Pichai "received a massive hike in salary a few weeks before Google announced layoffs." But Fortune makes an interesting comparison: Pichai's move to cut the pay for senior executives comes only weeks after Apple's Tim Cook announced his compensation would be 40% lower amid shareholder pressure. The iPhone maker had a strong 2022 and remains one of the few tech behemoths that hasn't announced layoffs yet.
Last year Apple's share price still dropped 27%, reports Forbes, and "According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected next month to report its first quarterly sales decline in over three years."

Yet Apple seems to have avoided layoffs — which Forbes argues is because Apple didn't hire aggressively during the pandemic. Compared to the other Big Tech companies, Apple scaled its workforce at a relatively slow pace and has generally followed the same hiring rate since 2016. While there was a hiring surge in Silicon Valley during the pandemic, Apple added less than 7,000 jobs in 2020....

The tech companies undergoing layoffs right now hired fervently during their pandemic — and even before. Alphabet has consecutively expanded its workforce at least 10% annually since 2013, according to CNBC....

Since 2012, Meta has expanded its workforce by thousands each year. In 2020, Zuckerberg increased headcount by 30% — 13,000 workers. The following year, the social media platform added another 13,000 employees to its payroll. Those two years marked the biggest growth in the company's history.

Amazon has initiated its plan to separate more than 18,000 white-collar professionals from its payroll. In 2021, the online retailer hired an estimated 500,000 employees, according to GeekWire, becoming the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart. A year later, the company expanded its workforce by 310,000.
Entrepeneur supplies some context about those layoffs at Google: Reports indicate qualifying staff who were let go will receive their full notification period salary plus a severance package beginning at 16 weeks' pay and two additional weeks for every year of employment. Also part of the package: bonuses, vacation time, and health care coverage for up to six months will be paid for, along with job placement and immigration support.
Entrepreneur also notes reports that Google's latest round of layoffs "affected 27 massage therapists across Los Angeles and Irvine."

Far below our feet, a giant may have started moving against us. From a report: Earth's inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning in the same direction as the rest of the planet and might even be rotating the other way, research suggested on Monday. Roughly 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) below the surface we live on, this "planet within the planet" can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core. Exactly how the inner core rotates has been a matter of debate between scientists -- and the latest research is expected to prove controversial. What little is known about the inner core comes from measuring the tiny differences in seismic waves -- created by earthquakes or sometimes nuclear explosions -- as they pass through the middle of the Earth.

Seeking to track the inner core's movements, new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience analysed seismic waves from repeating earthquakes over the last six decades. The study's authors, Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang of China's Peking University, said they found that the inner core's rotation "came to near halt around 2009 and then turned in an opposite direction." "We believe the inner core rotates, relative to the Earth's surface, back and forth, like a swing," they told AFP. "One cycle of the swing is about seven decades", meaning it changes direction roughly every 35 years, they added. They said it previously changed direction in the early 1970s, and predicted the next about-face would be in the mid-2040s. The researchers said this rotation roughly lines up with changes in what is called the "length of day" -- small variations in the exact time it takes Earth to rotate on its axis.

As farmers in Europe and across the world grapple with increases in the cost of fertilizers, researchers suggest a solution may be closer to home in what people flush down the toilet. From a report: A peer-reviewed paper by scientists in Europe published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that fertilizer made from human feces and urine is safe to use, and that only extremely tiny quantities of chemicals from medicines or drugs, for example, would get into the food. Governments worldwide are struggling to keep fertilizer costs manageable and increase self-sufficiency after Russia's invasion of Ukraine drove up prices of natural gas, a key feedstock for crop nutrients. European Union authorities are considering ways to speed up development of manure-based fertilizers after the surge in costs spurred anger among the bloc's farmers.

In terms of safety, the researchers screened human waste for 310 chemicals, from pharmaceuticals to insect repellents, and found that only 6.5% of these were above the limit for detection and at low concentrations. "In general, the risk for human health of pharmaceutical compounds entering the food system by means of fecal compost use, seems low," the authors concluded. While they detected two pharmaceutical products in edible parts of cabbages, the painkiller ibuprofen and the anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine, the concentrations were markedly low. This means that more than half a million cabbage heads would need to be eaten to accumulate a dose equivalent to one carbamazepine pill, they said.

Bloomberg reports: After five people were killed in a 2020 arson in Colorado, law enforcement officials failed to turn up any leads through their initial investigative techniques. So they served a warrant to Google for anyone who had searched for the address of the fire, according to a court motion.

Google eventually complied with the data request, helping law enforcement find suspects. Three teenagers who had searched the address were charged with murder. But the technique also drew a challenge from defense lawyers, who are calling reverse keyword search warrants "a digital dragnet of immense proportions." It's the first case to challenge the constitutionality of the method, the attorneys say.

