NVIDIA reportedly slows down hiring as it braces for a drop in gaming sales

A slowing economy continues to affect the tech industry, as NVIDIA has become one of the first chipmakers to announce a pullback on new hiring, according to memos seen by The New Indian Express and confirmed by Protocol. That lines up its comments during its latest earnings release, when it said that it expects sales of GPUs for gaming consoles and PCs to decline in the current quarter. “Overall the gaming market is slowing,” CEO Jensen Huang told Reuters. 

NVIDIA actually had a solid previous quarter, with revenue up 46 percent over last year to $8.29 billion. It also noted that its “gearing up for the largest wave of new products in our history” with new GPU, CPU, DPU and robotics processors coming online in the second half of the year. 

However, it forecast lower revenue than the market expected for next quarter. And internally, the company appears to be bracing for a slowdown. “Onsite interviews… continue, but we will raise our standard to the highest levels,” it reportedly said in a Slack message. “We were told that leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires we’ve recently made.” The company also told Protocol that it’s slowing hiring “to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists.

NVIDIA will be joining a number of tech companies, including Lyft, Uber and Snap, in announcing hiring slowdowns. Tech companies have been hit particularly hard by economic headwinds cause by COVID lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine. NVIDIA, however, was expected to weather events due to continued strong demand in the GPU market that has kept prices high and supply short. 

IKEA made a Matter-ready hub with a new smart home app to match

IKEA continues its foray into smart home devices with the launch of a Google Matter-ready hub called DIRIGERA and a new IKEA Home smart app. With the new device and app, the Swedish company is promising to handle more smart device segments while making device integration easier. It says the app will be “convenient, easy to navigate and user-friendly” for anyone just getting into smart home tech. 

“With the new DIRIGERA hub for smart products, users will be able to onboard all IKEA smart products to the system and steer them individually, in sets or in groups in the new IKEA Home smart app. This enables users to create different scenes with pre-set functions of the smart products and increases the personalisation options for the smart home,” according to the company.

IKEA’s first smart home hub/gateway TRADFRI and app launched way back in 2014, so it was long overdue for a refresh. The company said that you’ll still be able to use that device, and current “products from IKEA can be connected to and work equally well with the DIRIGERA hub.”

IKEA’s smart home and device family continues to grow at a fairly rapid pace. Earlier this year it launched the VAPPEBY LED lamp that doubles as a Spotify-enabled Bluetooth speaker. It also recently refreshed the SYMFONISK bookshelf speaker, built in partnership with Sonos, along with smart blinds, a smart air purifier and other devices. 

The DIRIGERA hub and new IKEA smart home app will launch in October 2022, the company said. It will also unveil remote “away from home” functionality in the first half of 2023. 

Dyson’s been secretly working on robots that do household chores

Dyson has been getting into more and more offbeat products these days, like the Zone noise-canceling headphones that blow purified air at your face. Now, the company has revealed that it has an entire division that’s secretly been developing robot prototypes that do household chores. 

The company didn’t detail any of the models in particularly, but many look like regular robot arms adapted to do specialized home chores like cleaning and tidying. One appeared to be designed to vacuum out the seat cushions, mapping an armchair out in detail to do the job. “So this means I’ll never, ever find crisps around the back of my sofa again?” the company’s chief engineer, Jake Dyson, asked a researcher in a video (below).

Another robot was putting away dishes or at least placing them in a drying rack, and another was grasping a teddy bear, presumably picking up after a child. Dyson also showed off a “Perception Lab” that was all about robotic vision systems, detecting its environment and mapping humans with sensors, cameras and thermal imaging systems.

Dyson is currently on a recruiting drive, looking for around 700 engineers, which is one reason it finally decided to show off the lab (located at Hullavington Airfield, Wiltshire in the UK) after keeping it under wraps. “What you’re developing counts an awful lot in terms of excitement and attracting engineers,” he said. “One thing about robots, as with wearables, is that they are the future of Dyson.”

Insta360’s Sphere lets DJI’s latest Mavic Air drones capture 360-degree video

Insta360, best known for its action and 360 degree cameras, has just launched an interesting drone camera. The Insta360 Sphere attaches around the body of DJI’s Mavic Air 2 or Air 2S drones, letting you film 5.7K 360 footage or create regular 2D videos with the option of reframing them later in post. Better still, Insta360’s tech ensures that the drone is “invisible” in shots.

Since 360 cameras film in all directions, half the video can be obstructed by the drone itself. However, Insta360 mounted cameras on either side of the drone to ensure it doesn’t appear in the footage. To provide seamless footage, “Insta360’s proprietary dynamic stitching algorithm makes the whole drone (including the propellers) disappear automatically,” the company wrote. 

The Sphere attaches to Mavic Air 2/2S drones with an “ultra-secure” mechanism, and doesn’t affect its structural integrity or impact the GPS signal or control system. Insta360 is also promising smooth flights via its FlowState stabilization tech that’s been fine-tuned for the Sphere. At the same time, you can simultaneously capture video from the drone’s own camera. 

The company showed off some fancy footage in a YouTube video, with barrel rolls and dolly zooms, created in its Insta360 app. The Insta360 Sphere is now available in the US and mainland China for $430.  

Lyft joins Uber in cutting back on new hiring

After Uber announced that it was cutting back on hiring and other expenses due to the economic slowdown, rival Lyft is doing the same, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Given the slower than expected recovery and need to accelerate leverage in the business, we’ve made the difficult but important decision to significantly slow hiring in the US,” Lyft President John Zimmer reportedly wrote in a memo to staff.

