The newest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report finds much of the same uneven progress on diversity at a time when it’s essential to the industry’s survival.
When Faraday Future released its earnings report for 2022 earlier this month, it said it’s on track to begin the production of its first vehicle. The company had a lot of false starts since it was founded in 2014 and had to push back the model’s production and shipment dates again and again. This time, the company was finally able to stick to its timeline: Faraday Future has announced that it has started production for the FF 91 Futurist electric vehicle at its factory in Hanford, California.
Faraday Future unveiled the FF 91 Futurist in February 2022, with the intention of kicking off the manufacturing process in the third quarter of the year. It obviously didn’t happen, and the company told investors that it was because it needed more cash for its commercial launch. Indeed, the automaker grappled with a string of financial woes over the years and even almost ran out of cash in 2017 before Season Smart, later acquired by Chinese company Evergrande Health, agreed to fund it with $2 billion.
Faraday burned through Season Smart’s initial $800 million cash injection too quickly, however, and ended up feuding with the investor. The company furloughed (and ultimately let go) hundreds of employees while the dispute was ongoing. It also had to abandon its plans to build a $1 billion Las Vegas production facility and sell the site for $40 million.
The FF 91 Futurist promises 1,050 horsepower, a range of 381 miles as certified by the EPA and the ability to go from zero to 60 mph in 2.27 seconds. It will be sold both stateside and in China — in the US, customers in Los Angeles will get their units first, followed by those in San Francisco and then buyers in New York. According to Reuters, deliveries in the US are scheduled to begin in April 2023. The company itself didn’t mention a specific date for when deliveries will start, but it did announce a final launch event for the FF 91 Futurist on April 26th.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/faraday-future-finally-starts-ff-91-production-after-repeated-delays-114510625.html?src=rss
The pearl-clutching Fox News personality’s expletive-ridden text messages have been made public in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit.
Electronic Arts is reducing its workforce by six percent, company CEO Andrew Wilson has announced in a blog post. As The Wall Street Journal notes, while layoffs are sweeping the tech industry, this makes EA the first major video game publisher to announce job cuts that would affect a significant number of people. While Wilson didn’t specify how many workers will be impacted by the layoffs, a 2022 filing by the company said it had a workforce that was almost 13,000 strong.
Wilson said EA already started telling some of the roughly 800 affected workers that they were going to lose their jobs earlier this year. The layoffs will continue over the coming months until early next fiscal year. He explained that the job cuts are a result of the company deciding to move away from projects that no longer align with its goals, to review its real estate footprint and to restructure some of its teams. In certain cases, EA will offer the affected worker the opportunity to transition to other roles within the company. But those who don’t get the offer (or choose not to take a new role within EA) will be getting severance pay, company-paid health insurance and career transition services.
The video game industry as a whole has been struggling with a slump in player spending since 2022 after a couple of years of growth fueled by increased gaming hours during pandemic lockdowns. EA has implemented several cost-cutting measures over the past months as a result, including shutting downApex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile. It also reportedly cancelled an unannounced single-player game set in the Titanfall and Apex Legends universe. In May 2022, Puck News reported that EA was actively looking for a buyer or a company willing to undergo a merger. The company approached Disney and Comcast, Puck said, but discussions ultimately broke down.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ea-is-cutting-around-800-jobs-in-company-restructuring-093534145.html?src=rss
The conspiracy theorist lawmaker went on a long, weird and ultimately wrong tangent about public urination laws.
The “Late Show” host isn’t buying McCarthy’s latest claim — for one key reason.
Netflix might have started (or is at least looking to start) testing games for TV, based on code within its app that developer Steve Moser has shared with Bloomberg. Moser reportedly found hidden code referencing games played on television, as well as additional code that indicates the possibility of being able to use phones as controllers to play them. One line from within the app apparently reads: “A game on your TV needs a controller to play. Do you want to use this phone as a game controller?” Moser also previously found hints that the service’s then-upcoming ad-supported plan might not come with offline viewing. He turned out to be spot on.
The streaming giant launched its gaming experience on Android, iPhones and iPads in 2021. It requires mobile users to download games from the App Store or from Google Play due to rules set by Apple and Google. But since the point of these games is to increase engagement and retain users, they can be launched from within the Netflix app and an active subscription is necessary to be able to access them. On the Netflix app for TV, these games are notably absent.
It remains to be seen how the company intends to implement gaming on TVs and whether it will also require users to download the games before being able to play them. Netflix VP of game development Mike Verdu said last year, though, that the company was “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering” and that it’s looking to launch more than just casual games for television.
For now, users will have to make do with what’s available on mobile. At the moment, Netflix’s catalogue has around 55 titles available, though it’s rolling out 40 more games throughout 2023.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-is-testing-tv-games-that-can-use-phones-as-controllers-070118171.html?src=rss
“We went from ‘backing the blue’ to ‘backing the coup,’” the California Democrat said as he took aim at a post from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The late-night host spots a desperate “last-ditch” move by Trump to save himself from the grand jury.
Over the past few days, users have reported seeing ads within the Bing chatbot experience. Based on the limited examples we’ve seen, the GPT-4-powered chatbot embeds relevant ad links in responses to users’ actual questions. Ads don’t seem to show up for most people (including us) yet, but they’ll most likely pop up more frequently and in more places soon. In a new post on the Bing blog, Microsoft Corporate VP for Search and Devices Yusuf Mehdi has admitted that the company is currently exploring putting ads in Bing’s chat experience, indicating that the samples we’ve seen so far are part of its experimentation. He also revealed how the company intends to embed more ads in the new Bing experience.
Bing ads are happening @luke_lafr@linusgsebastianpic.twitter.com/TzVJoObNb9
— Punit (@pewnit) March 25, 2023
So far, the ads that show up for users come in the form of a linked citation, along with additional links in a “Learn More” section below Bing’s response to their query. In the future, Microsoft could launch an experience wherein hovering over a link from an advertiser will display more links from its website in hopes of driving more traffic to it. The company is also exploring the idea of adding rich captions from its Start personalized news feed publishers right beside the AI chatbot’s responses.
The fact that Microsoft is monetizing its Bing chatbot is an expected development. From the start, the question was never “Will the company do it?” but “How will the company do it?” And now we have an idea of the tech giant’s initial plans. As Mehdi said in his post, Bing has amassed more than 100 million daily active users after the chatbot came out. Since one third of those users are new to Bing, they present a new opportunity for advertisers, and Microsoft clearly intends to strike while the iron is hot.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-reveals-how-its-putting-ads-in-bings-ai-chatbot-052014029.html?src=rss
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