Hello friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly list the most-read ukbusinessupdates.com stories from the past seven days. The target? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick recap of WiR should keep you up to date on the (technical) loop.
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This week was a bit everywhere, with a different big story every few hours. Let’s just walk in, shall we?
most read
- Cuts to Area 120: Area 120 is Google’s internal incubator, designed to let Googlers with potentially big ideas use the mega-corporate’s resources to turn those ideas into something real. However, this week Google confirmed that it is scrapping half of the Area 120 projects currently in development, with the incubator “shifting its focus” to AI projects. Affected employees will have until early 2023 to find a new job within Google.
- Adobe buys Figma: In one of the largest tech acquisitions of all time, Adobe this week announced its intention to acquire the collaborative/web-based design tool Figma for a staggering $20 billion. Figma saw ridiculous growth during the pandemic, as many, many tech teams went remote and adjusted their workflows accordingly. Even for a company as large as Adobe, it would have been difficult to reclaim that part of the workflow.
- Fired at Twilio: Twilio confirmed this week that it will lay off about 11% of its workforce – somewhere between 800 and 900 people – as the company aims to achieve profitability by 2023.
- iOS 16 goes live: As expected, iOS 16 rolled out to Apple devices this week. Do you want our opinion about it? Find Romain’s review here. Want to know all the not so obvious new features hiding in the update? Check out Ivan’s list. Most of our readers seem to be looking for interesting ways to use those new Lock Screen widgets.
- South Korea issues arrest warrant for Terraform Labs founder“A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs,” writes Manish, “escalating investigations into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens were $40 billion in a span of days earlier this year lost in value.”
- Uber hack: Late Thursday night, Uber confirmed it was “responding to a cybersecurity incident” after a hacker allegedly breached the company’s internal network, with the hacker allegedly announcing his presence (and protesting how Uber pays its drivers) within Uber’s Slack.
audio overview
If you like ukbusinessupdates.com for your eyes, check out ukbusinessupdates.com for your ears. This week in ukbusinessupdates.com podcast land, the Equity team talked about how Y Combinator has evolved over the years, the chain reaction crew “dug into the institutional embrace of blockchains by stodgy financial powerhouses”, and the Found it team went through all the “greatest hits” by revisiting an interview with Figma founder Dylan Field from earlier this year.
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