Hasta La Gadget!

Many folks mainly associate Samsung with smartphones and TVs, but the company is looking at other parts of its business for long-term growth potential. In the five years to 2026, it will plow 450 trillion won ($356 billion) into strategic areas, with a focus on things like semiconductors, biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This marks Samsung’s largest investment pledge to date and it’s an increase from a 240 trillion won commitment it made last August. The figure is 30 percent more than the 330 trillion won the company invested in itself over the previous five-year period.

The Samsung Electronics division will use the funding to bolster its chip design and manufacturing process, according to The Korea Herald. The company is preparing to start making 3nm chips to help it keep pace with TMSC. It’s also working on advanced chips for supercomputers, robots and AI purposes, and it plans to focus on the development of 6G tech.

Over the next few years, Samsung expects to create 1 million jobs. It plans to hire 80,000 people by 2026 and create hundreds of thousands more positions with its vendors. Around 80 percent of the announced investment is earmarked for the company’s home country of South Korea.

After Uber announced that it was cutting back on hiring and other expenses due to the economic slowdown, rival Lyft is doing the same, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Given the slower than expected recovery and need to accelerate leverage in the business, we’ve made the difficult but important decision to significantly slow hiring in the US,” Lyft President John Zimmer reportedly wrote in a memo to staff.

There are no layoffs planned. However, the decision means the company will give priority to fewer initiatives and not fill many current open roles, focusing instead on critical roles that support its core rides business, the memo further states. 

Tech companies have been hard hit during the economic slowdown, with Amazon reporting its slowest growth in nearly 20 years and Snap shares declining 43 percent after it reported earnings yesterday. Lyft has been hit particularly hard, having lost more than 60 percent of its value since the beginning of 2022, with a 15 percent decline alone yesterday.

SteelSeries makes some of the best gaming headsets on the market, but with its new flagship Arctis Nova Pro, the company is doing a top to bottom overhaul featuring with a brand new design, a second-gen GameDAC and an innovative audio suite with support for 360-degree spatial audio and more. 

Available in both wired and wireless versions for PC, Xbox and PlayStation, the Arctis Nova Pro’s revamped design was created to be super comfortable even during marathon gaming sessions. SteelSeries added four different points of adjustment including rotating and height-adjustable earcups, pivoting hangers, and a flexible tension band. Meanwhile, for people who want to customize the look of the headset, the company is offering $35 Booster Packs consisting of interchangeable headbands and exterior plates in red, lilac, mint and rose.

When it comes to audio, the Nova Pro uses custom speaker drivers with a dual-diaphragm design, while the new Sonar Audio Suite adds support for what the company claims is the world’s first pro-grade parametric EQ for gamers. The idea is that by allowing people to highlight specific frequencies like the sound of footsteps or breaking glass, gamers can get a jump on anyone sneaking up behind them. On top of that, SteelSeries developed a new 360-degree spatial audio feature generated from your content’s 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound track, which should make noises and effects sound more realistic when compared to traditional virtual surround sound techniques. 

The headset also features built-in ANC to drown out any potentially distracting noises. And to make sure your friends and teammates can hear you loud and clear, SteelSeries includes a fully retractable mic with AI-powered noise cancellation. For the wireless model, the Nova Pro also features a dual battery system so you’ll also have a fresh power pack you can swap in when the headset runs low on juice. And thanks to the company’s Quantum 2.0 Wireless system, users can connect to two different devices at the same time using Bluetooth and the Nova Pro’s dedicated 2.4GHz connection. 

Finally, the new GameDAC Gen 2 features Hi-Res Audio Certification and a new Quad DAC that SteelSeries says delivers a 78 percent purer signal. And by using the DAC’s OLED display, you can easily adjust your EQ, audio inputs, volume and more all without ever needing to close or pause your game. 

The Arctis Nova Pro is available today, with the wireless models going for $350, while the wired models being a bit more affordable at $250. 

Senator Ron Wyden and 41 other Democratic lawmakers are urging Google to stop collecting and keeping location data that could be used against people who’ve had or are seeking abortions. In a letter (PDF) to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the lawmakers referenced the Supreme Court draft obtained by Politico in which SCOTUS justices have voted to reverse Roe v. Wade. The landmark case protected the federal rights to abortion across the country, and states with trigger laws will immediately criminalize abortion if it truly gets overturned. 

“[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care,” the lawmakers wrote. Their issue mostly lies with how Google designed Android so that it also has to receive location data if a third-party app asks users for access to their location information. On iOS, Google can only collect information data while people are using Google Maps. 

As Google reveals in its transparency reports, it routinely gets court orders, subpoenas and search warrants from law enforcement agencies looking to get their hands on user information. In the first half of 2021, for instance, the tech giant received 50,907 requests for disclosure of user information involving 115,594 accounts. A total of 82 percent of those requests resulted in the disclosure of some information. 

In their letter, the lawmakers pointed out how a quarter of the court orders Google gets is for “geofence” data, which can show information on people near a particular location at a given time. They means it could be used to identify people who visit reproductive health clinics and other places that help people seek access to abortions.

The signees praised Google for being one of the first companies to require a warrant before disclosing user data, but they said it’s not enough. They compared Google to Apple, saying the latter shows that it’s “not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers’ locations.” By continuing to collect location data, the lawmakers say Google is creating a digital divide, since those who can afford iPhones have greater protection against government surveillance. 

They closed the letter with this plea:

“[W]e urge you to promptly reform your data collection and retention practices, so that Google no longer collects unnecessary customer location data nor retains any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against women.”

At its annual developer conference, Microsoft doesn’t typically announce new hardware. But at Build 2022 the company made time to unveil Project Volterra, a PC Microsoft designed to assist developers with building native ARM apps that employ AI-accelerated workloads.

While we don’t have all the details on Project Volterra just yet, what we do know is that it will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset with a dedicated neural processing unit or NPU. Microsoft told TechCrunch the component would deliver “best-in-class” AI computing capacity and efficiency.

A neural processor isn’t something you typically see on PCs. They’re far more common in phones where they help save on battery power by taking on machine learning tasks from the CPU. But with chips like Apple’s M1 including built-in NPUs, they’re becoming more commonplace, and it’s that future that Microsoft wants to be prepared for when it comes.

“Because we expect to see NPUs being built into most, if not all future computing devices, we’re going to make it easy for developers to leverage these new capabilities, by baking support for NPUs into the end-to-end Windows platform,” said Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer.

With Volterra, Microsoft is adding Windows support for NPUs. The company also said development tools like Visual Studio 2022 and Windows Terminal would soon run natively on ARM hardware. All of that suggests the company is keener than ever to get developers to program native ARM apps for Windows.