Bytes: What’s new in tech
Wisconsin’s ugly tech bust
Plans from microchip giant Foxconn to build “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest” have turned out to be empty promises, said Josh Dzieza in TheVerge.com. “Hopes were high among the employees who joined Foxconn’s Wisconsin project in 2018.” But instead of the 13,000 jobs that Foxconn promised, it had hired just 281 people by the end of last year. Many were simply brought on “so the company could reach the number required” to receive $3 billion in tax credits that Foxconn hoped to get. They “sat in their cubicles watching Netflix.” Residents were pushed from homes that were bulldozed for a state-ofthe-art LCD factory, but there appeared to be no research into “the costs of producing those products in Wisconsin.” Instead, Foxconn “searched for things in Wisconsin they could export to China,” from cosmetics to ice cream. It has since settled on allowing local manufacturers to rent land “to store construction equipment, snowmobiles, or boats.”
A close call in low-Earth orbit
A defunct Russian satellite and part of a Chinese rocket barely avoided a collision over Antarctica last week, said Jordan Pearson in Vice.com, raising concerns about how “space debris” could become a “potential menace.” A crash occurring in low-Earth orbit (LEO) does not pose any immediate threat to human life. But the debris that such a collision would shed adds “space junk” that could set up “a series of cascading collisions that renders a band of space dangerous and possibly unusable for humans or satellites.” Such crashes are extremely rare, but there are currently about 2,000 satellites in LEO, a number “that could be pushed to tens of thousands, thanks to private-sector companies” like SpaceX and Amazon.
Zoom expands into paid events
Zoom wants to become “more than a space for business meetings,” said David Pierce in Protocol.com. The video-chat platform has exploded in utility as the place we go for “conferences, workout classes, graduations, and cooking lessons” during the pandemic. Now it’s launching a bid to own the sprawling marketplace for virtual events. The company is saying “you’re already in Zoom all day; why not do more while you’re in there?” Zoom’s new platform, OnZoom, offers a sortable list of events, integrates with PayPal to sell tickets, and “gives hosts all kinds of information about their attendees and ticket sales”—for now, without taking a cut.