Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 105

Tesla delivered 367,500 vehicles in 2019 which marks a huge increase for the electric vehicle maker, as that is more than double the cars it shipped in the previous two years, combined.

Even just in Q4 2019, Tesla broke its own records for making close to 105,000 vehicles and delivering 112,000 vehicles. Most of this is from the super-popular Model 3 sedan, with 92,500 Model 3s delivered -- a 46% increase of Q4 2018, while delivering 19,450 Model S and Model X electric vehicles.

Tesla is bringing more Gigafactory locations online, with its recent Shanghai-based Gigafactory 3 churning out its Model 3 vehicles now. Tesla says that its new Gigafactory 3 facility has already made 1000 cars ready for consumers, and has a production run-rate of making more than 3000 cars per week (this excludes local battery pack production).

Two Amazon employee's who spoke out against the companies current environmental policies say Amazon heavily warned them that they could be fired if they continued speaking out.

The two employee's Maren Costa and Jamie Kowalski spoke to The Washington Post about how they believe that Amazon is currently attributing to climate change by still supporting the use of oil and gas with its cloud computing business. Costa and Kowalski said that they were called into official Amazon human resources meetings where they were accused of violating the company's explicit external communications policy.

Costa, in particular, said that an Amazon lawyer sent her an email that said if future violations were detected it could "result in formal corrective action, up to and including termination of your employment with Amazon." Engadget reached out to Amazon for a statement and received the following: "Our policy regarding external communications is not new and we believe is similar to other large companies."

AMD has gone from stride to stride in the last few years, and all of that success has been towards this very moment -- AMD stock price just reached a new peak of $49.10.

The last time that AMD stock was this high was back on June 21, 2000 during the time of the 1GHz race with Intel. Things went down from there, but back up into the $35-$40 range in 2005-2006, when AMD was kicking some ass with its Opteron processors. But then things went really far south until Lisa Su took over as CEO in 2014 and turned things around, big time.

AMD now has some kick ass products all over the place, between the new Zen 2-based CPUs on 7nm with Ryzen 3000, Ryzen Threadripper 3000, and EPYC processors -- not to forget the new 7nm-based Navi-powered Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5500 series graphics cards. AMD is also powering the next-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles with a semi-custom SoC on the 7nm node, meaning the company is literally firing on all cylinders right now in all the right ways.

TikTok continues to find itself in trouble with the US Navy first banning the use of the Chinese social media app on government-issued devices, and now the US Army is following in the same footsteps.

US Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa spoke with Military.com saying that TikTok was "considered a cyber threat". The US Defense Department warned employees back in mid-December 2019 to delete TikTok to "circumvent any exposure of personal information".

The major issue here is that US Army employees can't use TikTok on their government-issued smartphones, but nothing is stopping them (yet) from using TikTok on their personal devices. The US Army is continuing to warn soldiers against strange texts and other potentially damaging messages so that personal (and possibly critical) data isn't exposed.

Many Apple users that love their iPhone also love their Apple Watch to go alongside it. One of the main features of the Apple Watch is its heartbeat monitoring, and that the Watch can measure a wearer's irregular heartbeat, an amazing feature for fitness users.

Unfortunately, Apple seemed to have stepped in a bit of trouble when it comes to the Apple Watch's heartbeat monitor, as a New York doctor has claimed the company has ripped off his patented invention. Dr. Joseph Wiesel is suing Apple over allegations that the Watch is using his patented invention that covered "pioneering steps" in atrial fibrillation.

According to Wiesel, his invention allowed for the monitoring of "irregular pulse rhythms from a succession of time intervals." Wiesel also said that he contacted Apple back in 2017 in regard to the patent, giving them sufficient information. He is now going forward with the lawsuit and is asking the court to make Apple pay him royalties and to block the company from adding his invention to their product without his permission.

While the reviews for The Witcher TV show are accurately mixed, it can't be debated that the new TV show has caused a spike in overall Witcher IP attention.

The TV show has had some dividing opinions since its release, with critics giving it some tough love, but the majority of the people that watched it rating it well. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 93% and IMDB has settled on 8.7/10, and both scores reflect that most people who watched the show at least enjoyed it more than average.

Since the release of the TV show, a portion of people wanted more of The Witcher universe and have since sought out new content to consume. We can see this primarily in Amazon's Author Rank chart as The Witcher creator, Andrzej Sapkowski, is placed at #1. All of CD Projekt Reds games are also getting massive attention, the spikes in players have basically revived the series once again. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in particular.

Spotify, the largest music streaming platform in the world, has said that it will stop running political ads in 2020.

Spotify spoke to Ad Age about its new approach to political ads on its platform, and the company said that for the time being, they would be putting a "pause" on political advertising. This "pause" will affect the free ad-supported version of Spotify and any original podcasts it makes.

This change will also only apply for the US as this is the only country that is currently running political ads. Third-party users will still be able to implement political ads into their content, just as long as they fall into line with Spotify's content policy.

A man who attempted to black mail Apple out of $100,000 will be staying at home this holidays, instead of prison.

The 22-year old man is named Kerem Albayrak, and is from North London. Albayrak attempted to extort Apple out of $100,000 by threatening to dump the data of million of iCloud accounts. Albayrak actually ended up pleading guilty to three offences, one charge of blackmail, and two separate chargers of unauthorised access.

According to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), Albayrak threatened to delete 319 million iCloud accounts and in return has been slapped with a two year suspended jail term, 300 hours of unpaid work and six month eletronic curfew.

Tesla Motors shareholders will be cheering during the Christmas period, with Tesla stock breaching $420 per share on Monday -- and in perfect faction, Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk made a weed joke.

Musk is no stranger to blazing up controversy after he smoked weed live on the Joe Rogan show and landed in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But now that Tesla stock was smoking hot at $420, Musk tweeted out: "Whoa ... the stock is so high lol".

Back in August 2018, Musk found himself stuck in residue over a tweet that saw the Tesla CEO joking that he was "considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured". An obvious weed joke, but something the SEC didn't take lightly -- accusing him of misleading Tesla investors.

Lyft has found itself in quite the bad position just before the holidays, with the ride-sharing giant seeing its algorithm flagging names and banning them, or going as far as asking them to change their name.

The algorithm itself is flagging names like "Dick", "Finger", "Cummings" and others as inappropriate and not meeting Lyft's "community guidelines". One Lyft customer, Michael Finger, was emailed by Lyft with the email stating the company "noticed the name on your Lyft account doesn't align with our Community Guidelines". Crazy.

Another was Kevin Cocks, who received a push notification with the same warning and asked him to "update" his name by 12/21 in order to continue using Lyft. Lyft's mysterious algorithm is also picking up non-English names with a user named Bubunyo, where he received the same email about the Community Guidelines -- he said "if you are expecting me to use an English name, it won't happen cos I'm not English. You might as well ban me".