Richard Lawler
Amazon laid off about 100 people in the team behind Alexa, Echo, and Zoox.
Richard Lawler
Senior News Editor
Senior News Editor
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Richard Lawler
The Buffalo Bills used AI correctly.
When you’re looking for The Answer, there’s only one AI option you can trust.
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Sony tees up XM6 headphone reveal for May 15th.
The next generation of Sony’s noise canceling headphones is almost here. Sony has a placeholder YouTube stream counting down to the WH-1000XM6 launch on Thursday at noon ET, which will finally flesh out the real information after some recent leaks.
Richard Lawler
Slack is down, unless it’s back up already.
Slack has acknowledged an outage Monday evening as “...users are experiencing issues connecting to Slack and are unable to load threads,” with most reports noting problems beginning just after 6:30PM ET.
Some people are still connected, or can load certain threads and rooms, while others fail. According to Slack, “our backend database routing is contributing to error spikes with many Slack features,” affecting a percentage of users globally. There’s no ETA for a repair yet, but it might be a good time to take a break or just call it a day entirely.
Updated at 7:12PM ET.
Richard Lawler
Tariffs are pushing up the price of Funko Pops too.
This week, “leading pop culture lifestyle brand” Funko announced price adjustments for Funko, Loungefly, and Mondo products that will include bumping the MSRP of a standard Pop! figure from $12 to $14.99 in July. Its blog post says, “From rising tariffs to shipping to raw materials, the cost of creating our products has gone up significantly,” and “we’re opting to absorb a big part of the increase behind the scenes.”
Otherwise, it says buyers can anticipate better, more detailed figures, better boxes, and more micro-optic authentication stickers.
Richard Lawler
The parent company of Tinder and Hinge is cutting 13 percent of its staff.
Match Group, which owns Match.com and other big dating apps, announced its quarterly earnings today and announced a workforce reduction that new CEO Spencer Rascoff said will reduce “around 1 in 5 managers overall.” Based on its 2024 filing, Bloomberg says that’s about 325 jobs.
The company said recent developments have included rolling out a new AI-powered recommendation system for Hinge that “has driven a 15 percent increase in matches and contact exchanges.” Meanwhile, new “AI-enabled Discovery, Double Date, and The Game Game” launches for Tinder are targeting Gen Z users with “more social, low-pressure experiences.”
Match Group Announces First Quarter Results
[ir.mtch.com]