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Galaxy S23

Samsung Galaxy S23 series may feature a next-gen Qualcomm fingerprint scanner

The Galaxy S23, Samsung’s flagship smartphone series, is expected to feature Qualcomm’s 3rd Generation ultrasonic fingerprint scanner.

The Galaxy S10 became the first Samsung phone to include an ultrasonic fingerprint reader beneath the display. However, its performance was inconsistent. Qualcomm’s second-generation ultrasonic fingerprint sensor was included in the Galaxy S21. It appears that Samsung’s next-generation rising smartphone will include an even improved fingerprint reader.

Galaxy S23
Image Source: smartprix.com

The Galaxy S23, according to rumours, will include Qualcomm’s 3rd Generation ultrasonic fingerprint reader. However, we’re not sure whether it’s the same 3D Sonic Max sensor Qualcomm introduced earlier this year or a completely new fingerprint scanner. We’re in for a treat if it’s the 3D Sonic Max, which is the world’s largest and most advanced fingerprint reader.

The Qualcomm 3D Sonic Max scanner has a surface area of 20mm x 30mm, which is nearly 10 times larger than the 3-dimensional Sonic Gen 2 8mm x 8mm scanner utilized in the Galaxy S21 Ultra and Galaxy S22 Ultra. It’s already in the iQOO 9 Pro as well as the Vivo X80 Pro.

It has five times the accuracy of the 3-dimensional Sonic Gen 2 and can cater to two fingers at the same time for added security. It even claims to support one-tap fingerprint registration, which greatly simplifies the procedure of registering fingerprints.

The Galaxy S23 series is also expected to include an E6 LTPO 3.0 Super AMOLED display with 2,200 nits of peak brightness, a 200 MP ISOCELL HP2 camera sensor S23 Ultra only, a Snapdragon 8 Generation 2 processor, LPDDR5X RAM, Wi-Fi 7, UFS 4.0 storage and urgent or emergency messaging through the use of satellite communication.

All eyes are now on the release of Samsung’s next flagship smartphone. The Galaxy S23 series has already been the subject of numerous rumours and reports. The launch is already expected to take place in early 2023. A new report now offers some additional information.

According to reports, Samsung will hold a complete Unpacked event for the Galaxy S23 release in San Francisco. It’d be the first live event as they were halted due to the global epidemic.

hp

HP Joins Tech Layoffs Season, Plans To Fire 6,000 Employees

Hewlett-Packard aka HP, the world’s leading manufacturing company of laptops and electronic devices, decided to join the huge list of tech companies that have officially confirmed mass layoffs on Tuesday.

HP
Image Source: indiatimes.com

During its earnings report, the company stated that it expected to cut 6,000 job positions by the end of the fiscal year 2025, accounting for 12 per cent of its total worldwide workforce.

“The company expects to reduce gross global headcount by approximately 4,000-6,000 employees. These actions are expected to be completed by the end of fiscal 2025,” the company said in its fiscal 2022 full-year report. 

Source: wionews.com

the firm would lay off some of its almost 50,000 present employees, bit by bit over the ensuing years to save 1.4 billion USD. After HP reported reduced PC and laptop sales, the decision was made.

Read More: Roku lays off 200 employees after weak Q4 Results

During the pandemic, both groups’ sales increased significantly, but since offices and schools have opened, they have levelled off.

as per the experts, this choice could have been made worse by the unfortunate economical circumstances brought on by the ongoing recession and extremely high inflation.

Due to the confluence of the aforementioned factors, the PC manufacturer predicts a lower revenue for the first quarter in its report.

“Many of the recent challenges we have seen in FY’22 will likely continue into FY’23,” said Marie Myers, chief financial officer. 

Source: wionews.com

In addition, HP reported an 11 per cent decrease in Q4 sales, which came in at 14.8 billion USD, in comparison with the same quarter in 2017.

The announcement made by HP as speaking of layoffs comes as many other big tech firms, such as Amazon, Meta, and Twitter, have decreased their workforces, majorly as a result of a global recession.

In the first week after Elon Musk took control of the microblogging site, Meta fired around 11,000 people from its staff while Twitter let go of half of its workforce. Amazon, which is owned by, Jeff Bezos, has declared that it will be dismissing 10,000 of its workers.

