Latest news with #techIndustry
CNA
2 hours ago
- Business
- CNA
Haveli Investments to buy AI database firm Couchbase for about $1.5 billion
Haveli Investments will acquire Couchbase for about $1.5 billion, the companies said on Friday, as the private equity firm looks to capitalize on the artificial intelligence-focused database company's platform. Couchbase's shares, which have gained 21 per cent this year, were up 29 per cent in early trading following the news. The company's cloud-based database powers AI-related applications that need a flexible data model and easy scalability. Couchbase is part of a group of modern database companies — including MongoDB , Cockroach Labs, Snowflake and Databricks — challenging legacy players such as Oracle . New database technologies make it easier and faster to store, manage and use a large amount of unstructured data that modern AI systems require. Haveli Investments, founded by former Vista Equity Partners president Brian Sheth, will pay Couchbase shareholders $24.50 per share, which represents a premium of about 29 per cent to the stock's last close price. The private equity firm has a 9.6 per cent stake in Couchbase, according to data compiled by LSEG. It may engage with Couchbase's management or board to explore strategic options, including a potential merger, according to a March filing with the U.S. SEC. The agreement includes a go-shop period that ends on Monday, during which Couchbase can consider alternate offers.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Amazon Forces Remote Staff To Relocate
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is forcing thousands of corporate staff to relocate closer to their teamsoften across the countrywith tight deadlines or risk losing their jobs. Bloomberg reports that teams are being told in one-on-ones and town halls to move to hubs like Seattle, Arlington, VA, or Washington, DC. Employees have 30 days to decide and 60 days to either start the move or resign, without severance. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 2 Warning Sign with AMZN. Amazon says this hub strategy has been rolling out for over a year to boost collaboration, but many roles hired as fully remote during the pandemic are now on the chopping block. This comes after CEO Andy Jassy ended remote-first policies and amid broader cost cuts and warnings that AI will shrink headcount. After years of remote-work flexibility, this hard pivot tests Amazon's ability to retain top talent and maintain morale. Tight relocation windows and no-severance clauses could spur resignations, complicating hiring in a competitive tech labor market already jittery about layoffs. Watch for turnover spikes in affected teams and whether Amazon adjusts deadlines or support packages. How smoothly this transition goes will shape the company's post-pandemic workplace modeland signal how far tech giants will go to centralize their workforce. This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Amazon Forces Remote Staff To Relocate
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is forcing thousands of corporate staff to relocate closer to their teamsoften across the countrywith tight deadlines or risk losing their jobs. Bloomberg reports that teams are being told in one-on-ones and town halls to move to hubs like Seattle, Arlington, VA, or Washington, DC. Employees have 30 days to decide and 60 days to either start the move or resign, without severance. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 2 Warning Sign with AMZN. Amazon says this hub strategy has been rolling out for over a year to boost collaboration, but many roles hired as fully remote during the pandemic are now on the chopping block. This comes after CEO Andy Jassy ended remote-first policies and amid broader cost cuts and warnings that AI will shrink headcount. After years of remote-work flexibility, this hard pivot tests Amazon's ability to retain top talent and maintain morale. Tight relocation windows and no-severance clauses could spur resignations, complicating hiring in a competitive tech labor market already jittery about layoffs. Watch for turnover spikes in affected teams and whether Amazon adjusts deadlines or support packages. How smoothly this transition goes will shape the company's post-pandemic workplace modeland signal how far tech giants will go to centralize their workforce. This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
The Verge
2 days ago
- The Verge
Wyze tells us why its security cameras deserve your trust again