Defense lawyers filed a motion Wednesday to challenge the judge's decision to use evidence from the warrant to charge their client, Gavin Seymour. They're asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the matter, after the judge earlier denied their motion to suppress the evidence. The keyword search warrant "is profoundly different from traditional search warrants seeking data belonging to a suspect," the defense argued in the court filing. "Instead, the process operates in reverse — search everyone first, and identify suspects later."
One defendant's lawyer points out Google must review the activities of billions of innocent searchers to respond to keyword search warrants, arguing this has "tremendous implications...for everyone in the country who uses Google to run searches."

"The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that assesses searches on programming languages in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and other search engines," writes InfoWorld. And they add that this year the "vaunted" C++ programming language was the index's biggest gainer in 2022.

TIOBE's announcement includes their calculation that C++ rose 4.62% in popularity in 2022: Runners up are C (+3.82%) and Python (+2.78%). Interestingly, C++ surpassed Java to become the number 3 of the TIOBE index in November 2022. The reason for C++'s popularity is its excellent performance while being a high level object-oriented language. Because of this, it is possible to develop fast and vast software systems (over millions of lines of code) in C++ without necessarily ending up in a maintenance nightmare.
So which programming languages are most popular now? For what it's worth, here's TIOBE's latest ranking:


- Python
- C
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Visual Basic
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Assembly Language
- PHP


InfoWorld adds that "Helping C++ popularity was the publication of new language standards with interesting features, such as C++ 11 and C++ 20."

More from TIOBE: What else happened in 2022? Performance seemed to be important. C++ competitor Rust entered the top 20 again (being at position #26 one year ago), but this time it seems to be for real. Lua, which is known for its easy interfacing with C, jumped from position #30 to #24. F# is another language that made an interesting move: from position #74 to position #33 in one years' time. Promising languages such as Kotlin (from #29 to #25), Julia (from #28 to #29) and Dart (from #37 to #38) still have a long way to go before they reach the top 20. Let's see what happens in 2023.

Salesforce division Tableau was hit harder than other units in the company's largest-ever round of jobs cuts this week, adding to a major reorganization that signals the $15.7 billion acquisition hasn't lived up to expectations. Bloomberg reports: Chief Executive Officer Mark Nelson was ousted from the data analytics division in late December and more senior staff were axed Wednesday as part of Salesforce's announcement that it would eliminate 10% of its workforce. Job reductions at Tableau were greater, proportionally, than the company at large thus far. After a half-decade of fast hiring and large acquisitions, Salesforce is trying to cut costs and better integrate the companies it has purchased. The software maker, which lost almost half of its value in 2022, has been pressured by investors to improve profit. The job cuts made public Wednesday -- about 8,000 workers -- are less than half of the number of employees hired in the pandemic and followed the announced exit in December of co-CEO Bret Taylor and the elimination of hundreds of sales positions in November.

Acquisitions fueled the company's headcount growth. Tableau, then Salesforce's most expensive deal when it was bought in 2019, came with 4,200 employees while Slack, purchased in 2021, and Mulesoft, acquired in 2018, together brought another 3,700, according to company filings. The three deals combined cost almost $50 billion with the estimated $27.7 billion for Slack leading the way. Workers across these acquired divisions were pummeled by the job reductions, particularly in recruiting and customer success roles, according to company employees. Tableau is increasingly being treated as a visualization tool for data contained in Salesforce's other services rather than a standalone program -- co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the new integrations in a December keynote speech. The division has trailed the rest of the company in sales growth since the acquisition.

Salesforce also plans to pare back its office footprint. The company currently has four offices in the Seattle area, more than any other city, according to the company website. Three were inherited in the Tableau deal. Salesforce declined to comment on whether it would be reducing space in the Seattle area. Asked about the effect of Wednesday's job cuts on Tableau, a Salesforce spokesperson said the unit "is a vital part of our product strategy." Tableau contributes to a product that "processes over 100 billion customer records, and helps our customers understand and act on their data," the spokesperson said.

Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. From a report: Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge," the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.

But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.

The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.

The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced to switch down their facilities due to deadly blizzards. From a report: Bitcoin hashrate, the level of computing power used for mining and processing transactions, came in at 155.28 exahashes per second on Saturday, down from 253.88 exahashes on Wednesday, according to data from IntoTheBlock. A winter storm has claimed at least 32 lives across the U.S., as of Monday morning in Hong Kong, according to media reports.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

®Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (through his AME Cloud Ventures) contributed to $6 million in seed funding in November for startup Caden, which plans to pay users to share their personal data -- including what they buy or watch on mobile apps.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The startup, Caden Inc., operates an app by the same name that helps users download their data from apps and servicesâ"whether thatâ(TM)s Amazon.com Inc. or Airbnb Inc. â"into a personal âoevault.â Users who consent to share that data for advertising purposes can earn a cut of the revenue that the app generates from it. They also can access personal analytics based on that data....

