snydeq shares a report from CIO.com: ServiceNow has reported potential compliance issues to the US Department of Justice “related to one of its government contracts” as well as the hiring of the then-CIO of the US Army to be its head of global public sector, the company said in regulatory filings on Wednesday. The DOJ is looking into the matter. Following an internal investigation, ServiceNow said, its President and COO, CJ Desai, has resigned, while “the other individual has also departed the company.” That executive, Raj Iyer, told CIO.com, “I resigned because I didn’t want to be associated with this fiasco in any way. It’s not my fault.”

CEO Bill McDermott told financial analysts in a conference call Wednesday that someone within ServiceNow had complained about the situation and that an internal probe “determined that our company policy was violated.”

“Acting with total transparency, the company proactively disclosed the findings of the investigation to the proper government entities. And as a result, today, we’re announcing the departure of the individual whose hiring was the subject of the original complaint,” McDermott said. “We also came to a mutual agreement that CJ Desai, our President and COO, would offer his resignation from the company effective immediately. While we believe this was an isolated incident, we are further sharpening our hiring policies and procedures as a result of the situation.”

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Humble Games, the indie game publisher behind the popular pay-what-you-want “Humble Game Bundle,” has laid off its entire staff of 36 people. However, the company says it is not shutting down and Humble Bundle will not be impacted. Instead, the job cuts are part of a restructuring of operations. GameSpot reports: In a statement shared with GameSpot, Humble Games confirmed that Humble Bundle will have “no impact on its operations. Additionally, ongoing and upcoming games from Humble Games will still move ahead and be published by the company. Humble Games is the publisher of many notable indie games, including Stray Gods, Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus, Chinatown Detective Agency, Ikenfell, Unpacking, Slay the Spire, and Midnight Fight Express, just to name a few.

Humble Games is the separate publishing arm of digital storefront Humble Bundle. Both companies are owned by IGN Entertainment, but operate as a separate entities. Earlier this year, IGN Entertainment also bought video game websites Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, GamesIndustry.biz, and Dicebreaker from Gamer Network.

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Wiz, the cloud security startup that was in acquisition talks with Google, has decided not to forward with the deal and to remain an independent company, according to an internal note sent to company employees on Monday. Fortune: “While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz,” CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in the note. Rappaport said in the email that the company’s next target is to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and to take the company public.

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Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company’s software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock “is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25,” reports Forbes. “CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company.” From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity applications and Microsoft’s Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth’s lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple’s 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion.

The CrowdStrike selloff is “an overreaction to a temporary setback,” Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It’s a “compelling buying opportunity” as it “creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation,” Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock’s relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike’s P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business’ ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday’s incident were to impact CrowdStrike’s client base.

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the so-called “godmother of AI,” is working on a startup focused on developing technology capable of human-like visual data processing and advanced reasoning. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the startup is called World Labs and is already worth $1 billion. Quartz reports: “Curiosity urges us to create machines to see just as intelligently as we can, if not better,” Li said during a Ted talk in April. “And if we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.” Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures are funders of World Labs.

Li is renowned for her contributions to AI. She invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. She consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.

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Valve had its employee and payroll data leaked through a poorly redacted document in an antitrust lawsuit in May, offering a rare glimpse into the company’s small but impactful workforce over the years. As first noticed by SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik, Valve’s significant influence in PC gaming transactions has been maintained by just a few hundred employees. Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: It’s striking to consider just how small Valve is compared to other major players in the game industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve’s annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA’s $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA. The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming marketplace has seen a massive increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012 or so, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.

Yet, surprisingly, the size of the “Steam” department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve’s “Games” department has represented a majority of the company’s headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve’s output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work.

The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve’s small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company’s annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve’s small total headcount. Looking back, it’s impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck’s market success.

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Instead of “handmade” and “vintage,” Etsy created four new classifications for sellers on the site: “made by,” “designed by,” “handpicked by,” and “sourced by.” In order for products to be sold on Etsy, they’ll now need to fall into one of these four categories. The Verge reports: Vintage items — a backbone of Etsy’s offerings — will fall under “handpicked by,” though these items will also have “vintage” labels on product listings. Craft supplies like beads or clay are considered “sourced by.” A vase handmade by a ceramics artist would be in the “made by” category, whereas a digital illustration would be considered “designed by” the seller. These categories will be visible on Etsy product listings. The company says that this won’t change anything in practice — things that were previously prohibited, like the reselling of items made by someone else, still won’t be allowed under the new policy.

