Robinhood faces a class-action lawsuit, Bell raises mental wellbeing awareness, and Apple’s record earnings in Q4 2020.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Friday, January 29, and I’m your host Alex Coop.
The fire that is the GameStop stock continues to burn after Robinhood, a popular stock brokerage platform, pulled GME from its listings, causing a sharp drop in GameStop’s stock price. This move was promptly met with a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of manipulating the open market by preventing investors from purchasing the stock. In addition to GameStop, Robinhood also no longer allows investors to purchase BlackBerry, Express, Koss, and Nokia stocks, all of which saw similar surging trade volumes.
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Breaking news: we’ve just set a new #BellLetsTalk Day record with 154 971 256 interactions! But the day is not over yet! 😎 pic.twitter.com/bLL1hmuZbv
— Bell Let’s Talk (@Bell_LetsTalk) January 29, 2021
Bell Canada is once again raising mental well-being awareness through its Bell Let’s Talk Day event. The event has been held annually since 2010 and has raised over $113 million towards Canadian mental health programs. As always, Bell donated five cents to Canadian mental health programs for every applicable text, calls, tweets, or TikTok videos tagged with #BellLetsTalk. While mental health has always been an important topic, it is perhaps more so this year as social distancing compounded stress for many who are stuck at home. Many others suffered through job losses, domestic abuse, and loss of loved ones.
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Welcome to the super cycle: Apple just had the best quarter in the history of the smartphone from technology
And lastly, it turns out that Apple and its iPhones are booming. Sales were up 17 per cent year-over-year to a whopping $65.6 billion in a single quarter. Research firm IDC estimates that Apple shipped more phones during the quarter than any other smartphone vendor ever has in a single quarter. The smartphone giant’s dominant quarter coincides with Apple’s new privacy feature that forces developers to ask for permission to track iOS users for ad targeting. The feature is going live for non-beta users in the next iOS 14 beta, but according to the Verge, Apple won’t specify a launch date outside of “this spring.”
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.