In an effort to restore trust in the security of its cameras, smart home brand Wyze has developed VerifiedView — a new layer of protection that embeds your user ID into the metadata of every photo, video, and livestream. Wyze claims the system matches this data to your account before playback, blocking unauthorized access to your footage. 'This is a safety net,' Wyze co-founder and CMO Dave Crosby tells The Verge. 'On top of doing everything we can to protect users, we've built this double check at the end to make sure that they're extra protected.' 'We realized that we cannot survive if we keep making these stupid mistakes.' The move follows several rough years for Wyze on the security front, starting with a vulnerability on its v1 cameras that it knew about for three years and never disclosed, followed by two high-profile incidents in 2023 and 2024, where users saw images from other people's cameras. Crosby says that Wyze now sees fixing its security practices as existential. 'We realized that we cannot survive if we keep making these stupid mistakes that we're making,' he says. 'We've got to make monumental changes so this kind of stuff never happens again.' VerifiedView is just one result of this major shift; Wyze has also expanded its in-house security team, Crosby says, and 'invested millions of dollars' in strengthening its security architecture from top to bottom. That includes re-architecting its security stack, requiring two-factor authentication, launching a bug bounty program, and deploying monitoring tools to detect and prevent threats. Wyze is also committed to being more transparent around security. 'One of the biggest mistakes we ever made was not being more transparent on that,' Crosby says, referring to a flaw Bitdefender identified in its camera in 2019, but which the company didn't disclose to customers until 2022. VerifiedView is available now via a firmware update that began rolling out in April. 'It's 100% deployed on our most popular cameras — Wyze Cam v4, v3, Pan v3, and OG,' Crosby says, adding that it's coming to the rest soon. Some older cameras don't have the hardware to support it, but Wyze is exploring ways to accommodate them. Users can check to see if their cameras are on the new firmware on Wyze's site. Investing in rebuilding After the 2024 breach, Cosby says Wyze regrouped around security. 'We went through our entire security stack, evaluating where we can improve, reviewing third-party tools, and removing them where we can. Where we have to use them, we are only building with the best platforms,' he says. 'We've invested in AWS tools – including Lacework, Security Hub, GuardDuty, and Q CLI.' Wyze also hired several security firms 'to verify and validate what we've done.' VerifiedView should prevent the types of scenarios Wyze experienced in 2023 and 2024 around issues with third-party tools. 'If everything else fails and people get into the cloud or data gets switched, people cannot see other people's content,' Crosby says. It works by attaching your user ID to your camera – and therefore onto any photo, video, or livestream it produces. Before you can access the footage, VerifiedView checks that the ID from the device you're using matches. If it doesn't, access is denied. The tech is similar to DRM (Digital Rights Management) created to combat content piracy, explains Sharon Hagi, a cybersecurity expert and chief security officer at Silicon Labs, who reviewed Wyze's published materials at The Verge's request. 'At the core of VerifiedView is a well-established and critical data security concept: cryptographic binding of user identity and device data to digital content,' he says, calling it a significant step forward in smart home security. While VerifiedView is designed to prevent unauthorized access to your footage, it can't stop someone with access to your account from viewing it. To address that, Wyze claims login security has been strengthened. Two-factor authentication is now required by default, secure sign-in options are available, and the company has deployed tools to detect suspicious logins. Crosby emphasized Wyze has invested a lot of money into these changes and that the ongoing costs to maintain VerifiedView, including engineering and cloud infrastructure, are substantial. This raises the question of how sustainable this is for a bootstrapped startup with razor-thin margins. Could VerifiedView eventually become a paid feature? 'We will never charge for this feature and we will never discontinue it,' Crosby says. 'It will be a regular feature for all Wyze Cams going forward.' Another question is why not just build in end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which ensures only the user and their authorized devices can access footage? Most cloud-based security cameras, including Wyze, encrypt data while 'in transit' and 'at rest,' which protects against bad actors, but allows the company to access it while on their servers to provide additional features. 'VerifiedView offers very similar protections to E2EE without compromising the user experience – it felt like the perfect trade-off.' Crosby says E2EE is the 'holy grail,' but it breaks the features users value. 'With E2EE, you can't use third-party integrations like Alexa, and AI identifications in the cloud don't work. VerifiedView offers very similar protections to E2EE without compromising the user experience — it felt like the perfect tradeoff.' It's true that encrypting your footage keeps a company's cloud servers from looking at it and acting on your behalf to tell you when, say, a package is at your door. But some companies like Apple, with its E2EE HomeKit Secure Video, use a local server to do that processing. Alongside the local storage it offers on some cameras, Crosby says they are exploring adding more local processing, something it has on its higher-end cameras. 