Quest VR Headsets To No Longer Require A Facebook Account For Login

Meta has recently announced that a Facebook account is no longer needed for Quest VR headset logins. Instead, owners are now required to create a new Meta account and a Meta Horizon profile in order to fully utilise the virtual reality headgear – both of which are currently being rolled out on a gradual basis across the globe.

As some may recall, this isn’t the first time Meta has shifted the login policy for its headsets. Prior to this, the company discontinued the original Oculus accounts in 2020, requiring users to log in to their Quest VR devices with a Facebook account instead. The move proved to be unpopular, with existing headset owners – those with and without an existing Facebook account –  raising privacy concerns due to the tech giant’s well-known (but infamous) track record on the subject.

This supposed U-turn may seem like an attempt to quell users of any fears related to the stigma that Meta possesses. However, all this does is raise even more eyebrows at best, as you’re still required to register with the company anyway – this time around with another account made directly under the brand itself, which is undeniably redundant.

Despite all this, Meta is adamant that this move is the best course of action moving forward. “Our new Meta account structure gives you more flexibility and control, letting you choose how you do and don’t show up—and whether Facebook and / or Instagram is part of your experience in VR and other surfaces where you use your Meta Horizon profile,” the social media conglomerate said in its recent blog post.

If you’re cool with this (not like we’re given much of a choice to begin with), you can create a new account through the Meta mobile app using an email address, Facebook account, or Instagram account. Once it is created, all that’s left is to set up a linked Meta Horizon social profile for your Quest VR headset. Additionally, you can also choose to remove your Facebook profile from your newly created Meta account afterwards.

Microsoft: No Windows 11 Updates If CPU Does Not Meet Requirements

Over the last couple of weeks, Microsoft has made clear its hardware requirements to run Windows 11, while also reaffirming customers whose PCs don’t meet the standard that it won’t leave them in the lurch just like that, saying they will still be able to install the OS via an ISO.

Now it appears that the company is having a Mr. Hyde moment and telling all who do the latter that there is a catch: while users can install the Windows 11 via ISO, it will withhold the Windows Update feature if it detects that PC’s components are not up to its specifications.

While it is clear that the existence and function of Windows Update will certainly divide the room, one cannot argue that withholding the program means that said PCs will lack the ability to automatically download and install important security updates from the parent company over time. Even if some of us are perfectly content with having the feature disabled and turned off.

At this point, there is really no reason for Microsoft to act this way, especially if Microsoft intends for wider adoption of Windows than what it already has. However, as The Verge puts it, this could just be a “cover-your-ass” measure, aimed at discouraging the masses from thinking that it would offer a warranty or technical support for PCs that fail to meet the requirements.

Mind you, this isn’t Microsoft outrightly saying that its withholding updates for Windows 11 altogether; in theory, users adamant about sticking with systems running on CPUs older than Intel’s 8th generation Coffee Lake or AMD’s 1st generation Zen architecture can still get the update, albeit by manually downloading and installing said updates, on a per release basis.

Ultimately, Microsoft’s “selfish” act of withholding the updates can be viewed from a couple of viewpoints. The first is that the company would rather threaten its customers indirectly, rather than backtrack and make changes to the system requirements for Windows 11. The second? The move is Microsoft’s not-so-subtle way of pressuring PC owners into updating their systems with the latest hardware currently on the market.

CEOs are dooming business travel - maybe for good, No more outstation

Business travel as we’ve known it is a thing of the past. From Pfizer, Michelin and LG Electronics to HSBC and Deutsche Bank, businesses around the world are signalling that new communications tools are making many pre-pandemic-era trips history.

Take Akzo Nobel, Europe’s biggest paint maker, for instance. At its Amsterdam headquarters, Chief Executive Officer Thierry Vanlancker has spent the past year watching his manufacturing head, David Prinselaar, flap his arms, madly gesticulate and seemingly talk to himself while “visiting” 124 plants by directing staff with high-definition augmented-reality headgear on factory floors. A task that meant crisscrossing the globe in a plane before is now done in a fraction of the time — and with no jet lag. For Vanlancker, there’s no going back.

