Category: business

Apple said that it doesn’t steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies. It said Masimo and other companies cited in this article are copying Apple, and that it would fight the claims in court. Apple has tried to invalidate hundreds of patents owned by companies that have accused Apple of violating their patents. According to lawyers and executives at some smaller companies, Apple sometimes files multiple petitions on a single patent claim and attempts to invalidate patents unrelated to the initial dispute. Many large companies, particularly in tech, have been known to scoop up employees and technology from smaller potential rivals. Software developers have given a name to what they describe as Apple’s behavior in such cases: sherlocking. The term refers to an episode about two decades ago, when Apple released a software product called “Sherlock” that helped users find files on its Mac computers and perform internet searches.

“Paying for these spent batteries keeps them from going into the landfill,” O’Kronley told Canary Media. “It’s better to get paid for it rather than throw them away.” Ascend also accepts used consumer electronics from battery-collection programs, such as Call2Recycle. That’s not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what’s going into Ascend’s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America’s plant in Commerce, Georgia.

That relationship influenced Ascend’s choice of location: Covington sits in the emerging “Battery Belt,” a swath of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants opening up across the Midwest and the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky (look for all the blue icons in this White House map of new industrial investments). Fellow battery-recycling startup Redwood Materials also chose South Carolina for a forthcoming $3.5 billion recycling facility. “There will need to be a recycling plant within about an hour’s drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories],” O’Kronley said. “You don’t want to be [long-distance] shipping these very large, heavy EV batteries that are classified as Class 9 hazardous materials.” The report notes that the company’s second commercial-scale facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky will “introduce a brand-new technique for efficiently extracting cathode materials from black mass, which Ascend has dubbed ‘hydro to cathode.'”

More specifically, one area where Walmart is seeking to increase investment is in market fulfillment centers (MFCs), which are automated fulfillment centers built within, or added to, a store. Walmart piloted this concept at a store in Salem, New Jersey, in 2019, using automated robot technology from Alert Innovation — a robotics company Walmart acquired in October 2022. Since then, Walmart has built MFCs at several stores, such as in Jacksonville, Florida, and Dallas, Texas. Those include “manual MFCs,” where associates pick items for online orders but in a separate area from the sales floor.

Walmart will still need at least the same level of workers to help in stores even as automation picks up, company leaders say. John Furner, Walmart US president and CEO, told investors this week that automation “helps” employees, as it will result in less manual labor. “Over time, we believe we’ll have the same or more associates and a larger business overall,” Furner said. “There will be new roles emerging that are less manual, better designed to serve customers, and pay more.”

Rabois, who was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said the axing of droves of jobs is overdue. “All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways,” Rabois said, according to Insider. “There’s nothing for these people to do — it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.”
The DoorDash investor added Google had intentionally hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from being snapped up by competitors.

[T]he closings, first reported by Geekwire, are another sign of cost-cutting efforts at the online shopping giant. […] The stores being closed include two in downturn Seattle that had already been shut on a temporary basis, leaving five in the city. In addition it is closing two in New York City and four in San Francisco. The six closings of stores still operating are due to take place April 1. In addition to the 21 Amazon Go stores that will remain, there are two locations in New York that the brand shares with Starbucks.

“Starting from last month, so many people from the client side are visiting us almost every day,” Yoshinaga said from his offices at GoerTek’s sprawling industrial complex north of Hanoi. The topic that dominates discussions: “When can you move out?” The expanding conflict between the US and China, which began with a trade war but has since expanded to encompass sweeping bans on the exchange of chips and capital, is spurring a rethink of the electronics industry’s decades-old supply chain. The world’s reliance on the Asian nation became starkly clear during the Covid Zero years, when Beijing’s restrictions choked off the supply of everything from phones to cars.

Lenovo Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing told an analyst call after its earnings that the entire PC and mobile market experienced a “severe downturn” in the last quarter, and the company was looking to reduce expenses and improve efficiency. Lenovo is aiming to reduce its run rate operational expenses by approximately $150 million to achieve a medium-term goal of doubling net margin, its chief financial officer, Wong Wai Ming, added. “This includes overall reduction in operational spending as well as workforce adjustments where necessary and appropriate.” he said.