Caden, which has been testing with a limited group of users, plans to begin a public beta test of 10,000 users early next year.... One option in the public beta test will anonymize and pool the data before sharing it with outside parties in exchange for $5 to $20 a month, according to Caden founder and Chief Executive John Roa. The amount of compensation will be determined by a âoedata scoreâ reflecting factors such as whether consumers answer demographic survey questions and which apps and servicesâ(TM) data consumers are sharing. Consumers will eventually be given the option to share more specific information for more tailored advertising. A marketer could then form audience segments and tailor their ad targeting and messaging to those groups. For instance, a user could consent to sharing his ride-share history so advertisers could create segments of people who ride a certain amount. That would eventually pay consumers up to $50 a month, Caden said.

A third option would let advertisers take a direct action based on the data that Caden understands about a specific user. If a consumer were part of a department storeâ(TM)s loyalty program, for example, the store might reward her for sharing her individual Amazon shopping history and use it to provide more personalized offers.ÂThat could generate thousands of dollars a year for participating users, the company said.

 Caden also hopes that the data it can aggregate will be compelling for consumers. Users could search for restaurants theyâ(TM)ve eaten at in a certain city, for instance, or how much they spent in certain categories across different apps, executives said. âoeItâ(TM)s like Spotify Wrapped for your whole life,â said Amarachi Miller, Cadenâ(TM)s head of product, referring to the streaming music serviceâ(TM)s year-end distillation of each userâ(TM)s listening....

Caden said it will initially sell only anonymized and aggregated data that doesnâ(TM)t tie back to individuals. As it starts to let brands do more personal promotions for users, it said it will let users see which brands and partners itâ(TM)s working with, and will let users control which brands can access their information.
The digital ad industry has been seeking new marketing-guiding data, the article points out, especially since Apple began require apps to ask for permission before tracking users.

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article.

Zimbabwe has prohibited the export of raw lithium from its mines so it can cash in on value addition and stop losing billions of dollars in mineral proceeds to foreign companies. Quartz reports: The ministry of Mines and Mining Development on Dec. 20 published a circular under the Base Minerals Export Control Act that seeks to "ensure that the vision of the president to see the country becoming an upper-middle income economy has been realized." The government says it is losing $1.8 billion in mineral revenues due to smuggling and externalization to South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Gold is the most smuggled mineral.

With continued high international demand, Zimbabwe is projected to become one of the world's largest lithium exporters, with the government hoping to meet 20% of the world's total demand for lithium when it fully exploits its known lithium resources. Mineral exports account for about 60% (pdf) of Zimbabwe's export earnings while the mining sector contributes 16% to its GDP, according to a 2021 mining report by the London School of Economics.

"No lithium-bearing ores, or unbeneficiated lithium whatsoever, shall be exported from Zimbabwe to another country except under the written permit of the minister," mining minister Winston Chitando says in the circular. However, according to deputy mining minister Polite Kambamura, mining companies that are building processing plants will be excluded from the directive. "If we continue exporting raw lithium we will go nowhere. We want to see lithium batteries being developed in the country," he said. "We have done this in good faith for the growth of industry."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Micron Technology Inc., the largest US maker of memory chips, said the worst industry glut in more than a decade will make it difficult to return to profitability in 2023. The company on Wednesday announced a host of cost-cutting measures, including a 10% workforce reduction, aimed at helping it weather a rapid drop in revenue. Micron also projected a steep sales decline and a wider loss than analysts had estimated for the current quarter. The industry is experiencing its worst imbalance between supply and demand in 13 years, according to Micron Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra. Inventory should peak in the current period, then decline, he said. Customers will move to more healthy inventory levels by about the middle of 2023, and the chipmaker's revenue will improve in the second half of the year, Mehrotra said. "Profitability will be challenged throughout 2023 because of the oversupply that exists in the industry," he said in an interview. "The rate and pace of the recovery in terms of profitability depends on how fast supply is brought into line."

Micron, which had already announced factory output reductions, is cutting its budget for new plants and equipment, and now expects to spend from $7 billion to $7.5 billion for the fiscal year, a decline from an earlier target of as much as $12 billion. The company is slowing the introduction of more advanced manufacturing techniques and predicts that spending on new production will fall throughout the industry. [...] In addition to its planned workforce reductions, the company has suspended share repurchases, is cutting executive salaries and will skip companywide bonus payments, executives said on a conference call after its results were released. Micron said sales will be about $3.8 billion in the fiscal second quarter. That compares with analysts' average estimate of $3.88 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the three months ended Dec. 1, Micron's revenue declined 47% to $4.09 billion.

The World Health Organization is concerned about a spike in COVID-19 infections in China and is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, the head of the UN agency said on Wednesday. From a report: Infections have recently spiked in the world's second-largest economy and projections have suggested China could face an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths next year. "The WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.