“The consistent theme here is that items are infused with a human touch, because that’s what makes Etsy, well, Etsy,” CEO Josh Silverman said in a video message. The goal for the new categories, the company says, is to provide more details to shoppers about how an item is made and how a seller was involved in the process. Etsy has differentiated itself from other marketplaces like Amazon or Temu, emphasizing itself as a place to find unique items made by an artisan or selected by a curator. But over the years, the company has loosened its rules around what exactly counts as “handmade.”

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:

On 21 June, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni announced plans to ban short term rentals in the city starting in November 2028. The decision is designed to solve what Collboni described as “Barcelona’s biggest problem” — the housing crisis that has seen residents and workers priced out of the market — by returning the 10,000 apartments currently listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb and other platforms into the housing market… It’s all part of a wider theme: around the world. Airbnb — which dominates the short-term rental market with more than 50% of all online bookings — and others, including VRBO, Booking.com and Expedia.com, are being scrutinised at the same time as questions are being asked about who tourism is for, and where the balance lies between benefits for tourists and locals alike…

Recent years have seen a backlash against the brand, which is blamed for pushing up housing prices and affecting locals who feel they have been forced to live next door to unregulated hotels… The question is: does banning or restricting short-term rentals actually reduce housing prices or affect housing stock? Harvard Business Review’s study on the impact of the New York City ban, published earlier this year, concluded that in this case, short term rentals are not the biggest contributor to high rents, and that regulations, rather than bans, would offer better benefits to the city and locals alike. One clear result from the city’s ban has been that hotel room rates have hiked to a record average of $300 per night.

So why are tourism authorities and city councils doing it? Perhaps the real reason is that it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about how local people feel about tourism… Successful on paper or not, these bans send a signal to local people that politicians are listening to their concerns and will prioritise them over tourists. There is an alternative to outright bans, though. Many destinations, including Berlin, restrict owner-occupiers to a 90-day maximum rental period over a year, effectively allowing part-time hosts to continue to make a supplementary income while preventing professional hosts from buying up housing stock and turning it into full-time short-term rentals. The issue for all countries moving in this direction, including the UK, which proposes something similar, is about regulation. How do you do it and how much extra does it cost to do so?

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As reported by Bloomberg, Apple will get an “observer role” on OpenAI’s board of directors as part of its partnership to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18. That role will reportedly be filled by Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. 9to5Mac reports: Apple having an “observer role” on the OpenAI board matches the role of Microsoft. Schiller will be able to observe and attend board meetings, but will not have any voting power: “The board observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer and its main AI technology provider. The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers. Observers, however, do gain insights into how decisions are made at the company.” The arrangement will take effect later this year, according to Bloomberg. Schiller “hasn’t yet attended any meetings” of the OpenAI board and “details of the situation could still change.”

Schiller served as Apple’s long-time marketing chief before transitioning to an Apple Fellow role in 2020. In this role, Schiller continues to lead the App Store and Apple events and reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Schiller is also leading Apple’s efforts to defend the App Store against antitrust allegations around the world.

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In 2021, Apple announced plans for a new $1 billion campus in North Carolina, set to include a new engineering and research center and support up to 3,000 employees. According to Lauren Ohnesorge of Triangle Business Journal (paywalled), Apple remains committed to the project, but the timeline has been delayed by four years. MacRumors reports: A limited amount of progress on the campus has been made since the announcement, and Apple has not provided updates on construction until now. Apple told Triangle Business Journal that it has paused work on the campus, and it is working with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and the North Carolina Department of Commerce to extend the project’s timeline by four years.

Apple last year filed development plans for the first phase of construction, but the specific timeline for the project has never been clear. Apple’s plans for Research Triangle Park include six buildings and a parking garage totaling 700,000 square feet of office space, 190,000 square feet of accessory space, and close to 3,000 parking spaces spanning 41 acres. Apple owns 281 acres of land in the area where it plans to build its campus, so there could ultimately be several phases of construction. As it prepares to build the NC research center, Apple is leasing more than 200,000 square feet of office space in Cary, North Carolina. In a statement, Apple said it is still committed to the project: “Apple has been operating in North Carolina for over two decades. And we’re deeply committed to growing our teams here. In the last three years, we’ve added more than 600 people to our team in Raleigh, and we’re looking forward to developing our new campus in the coming years.”

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