Two tech stocks are soaring for completely different reasons. While Amazon is benefiting from an investment in electric cars, Snap is making a profit with Snapchat for the first time in the company’s history. On the other hand, there is less good news from Mozilla, because the virtual reality browser Firefox Reality is being discontinued. However, the code lives on in a new open source project – the most important messages in a nutshell.
Amazon.com shares are up more than 14 percent in after-hours trading Thursday night. Amazon’s net income surprisingly doubled to $14.3 billion in the holiday quarter. Although this is only on paper and no money is flowing into the coffers for the time being, institutional investors have reacted by buying shares. Revenues from AWS and advertising are growing particularly strongly. In addition, e-car investments let the Amazon.com share soar 14 percent.
Snap’s stock is even steeper. After the paper of the Snapchat operators had initially collapsed by 24 percent in the wake of the Facebook whirlpool, Snap presented a result with profits for the first time. That turned the mood and the price jumped over 59 percent in after-hours trading: Snap made its first quarterly profit in the company’s eleven-year history.
The virtual reality browser Firefox Reality is only four years old, but Mozilla is now handing over its browser, which was specially developed for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), to the open source development company Igalia. This integrates Firefox Reality into its own web browser project Wolvic after Mozilla discontinues the virtual reality browser Firefox Reality.
Google’s machine learning specialists from the DeepMind team have developed software that generates program code from natural-language instructions. The special thing about AlphaCode: The AI based on a Transformer model is trained to solve programming tasks, such as those that are often asked in competitions or recruitment tests for developers. The first results are as amazing as they are frightening: Google’s AI coder beats human developers.
The SneakerKit offers a completely different type of do-it-yourself (DIY). Sneakers are a topic of discussion because of their less sustainable construction and material composition: the individual elements of the shoes are made of different materials and plastics glued together and can neither be separated nor repaired. With the DIY set, SneakerKit offers a sustainable option for self-made lace-up shoes without glue. We tested the SneakerKit for sustainable shoes to sew yourself.
The Russian government is responding with sanctions to the broadcasting ban on the RT DE television station in Germany. As a “first stage” of the reaction measures, the German foreign broadcaster Deutsche Welle is not allowed to broadcast in Russia either via satellite, terrestrial or on the Internet. Russia is also imposing further sanctions after Deutsche Welle is no longer allowed to broadcast in Russia.