According to various sources on Tuesday, 10,000 or 6 per cent of the poor-performing employees of Alphabet Inc., the parent firm of Google, would be dismissed.

business directory

WhatsApp To Soon Launch New Yellow Pages-Style Business Directory

WhatsApp is formally debuting a brand-new business directory feature in the UK, Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. The new tools will be introduced for the first time in Brazil, one of Whatsapp’s largest markets, outside of pilot projects.

business directory
Image Source: wired.co.uk

WhatsApp has revealed the release of a business directory feature that supports in-app transactions. Users can use this feature to find nearby businesses. Users can look up the business by categories including banking, dining, and travel.

After a brief test in So Paulo, Brazil, last year, WhatsApp decided to officially launch the service. In Brazil, the feature is only accessible through Android, however, it is accessible through both Android and iOS in the other four countries.

Read More: WhatsApp Rolls Out New Feature for Group Chats

At a meeting in Brazil devoted to WhatsApp, the company said that the “business search” tool will help people find contacts for businesses more quickly. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, noted, “We want to make it easier for people to get more done on WhatsApp.

Part of that is building better ways to engage with businesses. The ultimate goal here is to make it so you can find, message, and buy from a business all in the same WhatsApp chat.” To start a conversation with a business on Whatsapp, users previously had to enter a mobile number to their phone contacts or follow a link on a different site.

The feature’s release coincides with WhatsApp’s increased marketing of itself as a platform for users to contact businesses in addition to family and friends. According to Meta, more than 175 million users use WhatsApp to communicate with business accounts daily as of October 2020.

Other e-commerce-related features have also been introduced to the service, such as support for in-app shopping.. According to a press statement from WhatsApp, the merchant payments functionality is now being tested in Brazil “with multiple payment partners.”

The business-oriented features of WhatsApp are noteworthy since they represent one of the few means the platform is monetized using the WhatsApp Business API. It doesn’t similarly display ads as Instagram and Facebook, two of Meta’s other top services, do. However, a Meta executive told Reuters a year ago that WhatsApp’s business model “in some form or another” is likely to include adverts in the future.

With the debut of person-to-person payments in 2020, Meta recently announced WhatsApp’s “first-ever end-to-end shopping experience” in India with JioMart earlier this year.  However, the expansion in Brazil has been more delayed. The payments function of WhatsApp was shut down by Brazil’s national bank in 2020, not long after it was introduced.

The Financial Times reported in April of this year that Meta was having trouble obtaining payment providers for its payment-to-merchant service.

Over 2 billion people use WhatsApp worldwide. According to the company’s quarterly earnings, which were cited by TechCrunch last month, the click-to-WhatsApp ad business had increased revenue by 80% year over year and was on course to reach $1.5 billion annually.

Recently, Meta reported its first-ever yearly revenue drop and laid off over 11,000 employees.

roku

Roku lays off 200 employees after weak Q4 Results

In the perfect example of what appears to be daily job cuts in Big Tech, Roku declared its plans presently to lay off about 200 employees, which represents nearly 7 per cent of its workforce. In an SEC filing, the streaming company stated that it intends to cut jobs in the United States due to economic conditions.

Roku
Image Source: news.yahoo.com

The company estimates that the reductions will cost between 28 and 31 million USD in severance pay, notice pay where relevant, employee benefits contributions, as well as other costs.

“Due to the current economic conditions in our industry, we have made the difficult decision to reduce Roku’s headcount expenses by a projected 5%, to slow down our [Operating Expenses] growth rate. This will affect approximately 200 employee positions in the U.S. Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position,” Roku said in an official statement.

Source: techcrunch.com

As per Roku, a large percentage of the layoffs will occur in Q4, with the remainder predicted to be “substantially complete” by the end of Q1 2023.

In a statement, Roku said, “Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position.”

Source: engadget.com

These layoffs arrive after Roku warned during its most recent quarterly results that it expects a year-over-year profits decline in Q4. In pre-market trading today, the company’s stock fell nearly three per cent.