There are no layoffs planned. However, the decision means the company will give priority to fewer initiatives and not fill many current open roles, focusing instead on critical roles that support its core rides business, the memo further states. 

Tech companies have been hard hit during the economic slowdown, with Amazon reporting its slowest growth in nearly 20 years and Snap shares declining 43 percent after it reported earnings yesterday. Lyft has been hit particularly hard, having lost more than 60 percent of its value since the beginning of 2022, with a 15 percent decline alone yesterday.

ASUS’s ROG Swift is the ‘world’s first’ 500Hz G-Sync gaming monitor

ASUS has unveiled what it calls the “world’s first” 500Hz G-Sync gaming display, the 1080p ROG Swift 500Hz. Designed for competitive gaming, it uses an “E-TN” (eSports TN) panel and incorporates NVIDIA’s G-Sync eSports to maximize motion it clarity. It also uses NVIDIA’s Reflex Analyzer technology that delivers real-time stats to help you reduce end-to-end latency if you’re using a Reflex-optimized mouse and NVIDIA GPU.

The key highlight is the 500Hz refresh rate that draws eight times faster than typical 60Hz displays, ASUS notes. The company is also promising 60 percent better response times than standard TN panels, thanks to the new eSports TN tech. It also uses something ASUS calls an enhanced Vibrance mode that’s built right into the monitor’s firmware. It’s supposed to let more light through the LCD crystals, boosting color vibrancy and “allowing you to pick out details and highlights that might give away an enemy’s position,” it said.

500Hz G-Sync eSports displays are specifically tuned for competitive games like CS:GO, Valorant, Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege. NVIDIA also announced four new Reflex-supported games: Icarus, My Time at Sandrock, Soda Crisis and Warstride Challenges.

NVIDIA also released a video (below) showing the benefits of higher refresh rates including animation smoothness for easier target tracking, minimal ghosting and improved system latency. It “benefits every game and gamer, not just competitive games and eSports games,” NVIDIA wrote in its own press release. 

Canon’s EOS R7 and EOS R10 are its first EOS R crop-sensor cameras

Canon has launched its first EOS R APS-C crop sensor cameras, the 32-megapixel EOS R7 and 24-megapixel EOS R10. The new models bring Canon’s APS-C and full-frame RF series in alignment, so you can finally use lenses interchangeably, much as you can wit…

Amazon installs AI-powered cameras in UK delivery vans

Last year, it was reported that Amazon planned to use AI-equipped cameras to surveil delivery drivers on their routes. Now, the company has started installing such cameras on its vans in the UK, according to The Telegraph. The action has created concern from privacy groups who called it “excessive” and “creepy.” 

Amazon will use a pair of cameras to record footage from inside vans and out to the road. They’re designed to detect road violations or poor driver practices and give an audio alert, while collecting data Amazon can use later to evaluate drivers. 

They don’t allow drivers to be monitored in real time and won’t capture sound, but can supposedly upload footage to a dedicated safety team in certain circumstances. Some of the actions monitored include illegal road behavior like failure to stop or speeding, along with actions like hard braking or seatbelt violations. 

A privacy group called Big Brother Watch said the system is “excessive, intrusive and creepy worker surveillance” and called for it to be paused. “This kind of directed surveillance could actually risk distracting drivers, let alone demoralizing them,” director Silkie Carlo told The Telegraph. “It is bad for workers’ rights and awful for privacy in our country.”

The GMB union that represents Amazon workers said the cameras inside the cabins aren’t necessary and create a major distraction. “We are against cameras being pointed in the face of the drivers every second of every day that they are working. This is surveillance, it does not aid driver safety,” a spokesperson said.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told The Telegraph that “the purpose of introducing this technology is to keep drivers and communities safe, there is no other reason behind that. We have carried out a comprehensive data privacy assessment in line with applicable laws.”

Clearview AI fined £7.5 million and told to delete all UK facial recognition data

Clearview AI has been fined £7.55 million ($9.5 million) by the UK’s privacy watchdog for illegally scraping the facial images of UK residents from social media and the web. It was also ordered to stop obtaining the data of UK residents and to delete any it has already collected. “The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behavior and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable,” said UK information commissioner John Edwards in a statement. 

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) opened a joint investigation with Australia into Clearview AI back in 2020, and issued a preliminary fine of £17 million ($21.4 million) against the company late last year. At the time, the office noted that “Clearview AI Inc’s database are likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people’s knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms.”

In issuing a final injunction, the ICO noted that globally, the company illegally collected more than 20 billion facial images for its database. “Although Clearview AI no longer offers its services to UK organizations, the company has customers in other countries, so the company is still using personal data of UK residents,” it said. 

Clearview AI sells an app that can be used to upload a photo of someone, then try to identify them by check its database. The data has been used by thousands of public law enforcement agencies, despite the technology being in a legal grey area. 

Twitter, Google and YouTube have all sent cease-and-desist letters to the company, alleging that it violates their terms of service. Facebook has also demanded that Clearview stop scraping its data. The company has received complaints from privacy groups in Europe, and was hit with a €20 million fine in Italy.

In the US, the ACLU sued Clearview for violating Illinois state laws. The company recently settled that lawsuit by agreeing to restrict the use of its database in Illinois, though it will still supply it to federal agencies and other states.