Business & Tech Twitter Fails To Remove Blue Checks For People Who Didn’t Pay, Only Removes the NY Times’ Check The Twitter D-Day for removing verification blue checks came and went without any noticeable blue check removal, with only the New York Times getting their check removed, and now Elon Musk has replaced the blue bird logo with a crypto meme.
Business & Tech 1,100 Tech Bigwigs Urge We ‘Immediately Pause’ AI Research For Six Months, Fearing It’s Getting Too Powerful A coalition of founders, CEOs and professors (Elon Musk among them) says artificial intelligence companies should “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems,” though some may just want to sideline the competition so they can launch their own AI products.
Business & Tech SF Game Developers Conference Rollicked By Multiple Allegations of Drink Spiking, Sexual Harassment At least six people say they were roofied at a Game Developers Conference afterparty in San Francisco last week, while other assault reports are trickling in, and the primarily male-attended conference is suffering some serious reputational damage.
Business & Tech Pinterest Offloading Yet Another Office Building In SoMa, This Time at Fourth And Brannan Streets Another office space haircut for a downtown SF tech firm, as Pinterest is bailing on 505 Brannan Street ten years before the lease is up, following rounds of layoffs in both December and February.
Business & Tech Silicon Valley Bank Gets Acquired By Something Called First Citizens Bank, Back Operating This Morning What’s left of the bankrupt and taken-over-by-the-government Silicon Valley Bank has been bought up by North Carolina-based First Citizens Bank, and while we don’t know the price, First Citizens got a hefty discount of at least $16.5 billion.
Business & Tech Disgruntled Former Employee Allegedly Leaked Twitter's Source Code on GitHub Twitter executives were scrambling late last week after the revelation that the platform's source code had been live and publicly available for download on the developer collaboration platform GitHub.
Business & Tech 16 Best House Cleaning / Maid Services in San Francisco for 2023 San Francisco, a city that many love to hate - and who can blame them? After all, it's not like it's home to some of the most beautiful streets, landscapes, and architecture in
Business & Tech Google Unveils Its AI Chatbot, Called Bard The Bay Area is now home to two big companies with AI chatbots that may or may not be writing your niece's term papers right now. Google has just opened up access to its chatbot, called Bard, at least in the U.S. and U.K.
Business & Tech New Video By SF Business Lobby Taps Giants Announcer Jon Miller to Lure Businesses Here A coalition of the city, bankers, and big-business types is using the voice of the Giants' Jon Miller in a new marketing video to bring businesses to San Francisco, in a campaign that conveniently ignores the affordability issues that keep them from doing so.
Business & Tech Game Developers Conference Opened Today at Moscone Center, Drawing an Estimated 24,000 The big annual Game Developers Conference returned to San Francisco with its Monday morning opening, and it runs through Thursday at the Moscone Center, with twice as many attendees expected compared to last year’s scaled-down version.
Business & Tech Judge In Elizabeth Holmes Case Says He'll Rule on Prison Delay, Restitution Next Month The federal judge who sentenced Elizabeth Holmes last fall to 11 years in prison heard arguments Friday morning on whether Holmes should have to pay restitution to Theranos investors, and on whether she will be able to delay entering prison.
Business & Tech SF-Based First Republic Bank Gets $30B Lifeline From Group of Larger Banks It was good news on Thursday for regional bank First Republic, which on Monday was facing serious stress in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. A coalition of larger banks agreed to funnel $30 billion in deposits to the bank to help it shore itself and meet the demand for withdrawals.
Business & Tech San Mateo County School Board Sues Social Platforms Over 'Monetizing Misery' of Kids — But Leaves Out Instagram The San Mateo County Board of Education has filed suit against the parent companies of YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok citing evidence that they were designed to be addictive and are harming the mental health of children. But where is San Mateo County resident corporation Meta in all this?
Business & Tech Report: Ron Conway Was Among Venture Capitalists Begging For Silicon Valley Bank Bailout The “small-government libertarians” got their big government bailout this past Sunday, and as observers slag the hypocrisy of founders and VCs who oppose safety nets for everyone else, we learn that local mayor whisperer Ron Conway was helping pull strings to get the bailout.
Business & Tech Appeals Court Upholds Prop. 22 Gig Worker Law, But It’s Still Likely Headed To State Supreme Court A big win for Uber and Lyft to not treat their drivers as employees, as a state appeals court has upheld the Prop. 22 law exempting rideshare companies from minimum wage and overtime rules, but this thing’s expected to go to the state Supreme Court.
Business & Tech Meta Laying Off Another 10,000 Employees, Or 13% Of Workforce It’s another 10,000 layoffs at Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, on top of the 11,000 layoffs from November, as their pandemic growth hangover collides with bad bets on Web3 and metaverse boondoggles.
Business & Tech SF-Based First Republic Bank In Huge Trouble As Shares Collapse By More Than 70%, Trading Halted The feared “contagion” from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse has now spread to banks whose branches and ATMs you see around San Francisco, as the SF-based First Republic Bank tanked in the markets over bank-run fears.
Business & Tech Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Reverberates Through Bay Area Wine Industry, Tech Startups In addition to the many local tech companies large and small that are likely to be impacted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), we're learning that they were a major lender and banking partner for the wine industry, accounting for about 2% of the bank's total business.
Business & Tech Silicon Valley Bank Shut Down By Regulators In Biggest Bank Failure In 15 Years In what may be a harbinger of more hard days ahead for the tech world in the Bay Area, a prominent lender to startups and one of the 20 largest banks in the country, SVB Financial Group or Silicon Valley Bank, has failed.
Business & Tech Tesla Faces New Federal Probe Over Possible Autopilot Crash In Walnut Creek; Also, Musk Seems to Have 'Disbanded' Their PR Department A Tesla that may have been operating in "Full Self-Driving" mode crashed into a firetruck at high speed on I-680 last month, and this has triggered a new investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Business & Tech High-Profile Tech Layoffs Continue With Thousands More Expected at Meta This Week Facebook parent entity Meta is reportedly planning to lay off thousands more employees in a second round of cuts, possibly happening as soon as this week.
Business & Tech Elizabeth Holmes Now Looking to Get Out of Possible $878 Million Restitution Bill Yeah, so, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't really think she should have to pay back the bilked investors who lost money because of Theranos's collapse, and her lawyers' latest gambit is to try to get out of her having to pay any restitution at all.
Business & Tech Another Glitchy Day at Elon Musk's Twitter, Snafu Breaks Several Features Across the Platform Twitter had a roughly 90-minute meltdown for thousands of users Monday morning, and while the platform is back up and running, these things seem to be happening more frequently in the wake of Musk's mass layoffs.
Business & Tech Well, Well, Well, Twitter Has Reinstated Its Longstanding Policy Against Violent Speech Twitter announced Wednesday that it has "made a few changes to our policies around violent content and similar language," though it is basically just a rephrasing of what Twitter's longstanding police was, pre-Elon.
Business & Tech John Oliver Goes After SF-Based OpenAI and Its ChatGPT Product: ‘The George Santos of Technology’ John Oliver’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ went on a fiery rant against AI products, pointing out how artificial intelligence is a lot more ‘artificial’ than it is ‘intelligent.’
