TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In brief: Dell's latest XPS hardware refresh looks good on paper but not all configurations will be available at launch, and the price tags are eye-watering. Still, the company's latest productivity-focused laptop and desktop machines pack some powerful specs such as Intel 13th-gen CPUs and Nvidia RTX 40 Series graphics solutions. Mobile World Congress this year was packed with announ ...read more

Elliott Management, one of five activist investors working inside of Salesforce, has nominated a slate of candidates to the Salesforce board of directors. This move, which was confirmed by sources to TechCrunch, is an indication that negotiations to resolve this without getting to this point have broken down. CNBC was first with this news. “Elliott has been in constructive, but intense dialogue with the company over the last few weeks, and has nominated a slate of directors to the board ...read more

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. Mary Ann is taking over while Natasha attends a summit in LA, and this week, she interviewed Mark Goldberg, partner and fintech lead at Index Ventures. Since 2015, Mark has spent his time investing in — and sitting on the boards of — financial s ...read more

Audible today announced that it would launch its first-ever singing competition series as an exclusive podcast featuring artists Sara Bareilles and Kelly Rowland as judges. “Breakthrough” will premiere on the Amazon-owned audio service on June 1. On the podcast series, Bareilles and Rowland will mentor five artists over the course of nine episodes. The host of “Breakthrough” will be “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs. The undiscovered musicians will have to compete in a series of c ...read more

Thoughtworks has emerged as the latest tech company to join the ongoing trend of laying off employees amid the global economic slowdown. The software consultancy firm laid off about four percent of its global workforce — approximately 500 employees — a figure that the company did not dispute when reached for comment on Wednesday. TechCrunch learned that the company initially informed its affected employees about the decision on Tuesday, and the layoffs will continue in the coming days ...read more

TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. The big picture: The US government has had a bad run of cybersecurity-related incidents over the last couple of weeks. In the span of 12 days, officials from the FBI, DoD, and USMS have confirmed one data leak caused by human error and two separate attacks against government systems. So far, investigators have either not found any suspects or are keeping the lid on what they have disco ...read more

from the but-free-can't-work dept You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, particularly the parts that are reproducable at zero marginal cost, then you can build in value-adds one way or another that you can charge for. Whatever you lose ...read more

Amazon has struck a deal with embattled online mortgage lender Better.com to offer up a new benefit to employees. Better.com is launching Equity Unlocker, a program that allows employees to use their vested equity as collateral for a down payment when trying to buy homes. Amazon employees in Florida, New York and Washington State will be the first to try the tool. Unique about the program, according to Better.com, is that employees will have the ability to finance their homes without actually s ...read more

TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In brief: MSI has announced that the 34-inch QD-OLED curved monitor it unveiled at Computex last year will be available next month. The MSI MEG 342C packs several compelling specs, including a 3,440 x 1,440 (21:9) resolution, a 175Hz refresh rate, 1,800R curve, and around 1,000 nits brightness for viewing HDR content. MSI's monitor drew a lot of attention while it was on show in Taiwa ...read more

Two months after AMD's announcement at CES 2023, the first 3D V-Cache enabled Zen 4 parts have hit the shelves, and we have the top-of-the-range Ryzen 9 7950X3D up for review. Two other models with the extra cache, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, were also part of the announcement but AMD is not sampling them yet and has delayed the release of the 7800X3D for another 5 weeks. There's no technical reason for it, perhaps binning, but it would seem that AMD is doing this simply to push b ...read more