It turns out Jeff Bezos contributed to Amazon’s recent PR meltdown on Twitter, everyone is wondering what materials will be used to replace silicon as chip manufacturers evolve, and BMW is charging for an important software update.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, March 30 and I’m your host Baneet Braich.
So it turns out that those snarky tweets from Amazon last week targeting American politicians and denying the fact that its warehouse workers sometimes pee in bottles, started because of Jeff Bezos. Vox is reporting that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was very dissatisfied with company officials’ response to criticisms lodged at the business and demanded company reps be much more aggressive defending the company online. This is also in the midst of the largest union election in the company’s history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.
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Silicon has served us well over the past seven decades but it’s showing its age. We’re approaching the limits of the material’s potential, and researchers are desperately trying to discover silicon’s next successor. The Wall Street Journal’s latest piece highlights the other candidates, including graphene, black phosphorus, and boron nitride nanosheets. The article says microchips made from some of these materials could help make them 10 times faster, helping us develop biological sensors to detect COVID-19 as well as cameras that can detect movement better than any current smartphone or DSLR camera on the market.
And lastly, The Verge’s latest piece about BMW’s bizarre pay-wall for a safety feature has got a lot of people angry. It turns out that BMW’s High Beam Assistant, which dims your high-beams so you don’t blind people in the opposite lane, charges extra to unlock the safety feature that’s ALREADY built into their cars. Drivers can unlock this feature with a software patch for roughly $277 (dollars Canadian).
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening!