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☆ CIOs Can Play Key Role in Guiding Companies Through Slowdown
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-27 | by ( Steven Rosenbush | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +7 min

The market for cloud computing, business software, artificial intelligence and other so-called enterprise technologies has been a relative bright spot. “During times of economic uncertainty, companies look for ways where technology can drive growth and create more economic value faster,” said Juan Perez, chief information officer at Salesforce Inc. When budgets are under scrutiny, companies tend to focus on short-term solutions that can drive efficiency and productivity, Salesforce’s Mr. Perez said. Companies should take this opportunity to reconsider the pace of hiring and employ freelance workers where it makes sense. Additionally, CIOs say they are looking at the opportunity to hire valuable workers who lost their jobs at other companies or renew technology contracts on more favorable terms.

☆ I'm convinced Facebook Marketplace is Meta's best feature after I furnished my new apartment with used furniture
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-27 | by ( Samantha Delouya | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: 1 min

You can set filters only to show local items within a certain radius – I've set mine to offer items for sale within 9 miles of my Los Angeles apartment. It's not only used for furniture; you can also search for clothing and electronics. I usually pay sellers in person using cash, Venmo, or Zelle, so I can check the item's quality before paying. You don't use Facebook itself to exchange payment; Facebook acts more as a classified ads service in this case. Facebook Marketplace

☆ Twitter is removing less hate speech and taking longer to review it, fresh data on social media disinformation shows
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-25 | by ( Pete Syme | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The EU has published its latest data on social media platforms reviewing hate speech. It sent over 3,600 notifications of hate speech to six companies, which also included Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Facebook received the most at 1,558, while Twitter was the only other company to see more than 1,000 hate speech reports. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the French gaming site Jeuxvideo also reviewed less hate speech reports within 24 hours this year. YouTube was the only platform to improve its removal rate of hate speech this year, going from 58.8% to 90.4%.

☆ I've been on more than 15 cruises. Here are my best tips for planning a cost-effective and seamless trip to sea.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-24 | by ( Jamie Killin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

One of the biggest things I would recommend for people who haven't cruised before is finding a travel agent or advisor who specializes in cruisesEven with me being in the industry for as long as I have, having a travel agent is helpful. I decided to use a travel agent because I didn't want all the guests calling me, but this travel agent was with a bigger agency and the experience was awful. Travel agents don't cost money — they make their commissions from the ships and travel insurance agencies or tour companies. Travel insurance is also great because it covers anything from medical issues to trip interruption or even theftI'd never had travel insurance until my travel agent educated me on it, but it's been helpful already. I had my phone stolen in Paris last year and my travel insurance covered it.

☆ Gen Zers increasingly fear that homeownership is a hopeless dream
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-23 | by ( Kelsey Neubauer | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Gen Z's outlook on homeownership has darkened since 2019 , according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. , according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. The weight of student debt was among the top complaints fielded by Freddie Mac. Younger Americans are also looking particularly overextended with their credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Still, the majority of Gen Z can't seem to get its finances up to snuff, as some numbers bear out.

☆ 5 Club stocks that did worse than the Nasdaq since year-ago record but are well-liked by analysts
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-23 | by ( Kevin Stankiewicz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +8 min

It turns out the tech-heavy index peaked on Nov. 22, 2021, one session after its last closing record. Using the one-year anniversary of the Nasdaq's record , we wanted to see where Wall Street stands on the 13 Nasdaq-listed stocks in the Club portfolio. From here, though, 72.7% of the 44 analysts who cover the stock consider the stock a buy or buy equivalent. Facebook-parent Meta Platforms was the worst-performing Club stock in the Nasdaq since its 2021 peak. Conversely, the vast majority of analysts — 90.4% to be exact — have a buy or buy-equivalent rating on Microsoft shares.

☆ NBCUniversal layoffs are coming in January
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-22 | by ( Claire Atkinson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Layoffs will come in ad sales and marketing in the linear television business but won't affect theme parks. NBCUniversal is the latest major media corporation to plan layoffs, according to two company insiders and a third person closely familiar with plans. The axe will fall mainly in ad sales, marketing, and back-end functions at the traditional broadcast and cable business units, but will come division by division, two people said. Paramount Global also conducted layoffs last week, mainly in ad sales in New York and Los Angeles. NBCUniversal was the first major media firm to conduct a corporate restructure of its business back in 2020.

☆ HP laying off 4,000-6,000 employees globally over the next three years
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-22 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Computer maker HP Inc. said Tuesday that it plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 employees over the next three years. HP said revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on Oct. 31, declined 0.8% year over year to $14.80 billion. Revenue in the Personal Systems segment, which includes PCs, fell 13% to $10.3 billion, as units dropped 21%. In the previous quarter, Personal Systems revenue declined 3%, and Printing revenue moved down 6%. From a profitability standpoint, HP reported that the operating margin for the Personal Systems segment contracted to 4.5% from 6.9% in the prior quarter.