“Trips to drum up business could drop by a third, and internal meetings by even more,” he said in an interview. “It’s a good thing for our wallets and helps our sustainability targets. Our customers have had a year of training, so it’s not a social no-no anymore to just reach out by video... There’s an enormous efficiency element.”

A Bloomberg survey of 45 large businesses in the US, Europe and Asia shows that 84 per cent plan to spend less on travel post-pandemic. A majority of the respondents cutting travel budgets see reductions of between 20 per cent and 40 per cent, with about two in three slashing both internal and external in-person meetings. The ease and efficiency of virtual software, cost savings and lower carbon emissions were the primary reasons cited for the cutbacks. According to the Global Business Travel Association, spending on corporate trips could slide to as low as $US1.24 trillion by 2024 from a pre-pandemic peak in 2019 of $US1.43 trillion.

Business travel has “forever changed,” Greg Hayes, CEO of jet-engine maker Raytheon Technologies, said in July. About 30 per cent of normal commercial air traffic is corporate-related, but only half of that is likely mandatory, he said. While the market may eventually recover, sophisticated communication technologies have “really changed our thinking in terms of productivity,” Hayes said.

Having saved billions from slashed travel budgets during the pandemic with only a marginal impact on operations, companies, banks, consulting firms and government offices will be hard-pressed to explain why they’d return to their old ways. Kit Kat chocolate-bar maker Hershey said the pandemic showed that online meetings were a more efficient use of time and financial resources. Companies like Pfizer are grappling with questions about what one accomplishes with a trip that can’t be done virtually, Tina Quattlebaum, its director of global travel operations, said at the GBTA Mid-Year Virtual Summit in July.

“We don’t think business travel will ever return to 2019 levels,” said Will Hawkley, the global head of travel and leisure at KPMG. “Corporates are looking at their bottom-line, their environmental commitments, the demand from employees for more flexible working and thinking: Why do I have to bring that back?”

That’s a blow to the airline and hospitality industries — already among the biggest casualties of the pandemic. Business travellers, who buy premium-class or more-expensive refundable tickets, rang in as much as three-quarters of airlines’ pre-pandemic profits while accounting for only 12 per cent of seats, according to PwC. The hotels sector, which draws about two-thirds of its revenue from business travellers, could see a dip of as much as 18 per cent by 2022 as virtual meetings replace 27 per cent of corporate travel volumes, a Morgan Stanley study shows.

The world’s biggest airlines collectively lost a whopping $US126 billion in 2020 and are set to lose another $US48 billion this year, according to the International Air Transport Association, their lobby. As they wrestle with those losses and the huge debts racked up after coronavirus punctured a decades-long boom in travel, the last thing airlines need is corporate customers cutting back. Carriers like Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines, with thousands of staff and overhead to support, depend on business travellers returning.

“The effect of this structural decrease in business travel will be enormous for the industry, and especially for the airlines that are the most exposed to this category of traveller,” said Pascal Fabre, managing director in Paris for AlixPartners, a consulting firm.

Airlines are trying to stay optimistic. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said about 80 per cent of the carrier’s large corporate clients have indicated that as much as 90 per cent of their pre-Covid business travel will eventually return.

“I don’t expect we’re going to see a degradation in the aggregate of business demand over time,” he said in an interview. “The more people are connected in person, the more opportunities are created. I don’t see this being a significant body-blow to the industry as prognosticated by some.”

Travelling thousands of miles to meet with customers to discuss key issues across a table or over a meal made business sense before the pandemic and that hasn’t changed, said Warren East, the CEO of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc, which makes aircraft engines.

“COVID-19 has definitely taught people that some of the mad regular dashes across the Atlantic hither and thither aren’t necessary,” he said, speaking at a net-zero event on June 17. “But when you peel back beyond that superficial analysis, you realise people were doing it because they thought it delivered real benefit to them.”

