Enterprise

Facebook changes name to Meta

Thoughts on the new name?

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Meta

That’s so Meta. At Connect 2021, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will now be called Meta.

Under Meta will still be same family apps like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But there will also be their Reality Labs with Oculus, the Horizon VR platform and other VR and AR efforts which will expand Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision.

In their official release announcement, the company said “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.”

“The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.” it added.

Zuckerberg and his metaverse

On the founder’s letter, Zuckerberg shared more about his metaverse vision. He said, “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place.”

Zuckerberg previously demonstrated this with all of their VR and AR efforts with Oculus.

Meta

“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today,” he added.

Zuckerberg insists that the metaverse won’t be created by Meta alone. He said it will be “built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items” to “unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.”

Misinformation hub

The announcement comes on the heels of whistleblower Frances Haugen detailing the dangers that the platform enables in the real world.

Facebook’s reputation is rapidly crashing down. For quite a while now, the social media platform has defended itself against claims of misinformation and anti-trust. However, though the company is holding its own in the courtroom, Facebook is now facing another internal battle. A Facebook whistleblower has revealed how consciously dangerous the platform is, especially in other countries.

Speaking to CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Haugen says the platform is more harmful in countries where there are no robust misinformation regulations. She noted how the lack of protection and fact-checking can lead to death.

“In a village in Africa, someone will send in a picture of a massacre that is allegedly happening in the next village and say, ‘grab your guns, come save your cousins,’” Haugen said.

Enterprise

NVIDIA CEO admits to having an affair with alleged Chinese spy

The company is currently investigating the allegations.

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In one of the craziest headlines this year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Over the weekend, a heavy allegation claimed that the NVIDIA CEO had a relationship with a person actively involved in Chinese intelligence. Since Huang is involved in business globally, the accusation isn’t a light one. In fact, it’s serious enough that Huang admitted to the affair late this past Sunday.

In an internal letter reported by Associated Press, the CEO acknowledged the existence of the affair with a business executive. Of note, Huang did not confirm the executive’s ties to Chinese intelligence. NVIDIA, however, will conduct its own investigations regarding the allegations. Despite the allegations, Huang will remain as the company’s CEO. The company is also confident that the alleged spy did not compromise NVIDIA’s secrets.

According to The New York Times, the executive, Alice Huang, was reportedly feeding information back to Beijing, despite being an executive of the Singapore-based Megaspeed, which is already a serious customer of NVIDIA.

Now, NVIDIA is currently in a prime position when it comes to the industry today. Formerly a huge proponent of gaming peripherals, the company is now one of the biggest names in AI hardware, allotting a lot of its products for data centers. Huang’s allegations come at an interesting time.

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Apps

Salesforce introduces Slack Frontline for deskless workers

Simple, secure, mobile-first way for deskless teams across retail, healthcare, manufacturing, field service

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Salesforce is bridging the massive divide between corporate headquarters and deskless workers with the launch of Slack Frontline.

This new solution is designed specifically for retail associates, healthcare providers, factory workers, and field crews.

The mobile-first workspace brings communication, data, role-specific tools, and AI together in a single clutter-free app.

While frontline employees make up about 80 percent of the global workforce, they have historically been left out of workplace transformation, often relying on paper checklists, group texts, and broken communication loops.

Slack Frontline addresses these challenges by giving mobile workers up to 10 role-relevant channels, instant Huddles with headquarters, on-demand AI agents, and automated workflows.

Backed by Salesforce data and enterprise-grade security, the platform lets IT teams govern the entire workforce under one secure layer with employee ID sign-ins, multifactor authentication, and compliance configurations like HIPAA.

This ensures that critical updates, training materials, and shift handoffs reach workers directly in their pockets without needing corporate email addresses or shared terminals.

Moreover, the platform is tailored to transform operations across multiple industries, including retail, home healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, and field services.

For instance, retail teams can instantly sync promotions and monitor inventory, while healthcare professionals can securely review patient histories and coordinate care on the go.

Manufacturing and hospitality teams benefit from drastically reduced downtime and faster issue resolution, cutting response times significantly.

Slack Frontline is available now as an add-on for businesses on the Slack Enterprise+ plan.

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Enterprise

Google illegally destroys 250,000 trees for a single AI data center

This is what we stand to lose with data centers.

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In the Philippines, it’s illegal to cut down a single tree without a permit. It’s a constant reminder that the preservation of nature should be a civil, besides being a moral, obligation. And yet, corporations are seemingly immune from obligations and morals. Google, the company that used to stand for “Don’t be evil,” shows off its true colors by illegally cutting down 250,000 trees in Finland for a datacenter.

As first reported by The Guardian, Finland is now staring at 330 hectares of land suddenly denuded of around 250,000 valuable trees, all thanks to Google. A local ecologist has also said that the company killed a further 150,000 trees at a separate site.

The environmental desecration is part of Google’s multibillion-dollar push to build data centers all over the world for artificial intelligence. Google has since been ordered to stop the development in the country after Finland found that the company acted without securing the needed assessments and permits to clear the area.

Google brushed away the report by saying that they acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time.” The company also said that they are protecting the water quality at the affected sites and committed to replanting trees across 130 hectares, a pale comparison to the total area affected.

Other AI companies are also trying to weasel their way into other countries to build data centers. An example is the controversial Pax Silica in the Philippines. Finland now stands as a cautionary tale against the unimpeded and unsupervised growth of data centers for a service that no one asked for.

Don’t be evil, my ass.

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