☆ The only thing Elon Musk understands about Twitter is how to kill it
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +15 min

Biologists, anthropologists, and information theorists do think that social networks, like Musk's bird app, show at least some signs of being flocks. "Elon's tweet is basically espousing the invisible hand of social behavior," Bak-Coleman says. In this construction, a social network might have become a collective superintelligence, had capitalists left it to its — our? Under Musk, Twitter has entered the dance-off phase. I'll be sad if the Twitter superintelligence starts singing a Kubrickian cover of "Daisy" and implodes into a pile of melting isolinear chips.

☆ Georgia woman’s death that authorities said appeared ‘personal and targeted’ was a suicide, autopsy reveals
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-19 | by ( Tim Stelloh | Tim Stelloh Is A Breaking News Reporter For Nbc News Digital. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +3 min

A Georgia woman whose mysterious death was initially described by authorities as a "personal and targeted" killing was found to have died by suicide, officials said Friday. A spokeswoman for the state law enforcement agency said it provided the autopsy results to the sheriff’s office Thursday. The sheriff’s office also said it found no evidence linking her death to suicide. “At this time, the investigation is leading us to the proposition that Mrs. Collier’s death was personal and targeted,” the sheriff’s office said on Sept. 30. "This was the consensus of all of the agencies involved in the initial and ongoing investigation into Mrs. Collier’s death," he said.

☆ Premarket stocks: Fed officials crushed investors' hopes this week
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Nicole Goodkind | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

But messaging from Fed officials this week has brought Wall Street back down to earth. Tech layoffs don’t mean impending recessionA series of high-profile layoffs have rattled Big Tech this month. The series of high-profile layoff announcements prompted fears that the labor market was weakening and that a recession could be around the corner. Those fears aren’t unwarranted: The Federal Reserve is actively working to slow economic growth and tighten financial conditions to rebalance the white-hot labor market. “The main problem in the labor market is still that labor demand is too strong, not too weak,” they concluded.

☆ A few big-time FedEx contractors have a new plan to boost struggling delivery outfits. Here's why it could work where the last one fizzled.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Emma Cosgrove | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

The 6,000 contractors who deliver for FedEx Ground have been having a tough year. ThinkISP is a think tank launched in October by eight large FedEx contractors. FedEx Ground, the division that handles the majority of the giant's e-commerce business, contracts with 6,000 small businesses for doorstep deliveries. FedEx contractors have had a tough year navigating fuel costs, and operational changes. Moreover, the think tank chose its top issues "collaboratively" with FedEx Ground, Johnson said.

☆ Worried About Being Locked Out of Facebook or Instagram? Here Are Options
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Robert Mcmillan | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Locked out of Facebook or Instagram? It happens to a surprising number of people, often with maddening results. The reality, though, is that there aren’t many great options for getting an account restored once a user is locked out. Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., doesn’t have a customer-service line where any user can speak with representatives. The company, which has said it is committing to building out more customer-service options, advises people to use their guided tools, Facebook.com/hacked and Instagram.com/hacked, which ask a series of questions and then recommend various actions to secure the account.

☆ Meet Hakeem Jeffries, the New York congressman likely to succeed Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( John L. Dorman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: 1 min

Hakeem Jeffries was born and raised in Brooklyn. Hakeem Jeffries. FacebookUS Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, 52, was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of the borough. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton, as well as a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown University. He then earned a law degree from the New York University School of Law, where he served on the Law Review.

☆ Airbnb CEO on the tech downturn: ‘It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on’
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Catherine Thorbecke | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

CNN —After years of seemingly unstoppable growth, the tech industry is now facing the “ultimate reality check” as it confronts broader economic uncertainty and waves of layoffs, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNN on Thursday. Facebook-parent Meta said last week it was cutting 11,000 jobs after nearly doubling its staff during the pandemic. And Twitter recently cut approximately 50% of its staff as new owner Elon Musk races to bolster its bottom line. Chesky said the company is not undergoing layoffs at this time, and in fact is hiring. “We need more diversity in Silicon Valley, but that diversity should not just be demographic diversity.

☆ Tech stocks have been crushed. What’s next for the FAANGs?
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-14 | by ( Paul R. La Monica | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

New York CNN Business —The great bull run for tech stocks may finally be over. The tech sector has been a market leader for years, but there are growing concerns about the future. Todd Sohn, director and technical strategist at Strategas, noted in a report late last week that when tech stocks imploded in 2000 as the dot-com bubble burst, it wasn’t until after the 2008 financial crisis before tech resumed a role as a market leader. But cybersecurity stocks such as Palo Alto Networks (PANW), as well as semiconductors, are more reasonable. In other words, tech investors should be looking tor more boring parts of the sector, not assets like crypto that are more about hype than substance.

