Compass CEO Robert Reffkin in the company’s Seattle office in September 2019. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) New York-based real estate brokerage Compass has laid off 84 employees based in Washington state as part of a reduction that largely targets the company’s technology workforce. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Compass said a significant portion of its cuts in headcount would come from the company’s product and engineering team. A ...read more

from the synergies,-yo! dept Wed, Sep 21st 2022 03:33pm - Karl Bode Remember when ATT spent more than $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV in the belief it would help the telecom dominate video advertising? Then remember when company leadership was so monumentally incompetent they had to run to the exits in terror? Good times. After ATT’s gambit fell apart, the company returned to what it’s best at (lobbying the government to crush broadband competition), and spun off Time ...read more

Gen Z’s favorite social app BeReal experienced a lengthy outage today, which the company only acknowledged with a brief — and fairly vague —  tweet, stating: “yup, we’re on it.” In recent months, the Paris-based app maker has seen its photo-sharing service climb to the top of the App Store, ousting competitors like Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok from the No. 1 spot, at times. But the company has also developed a reputation for not being very communicative — a pattern t ...read more

With Telegram, you can create group chats with up to 200,000 people so you can stay connected with everyone at once. Plus, you can share videos up to 2GB, send multiple photos from the web, and forward any media you receive in an instant. All your messages are in the cloud, so you can easily access them from any of your devices. Telegram secret chats offer end-to-end encryption to ensure that a message can only be read by its intended recipient. Telegram became one of the top-5 downloaded apps ...read more

from the can't-fix-what-you-can't-measure dept Wed, Sep 21st 2022 05:46am - Karl Bode This FCC this week formally announced it had finally started gathering more accurate broadband mapping data from U.S. ISPs after more than a decade of complaints about mapping accuracy. “On June 30, the Federal Communications Commission opened the first ever window to collect information from broadband providers in every state and territory about precisely where they provide broadband services,” FCC ...read more

The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce one, and Cornell University is out front now with a set of bots small enough to sit on a human hair but that can move on their own using nothing but light as a power source. Now, you may remember a similarly small machine from a few months ago, sitting proudly on the rim of a penny. Small, yes — but calling it a robot isn’t quite accurate. It was a tiny machine, for sure, but it operated through being repeatedly he ...read more

What just happened? Rust will soon be part of Linux, Torvalds has decided. The memory safe programming language will join C and the other traditional languages developers use to create new pieces and drivers of the ubiquitous open source kernel. The debate around the inclusion of Rust in Linux has seemingly ended: Linus Torvalds, the original creator and current maintainer of the open source kernel, has decided that, "unless something odd happens," Rust will be part of the final Linux 6.1 rel ...read more

from the well-well-well-if-it-isn't-the-consequences-of-our-actions dept Courthouse News Service takes home another win in the ongoing fight for the respect of the First Amendment. For years, courts received filings printed on paper. Those filings were routinely made available to journalists almost immediately. Whatever processing needed to be done could be interrupted long enough to make copies for reporters. Nothing slowed down and the presumptive openness of the courts was preserved. Then ...read more

Cutting corners: The LibreOffice Foundation is offering a paid version of the eponymous productivity suite to Apple users. The money will be used to fund the project's development, or rather to "educate" organizations about the added value of professional services and official distribution channels. Or so they say. Shortly after the release of LibreOffice 7.4.1 Community Edition, The Document Foundation has started a new paid distribution of the office suite on the Mac App Store. LibreOffice ...read more

French startup Bump has signed a multi-year financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general. It is an equity and quasi-equity $180 million deal that will be progressively unlocked from 2022 to 2030. Yesterday, ZePlug also announced a significant investment — but ZePlug focuses on a different market with partnerships with residential and office buildings. Today’s news is extremely important ...read more