'We want to move more and more to the edge,' he says, adding that could mean new local devices, but didn't clarify if that's new cameras or some type of hub for local processing. Wyze is also working on bringing back Real-Time Streaming Protocol, Crosby says. This would let users stream video to a local recording device and/or platforms like Home Assistant. When asked why not at least offer E2EE as an option, Crosby again pointed to the lost functionality of E2EE, such as Wyze's new AI features that help cut down on notifications. 'We created VerifiedView to be a third layer of protection so users can benefit from the AI features … while knowing their videos are secure.' Clearly, the cloud will always be a core part of the Wyze service. 'There will probably always be some sort of edge-cloud collaboration,' Crosby says. 'Today, we do the easy stuff on the edge and the hard stuff on the cloud. As our cameras get smarter, we move more to the edge. But situations are getting harder, too, and we're adding more use cases to what we monitor. So, it will always be a process of learning and getting better at something, and then moving that to the edge.' Crosby believes that users should now feel safe using Wyze's security cameras. 'We are more locked down than ever,' he says. 'I feel very confident. And while you can't be too confident in this game, because everyone feels confident until something happens, we're building layers of tools on top of each other. It's the best we can do at this point, and I feel very confident with it.'
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Amazon announces brutal jobs cuts as silent bloodbath tears through America
Amazon's CEO has announced brutal workforce cuts as the company increases its use of Artificial Intelligence. Amazon boss Andy Jassy said he plans to reduce the company's corporate workforce over the next few years as AI will make certain roles redundant. Jassy told employees in a note seen by the Wall Street Journal that AI was a once-in-a-lifetime technological advancement and it has already transformed how Amazon operates. 'As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,' he wrote in the memo. It is not yet clear how many workers will lose their jobs and when the cuts will come. 'It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce,' Jassy explained. Those close to the matter told the Journal that a large chunk of the decrease in headcount would hopefully occur via attrition. This means as employees move on their roles will not be filled. However, this will not cover all of the reductions and layoffs are still expected to occur at some point. Amazon is the second largest employer in the country and is seen as a bellwether for employment stability. The company has already slowed hiring, suggesting AI is already influencing the company's staffing needs. It is also clear the company is betting big on the new technology, after it revealed plans to splash $100 billion on data centers that AI depends on. It has pumped further billions into the AI startup Anthropic, the CEO of which recently warned AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Amazon has already begun rolling out AI features on Alexa personal assistant and advertising. Jassy said he is confident that more generative AI agents will push the company forward. 'Agents will allow us to start almost everything from a more advanced starting point,' he wrote. 'We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,' he added. The Amazon boss said AI has already changed how the company interacts with consumers Amazon inflicted a wave of painful job cuts in 2022 and 2023, eliminating some 27,000 roles. The layoffs hit teams at Amazon Web Services as well as the company's retail and entertainment branches. It comes as Americans grow increasingly concerned about the impact of AI on the jobs market. AI is continuing to upend the jobs market with white collar entry-level jobs disappearing fastest and layoffs in tech, finance and consulting gathering pace. Earlier this month Procter & Gamble, which makes diapers, laundry detergent, and other household items, announced it would cut 7,000 jobs, or about 15 percent of non-manufacturing roles. As well as cutting jobs, P&G said it will divest a number of its businesses and restructure the organization, chief financial officer Andre Schulten said at a conference earlier this month. Part of this reorganization will involve more automation and digitization, as well as cutting down management teams, he said. Microsoft last month also announced a cull of 6,000 staff — about 3 percent of its workforce — targeting managerial flab, after a smaller round of performance-related cuts in January.
