A digital pandemic winner pushes restart

We hope you had a good day and now we want to give you some exciting information to take with you into the evening. t3n Daily is also available as a podcast and as a newsletter. Here are the topics of the day.

During the Corona pandemic, Clubhouse was the perfect app for people who have been spending a lot of time at home. You could follow live conversations via the app, but only with an invitation. Clubhouse was thus an exclusive pastime during a time when face-to-face social contact was rare and evenings long.

But the rosy days of the app are long gone. As the co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth have now explained in a blog post, more than half of the employees have been laid off. The reason for Clubhouse’s weakening business: As the world has opened up after Covid, it has become more difficult for many people to find their friends on Clubhouse and to integrate long conversations into their everyday life.

A new strategy should help the company to new success. It is said that the halved team will now focus on Clubhouse 2.0. What that should look like was not communicated, it was only said that one had “a clear idea”.

Bad news for Windows 10 fans: According to Microsoft, version 22H2 was the last feature update. Support for the popular and still widespread operating system will officially end on October 14, 2025. Until then, there should be no more new features, only monthly security updates. Customers are therefore recommended to switch to Windows 11.

As of June 13, 2023, the older version 21H2 will no longer be supported by Microsoft. This applies to both the Home and Pro versions of Windows 10. For this reason, users should update to version 22H2 to ensure that their Windows devices continue to receive updates. There are some versions in the Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) that should continue to receive updates even after support has expired. However, that is an exception.

New cooperation on the way: The fund company DWS is merging with the digital financial service provider Galaxy and wants to get involved in the crypto business. The asset manager would first like to develop a series of exchange-traded products (ETP) on certain cryptocurrencies in Europe. The aim is also to give investors access to the growing blockchain and digital asset universe with additional “solutions for digital assets”.

Thanks to the exclusive alliance with the financial service provider Galaxy Digital, the fund subsidiary of Deutsche Bank can draw on extensive know-how in the field of blockchain technology. The company, founded by CEO Michael Novogratz in New York, has more than $2 billion in assets under management and offers a wide range of services including trading, wealth management, investment banking and mining.

Shockingly simple: Tencent Cloud makes creating deepfakes child’s play. Three minutes of video footage, 100 spoken sentences, and $145 is enough to create a live streaming bot that answers questions. Users can create the high-resolution digital person according to their wishes. Half or full body, 3D realistic, 3D semi-realistic, 3D cartoon, 2D real person or 2D cartoon – everything is possible! Production only takes 24 hours.

Customer-specific Q&A can also be created so that the digital human is transformed into a kind of deepfake chatbot. Thanks to an internal timbre adjustment technology, the videos can bypass the flat intonation and monotonous speaking pattern that are often a problem.

Deepfake technology has now reached such a high level that it is often difficult to distinguish between an authentic video and a manipulated one. With Tencent’s $145 deepfakes-as-a-service, that line is becoming increasingly blurred.

Amazon delivers: Despite inflation and economic concerns, the world’s largest online mail order company was able to increase its revenue by nine percent year-on-year to a whopping $127.4 billion. Although the company had to shed about 27,000 jobs, Amazon’s operating profit grew about 30 percent to $4.8 billion. And the stock also gained more than ten percent after the trading session at times.

Amazon’s business targets for the current second quarter also exceeded market expectations. The company expects sales of between $127 billion and $133 billion and an operating profit of $2.0 billion to $5.5 billion.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is making strides in his efforts to cut costs after spending offensive amid the pandemic online ordering boom. In the first quarter, operating expenses increased by just under nine percent, which is the smallest increase in at least a decade.

That’s it for the t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.