Amazon Web Services was awarded a National Security Agency cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion. The contract, code-named WildandStormy, was first awarded to top cloud provider AWS in July 2021. The same cloud services competed last year and the previously awarded contract was protested.
Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, will no longer accept donations in cryptocurrency. A majority of the WMF community voted 234 to 94 to do away with crypto contributions. The WMF received $130,100.94 worth of cryptocurrency donations in 2021, making up just 0.08 percent of total contributions.
Apple is moving forward with a second season of its critically-acclaimed adaption of Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel Pachinko. The company announced the renewal shortly before the show’s season one finale premiered this past Friday on Apple TV+.
Friday’s season one finale pulled from a scene that occurs about a third through Lee’s approximately 500-page novel, so there’s plenty of story left for Apple’s TV+ series to adapt.
SpaceX launched 53 Starlink satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on April 29. The flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket launched SpaceX’s 42nd operational Starlink mission. The company is working towards completing the deployment of the Starlink broadband constellation. The Starlink constellation will be made up of at least 12,000 internet-beaming satellites.
The Ukrainian government is accepting war effort donations in the form nonfungible token donations and purchases for the war effort. The initiative has already raised over $60 million. All funds go to supplying Ukrainians with weapons, medical gear, and medical kits, and other expenses.
Questions abound about what the metaverse will look like, what its impact will be, and how it will interact with our daily lives. For many, the biggest concerns are the aspects of privacy and cybersecurity. We have a lot of work ahead of us to map out the principles of how the real world interacts with this virtual future.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicts IT budgets and digital transformation projects will withstand a potential recession this year. Microsoft reported a better-than-expected third fiscal quarter this week. The company's CEO called several products “new growth engines” for the company. The only deflationary force is software, he said.
Amazon shares dropped as much as 10% in extended trading on Thursday after the company issued a revenue forecast that trailed analysts’ estimates.
Earnings: $7.38 per share, adjusted, vs. $8.36 expected, according to Refinitiv
Revenue: $116.44 billion vs. $116.3 billion expected, according to Refinitiv
Here’s how other key Amazon segments did during the quarter:
Amazon Web Services: $ 18.44 billion vs. $18.27 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Advertising: $7.88 billion vs. $8.17 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Telegram adds bot to allow users to send and receive toncoin. Users can also buy bitcoin through the "@wallet" bot. The aim is to make sending toncoin "feel like sending a text message," the TON Foundation said. The bot has been used by 800,000 Telegram accounts already, it said.
Microsoft is testing a VPN-like service for its Edge browser, adding a new layer of security and privacy to the browsing experience. A recently-discovered support page on Microsoft’s website details the “Microsoft Edge Secure Network” feature, which provides data encryption and prevents online tracking, courtesy of Cloudflare
Months after Bitcoin (BTC) became legal tender in El Salvador, a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows that 20 percent of businesses have started to accept BTC as their payment method.
The study, surveying adults from 1,800 households in El Salvador, aimed to measure the adoption of BTC in the country after the Bitcoin Law was passed. The researchers found that BTC is gaining ground compared to other payment methods.
For the quarter that ended March 31, Twitter posted revenues of $1.2 billion, up 16% on the same quarter a year ago — in the middle of the range based on Twitter’s figures but short of analysts’ expectations. mDAUs, Twitter’s own user metric for measuring its audience (‘monetizable daily active users’), was 229 million for the quarter, up 15.9% on a year ago.