Author: GT

Epic Games is taking a victory lap. After notching a big win against Apple in a years-long legal dispute, Epic announced that its Epic Games Store will allow developers to open webshops, which can offer players out-of-app purchases to circumvent fees from Apple and Google. Epic has been in a long legal battle with Apple over its iOS App Store fees, which take 30% of a developer’s earnings. A judge had ruled in 2021 that Apple couldn’t stop developers from directing customers to buy digital goods outside of the Apple ecosystem. But Wednesday night, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote in…

By Tommy Reggiori Wilkes LONDON (Reuters) -Britain is to restrict consumers’ use of credit cards to buy crypto and their access to crypto lending products, the regulator said on Friday, a move aimed at improving protection as cryptoassets are regulated for the first time. The finance ministry this week said it would bring cryptocurrencies under compulsory regulation, with exchanges, dealers and issuers all coming under the existing rulebook. Crypto trading has exploded in popularity, with around 7 million people – about 12% of the adult population – owning cryptoassets, but it remains largely unregulated, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said.…

Startup May Mobility plans to deploy its autonomous vehicles on the Uber platform by the end of 2025, starting in Arlington, Texas, as part of a multi-year partnership. The tie-up with Uber offers May Mobility a chance to grow beyond offering shuttles within campuses and planned communities, while Uber adds May Mobility to its growing roster of autonomous vehicle collaborators as it works to integrate self-driving tech onto its platform. For example, Uber has already begun offering Waymo robotaxis on its app in Phoenix and Austin, and plans to launch in Atlanta this summer. That will put it in competition…

Wall Street analysts are standing firmly behind Strategy’s (MSTR) aggressive escalation of its bitcoin (BTC) acquisition strategy after the company unveiled plans to double its capital-raising ambitions. “While the number of companies that have sought to replicate Strategy’s bitcoin acquisition strategy has continued to grow rapidly … MSTR yesterday issued a reminder of the extent of its first-mover advantage and how its ability to accelerate its accumulation of bitcoin has continued to increase as its platform has scaled,” wrote Benchmark’s Mark Palmer, reiterating his buy rating and $650 price target. Though MSTR trades at more than double the value of…

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, takes the stage during The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, Dec. 4, 2024.Michael M. Santiago | Getty ImagesAmazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares in the company over the next year, according to a financial filing on Friday.Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 but remains Amazon’s top shareholder, is selling the shares as part of a trading plan adopted on March 4, the filing states. The stake would be…

Nvidia clearly doesn’t agree with Anthropic’s support for export controls on U.S.-made AI chips. On Wednesday, Anthropic doubled down on its support for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion,” which would impose sweeping AI chip export restrictions starting May 15. The next day, Nvidia responded with a very different take on the upcoming controls. “American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in ‘baby bumps’ or ‘alongside live lobsters,’” a spokesperson for Nvidia told CNBC, in reference to Anthropic’s…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amid a backdrop of ongoing tariff uncertainty, more and more gamers are facing price hikes.Microsoft raised recommended retailer pricing for its Xbox consoles and controllers around the world this week. Its Xbox Series S, for example, now starts at $379.99 in the U.S. — up $80 from the $299.99 price tag that debuted in 2020. And its more powerful Xbox Series X will be $599.99 going forward, a $100 jump from its previous $499.99 listing.“We understand that these changes are challenging,” Microsoft wrote in a Thursday Xbox support update and subsequent statement sent to The Associated…

‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. Nonprofit AI research institute Ai2 on Thursday released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. Olmo 2 1B is available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license on AI dev platform Hugging Face. Unlike most models, Olmo 2 1B can be replicated from scratch, as Ai2 has provided the code and data sets (Olmo-mix-1124 and Dolmino-mix-1124) used to develop it. Small models…

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is seeking views on intermediaries, staking, lending, borrowing, and decentralised finance (DeFi), in a discussion paper released on Friday. The discussion paper follows draft legislation by the Treasury that was announced on Tuesday. Once the legislation passes it will bring specific crypto activities within the FCA’s regulation, the regulator said on its website. “Crypto is a growing industry. Currently largely unregulated, we want to create a crypto regime that gives firms the clarity they need to safely innovate, while delivering appropriate levels of market integrity and consumer protection,” said David Geale, executive director of…

Block shares were on track for their second-worst day Friday, plunging more than 20% as investors digested a brutal quarterly report and a wave of analyst downgrades centered on one issue: Cash App.The first-quarter earnings miss rattled Wall Street, prompting multiple firms — including Wells Fargo, Seaport, BMO, and Benchmark — to downgrade the stock overnight. Many flagged fresh concerns around stagnant Cash App user growth, muted consumer demand, and a soft macro environment that may weigh on monetization.”Stagnation in the number of active users of the app is even more concerning than users’ reduced spending,” Benchmark wrote in its…