☆ Analysis: Silicon Valley's greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-10 | by ( Catherine Thorbecke | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

CNN Business —In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook only grew bigger and more central to our lives. On Wednesday, however, Zuckerberg reversed course and laid off more than 11,000 employees, marking the most significant cuts in the company’s history. In a memo to staff, Zuckerberg coughed up some of the hardest words in the English language. The Federal Reserve maintained near-zero interest rates at the time, giving tech companies easier access to capital. And private and public market valuations for tech companies only seemed to go higher.

☆ Zuckerberg Didn’t Move Fast, Still Broke Things
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-09 | by ( Dan Gallagher | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Some problems at Meta Platforms—including investors’ lack of enthusiasm for CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse—have been evident since early this year. The company once known as Facebook announced broad layoffs Wednesday morning, in a letter to employees from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. The action will cut the size of Meta Platforms ‘ workforce by 13%—about 11,000 employees. Facebook has never done a major retrenchment in its 18-year history, since the bulk of that history has involved double-digit growth and sky-high operating margins. They enabled the company to draw workers by the thousands every year, even in an industry marked by generous salaries and lavish perks.

Meta said Wednesday it plans to lay off more than 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce. Meta had 87,314 employees on September 30, 2022, according to its third-quarter earnings report. Such a move has been expected by employees for months, as Insider previously reported. FacebookZuckerberg said that affected US employees would get 16 weeks of severance plus an extra two weeks for every year of service. Affected employees would also still get their restricted stock unit vesting on November 15, he said.

The states filed their friend-of-the-court brief in San Jose, California, federal court, where the FTC in July asked a federal judge to bar Meta's acquisition of Los Angeles-based Within. The states, joined by the District of Columbia and Guam, said the deal threatens to "harm competition in the emerging virtual reality space." Circuit to revive the states' claims after a U.S. district court judge dismissed the case. Utah, which also signed the amicus brief, is leading a group of states in an antitrust lawsuit challenging how Google runs its app store. The case is Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms Inc, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No.

☆ Facebook layoffs will likely hit most departments, including Mark Zuckerberg's beloved metaverse division
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-08 | by ( Kali Hays | Rob Price | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Facebook employees have been told for weeks to expect layoffs, as Insider previously reported. Even Reality Labs is expected to be impacted, despite it building out Zuckerberg's metaverse vision. 'Investors are demanding more action'One of the people said Reality Labs is "Mark's baby" and could be somewhat insulated from cuts, compared with other divisions. Facebook disclosed it has already this year lost more than $9 billion on Reality Labs, including nearly $4 billion in the third quarter alone. The division lost $10 billion over the whole of 2021, yet the company said spending on Reality Labs is only going to keep growing.

For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures. People swap posts and links with others on their own server - or Mastodon "instance" - and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers across the growing network. But the jump in Mastodon users in a matter of days has still been startling. loadingBefore Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on Oct. 27, Mastodon's growth averaged 60-80 new users an hour, according to the widely-cited Mastodon Users account. Rochko started Mastodon in 2017, when rumours were spreading that PayPal founder and Musk ally Peter Thiel wanted to buy Twitter.

☆ How social media platforms plan to fight Election Day misinformation
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-07 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +12 min

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty ImagesSocial media platforms including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Google's YouTube are readying themselves for another heated Election Day this week. The company is once again banning new political ads in the week before the election, as it did in 2020. Political ads, including information on how much money was behind them and how much they were viewed, are included in the company's transparency report. The NYU and Global Witness study found YouTube performed the best out of the platforms it tested in blocking ads with election misinformation. WATCH: The messy business of content moderation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

☆ Why technology spending will rise even as tech stocks tank and layoffs mount
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-07 | by ( Tim Mullaney | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

The path of tech demand has been one of the key questions as markets try to handicap the odds of a 2023 recession. "CEOs and CFOs have no intention of cutting tech spending," said Gartner chief forecaster John-David Lovelock. On the bright side, the GDP report painted a picture of fairly strong technology demand, said Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist Michael Gapen. The shortfall in investment spending was driven by a sharp decline in residential investment, he said. In percentage terms, cloud spending will rise by about 20 percent for the next two to three years, according to Gartner's forecast.

☆ Influencers debate leaving Twitter, but where would they go?
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-06 | by ( The Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +7 min

PHILADELPHIA — Pariss Chandler built a community for Black tech workers on Twitter that eventually became the foundation for her own recruitment company. I have lost hope in that,” said Chandler, 31, founder of Black Tech Pipeline, a jobs board and recruitment website. She now has more than 60,000 followers and her own company connecting Black tech workers with companies large and small. “This is the exact reason that Musk bought Twitter and didn’t just build his own social network,” Donovan said. “I’m personally going to stay on Twitter until there is really not a reason to stay anymore.

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