Read More: Coinbase to lay off more employees amid FTX saga

Job cuts in Big Tech have emerged as an unfortunate trend in recent days. Roku’s layoffs arise on the heels of downsizing at Meta, which laid off 11,000 of its employees last week; Twitter, which laid off nearly 3,800 staff members earlier this month; and Amazon and Microsoft.

Even though Apple has thus far been an exception, it has decided to impose a hiring freeze that is expected to last until late 2023. Similarly, Disney is reportedly freezing hiring and planning layoffs, while Netflix laid off about 300 workers in June. Streaming companies, including Roku, have encountered the dual difficulties of an uncertain economy and revenue downturn following a surge during the coronavirus pandemic.

whatsapp

WhatsApp Rolls Out New Feature for Group Chats

WhatsApp has been striving to improve the user- experience of group users. The Facebook-owned messaging application a while back increased the maximum number of members in a group. It also unveiled a brand-new Communities feature, which enables WhatsApp users to manage numerous groups under a single roof.

whatsapp
Image Source: indiatoday.in

The corporation has officially started to introduce new group functionalities for desktop users. According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is launching a new feature that will enable some beta testers on Desktop beta to view profile photos inside of group chats.

For quite some time, the new WhatsApp feature, which permits PC users to view profile photos within group chats, has been in the works, and statements about the feature have indeed been sighted in previous beta versions.

According to the report’s screenshot, the feature will also allow you to view an image of the member in the group chat screen just beside their name. As of now, the app only displays the names of the members.

Read More: Zuckerberg Announces 32-Person Video Calling Feature for Whatsapp

To determine whether you have gotten the latest feature, you just have to open a group chat. As previously stated, the feature is currently only available to beta users. However, the company is expected to roll out the feature in a public upcoming update.

WhatsApp officially unveiled a companion mode for smartphone users having Android in the form of a beta update. According to a report by WABetaInfo, a few fortunate beta testers on the Android system are now able to use the WhatsApp companion mode which was highly awaited.

The feature was previously available to just a few Android-based tablet users last month, and it is now accessible to mobile phone users as well. You could use a single WhatsApp account on some other smartphone with the help of the new companion mode.

However, my updates and bugs are still going on. Users will experience a series a changes.

WhatsApp is yet to fix two bugs disclosed by WABetaInfo. A tweet quoted, “Some users are experiencing crashes when downloading videos after installing the latest version of WhatsApp beta for Android. In addition, WhatsApp may continuously play a conversation tone when sending a message.”

Source: thehindubusinessline.com
shopping features

YouTube expands shopping features to combat digital ad slowdown

According to the Financial Times on November 15, Tuesday, YouTube is adding shopping features to its short-form video service which is like TikTok, as it seeks to broaden its revenue stream, which has been decreased by falling ad spending.

shopping features
Image Source: geo.tv

“Viewers in the U.S., India, Brazil, Canada, and Australia can see the tags and interact with them and we’ll continue to bring tagging to more creators and geographies,” a Google spokesperson said.

Source: usnews.com

Ad sales on Alphabet-owned YouTube fell to US$7.07 billion in the third quarter, down from US$7.2 billion the previous year, as advertisers cut back on ad spending in the name of an economic downturn.

Read More: Youtube to introduce new feature to zoom in and out while watching videos

According to the newspaper, the streaming platform is also trying out new commission strategies for influencers who sell stuff via links in videos.

Reuters’ request for comment was not immediately responded to by YouTube.

The report information came only months after YouTube introduced a brand-new way for creators to make a living on short-form videos, launching advertising on its video feature Shorts and offering video makers 45 per cent of the profits.

The internet’s most popular video site has had difficulty keeping up with TikTok, the app that began by organising lip-sync and dance video content and has since grown to 1 billion monthly users.

YouTube sincerely hope that the new shopping features will boost its earnings from digital advertising. The site is introducing new features that will allow users to purchase products directly from videos and learn more about the products they are watching.

This is in addition to the existing features, which allow users to add items to their shopping carts and keep them for later use. In addition, when users are watching videos on YouTube, a new “shopping shelf” will show up on the right side of their screen. This shelf will display similar products that users can purchase as well as product information.