Category: business

The kicker is that Intel plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalized foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, the industry’s other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. This new strategy by Intel is called IDM 2.0, and it means the chipmaker will have to juggle two somewhat conflicting objectives:

– taking foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants;

– and using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia. “Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores the tentative position Intel is in,” concludes the report.

Airbnb said that since it implemented its policy in August 2020, it has seen a 44% year-over-year drop in the rate of party reports. “The temporary ban has proved effective, and today we are officially codifying the ban as our policy,” the company said in a blog post. Airbnb said guests who attempt to violate its rules will face consequences varying from account suspension to full removal from the platform. In 2021, for example, more than 6,600 guests were suspended from Airbnb for violating its party ban.

The proposed overhaul would be the biggest change to Wall Street’s rules since 2005 and would affect nearly every corner of the market, from commission-free brokerages to market makers and exchanges. The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on Friday called for the SEC, along with other regulators, to do more to protect the markets from similar events….

The U.S. House Financial Services Committee on Friday urged Congress to adopt legislation mandating the SEC study how its rules need to change to address new technological developments, such as digital engagement practices and social media-driven market activity.

“The boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over,” Lightspeed, which has backed companies including social network Snap and crypto exchange FTX, wrote in a dispatch for startup executives that was posted on Medium, a publishing platform, this month. The investors’ admonitions are a departure from the growth-above-all mantra for startups in recent years, and come as the venture market is showing signs of sputtering. Funding for global startups — at around $58 billion in commitments midway through the second quarter — is on pace to drop by about one-fifth in the period compared with the previous quarter, according to analytics firm CB Insights. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down about 25% from its all-time high in November, and SoftBank Group, which has poured more than $100 billion into investments, this month reported a $26.2 billion loss in the first quarter as valuations plummeted in its portfolio of tech companies.

The headlines kept coming…. (“Wells Fargo Hit With ‘Unprecedented’ Punishment Over Fake Accounts…” “Wells Fargo Employee Informed the Bank of Fake Customer Accounts in 2006”)

But this week the New York Times reported a new allegation — involving fake job interviews:

Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong.” Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.

Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank’s wealth management unit to interview “diverse” candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate.

Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it…

The new salary sacrifice for full remote working policy is being introduced after the company’s experience of recruiting lawyers during the coronavirus pandemic who were not based in London, where living costs tend to be higher. However, the company said it expected only a few staff to take up the full-time work from home option because “for the vast majority of our people, our hybrid working policy works well.” Staff already have the option of working remotely for two days a week. “Like so many firms, we see value in being in the office together regularly, while also being able to offer our people flexibility,” the spokesman said.

The government’s so-called ONDC platform will allow buyers and sellers to connect and transact with each other online, no matter what other application they use. It will be soft-launched on Friday before being expanded, the trade ministry told Reuters. The government document said that two large multinational players controlled more than half of the country’s e-commerce trade, limiting access to the market, giving preferential treatment to some sellers and squeezing supplier margins. It did not name the companies. The document said India’s ONDC plan aimed to onboard 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants online. The plan is to cover at least 100 cities and towns by August.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy. The long-run impact may be more significant than the short-run impact,” said Barry Ickes, head of the economics department at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in the Russian economy. “Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that.” Before all this started, Russia had such a strong technology base,” [Artem Taganov, founder and chief executive of a Russian start-up called HintEd] said. “Now, we have a brain drain that will continue for the next five to 10 years.”