There may also be competitive pressures to keep flying, Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith said in an interview. “I hear many of our corporate customers saying that the day they lose an account because they weren’t somewhere face-to-face will immediately bring them back to the way operations were before.”

Airlines are banking on a recovery sparked by pent-up demand after about 18 months when executives couldn’t visit customers — hopes that are being dented by the spread of the delta variant. Even if there is an initial burst of activity, it will start to stabilise and the structural change to business travel will become evident by around 2024, according to Fabre.

“In the past, it was seen as a good thing to go to the other side of the world to shake someone’s hand, but not anymore,” Augustin de Romanet, the CEO of Aeroports de Paris, which operates dozens of airports around the world, said in an interview. “Many things that have been done by conference call during the pandemic will stay that way, especially when it comes to far-flung countries. This will be for costs and the environment as well as people’s wellbeing.”

Company executives travel for many reasons — from business development and customer support to trade shows, conferences and meetings with local staff. Trips for intra-company activities will likely bear the brunt of the cuts “because client relationships aren’t at stake,” said AlixPartners’ Fabre.

“We have learned how to work, develop products, sign contracts without travelling,” he said.

Deutsche Bank’s global head of Investment Banking Coverage and Advisory, Drew Goldman, said that while the bank’s client-related business travel will return to about 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, trips for internal meetings will probably be a shadow of what they were before — at 25 per cent to 30 per cent.

Volkswagen is making employees jump through hoops before they can fly. Internal booking software steers them toward alternatives to flying, the most carbon-intensive form of travel. They’re also asked to justify why they can’t conduct the business online. At French defence and tech giant Thales, “trips will be for longer and probably less frequent in order to optimise costs, environmental impact and wellbeing,” said CEO Patrice Caine.

The world’s biggest airlines collectively lost a whopping $US126 billion in 2020 and are set to lose another $US48 billion this year, according to the International Air Transport Association, their lobby. As they wrestle with those losses and the huge debts racked up after coronavirus punctured a decades-long boom in travel, the last thing airlines need is corporate customers cutting back. Carriers like Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines, with thousands of staff and overhead to support, depend on business travellers returning.

“The effect of this structural decrease in business travel will be enormous for the industry, and especially for the airlines that are the most exposed to this category of traveller,” said Pascal Fabre, managing director in Paris for AlixPartners, a consulting firm.

Airlines are trying to stay optimistic. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said about 80 per cent of the carrier’s large corporate clients have indicated that as much as 90 per cent of their pre-Covid business travel will eventually return.

“I don’t expect we’re going to see a degradation in the aggregate of business demand over time,” he said in an interview. “The more people are connected in person, the more opportunities are created. I don’t see this being a significant body-blow to the industry as prognosticated by some.”

Travelling thousands of miles to meet with customers to discuss key issues across a table or over a meal made business sense before the pandemic and that hasn’t changed, said Warren East, the CEO of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc, which makes aircraft engines.

“COVID-19 has definitely taught people that some of the mad regular dashes across the Atlantic hither and thither aren’t necessary,” he said, speaking at a net-zero event on June 17. “But when you peel back beyond that superficial analysis, you realise people were doing it because they thought it delivered real benefit to them.”

There may also be competitive pressures to keep flying, Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith said in an interview. “I hear many of our corporate customers saying that the day they lose an account because they weren’t somewhere face-to-face will immediately bring them back to the way operations were before.”

Airlines are banking on a recovery sparked by pent-up demand after about 18 months when executives couldn’t visit customers — hopes that are being dented by the spread of the delta variant. Even if there is an initial burst of activity, it will start to stabilise and the structural change to business travel will become evident by around 2024, according to Fabre.

“In the past, it was seen as a good thing to go to the other side of the world to shake someone’s hand, but not anymore,” Augustin de Romanet, the CEO of Aeroports de Paris, which operates dozens of airports around the world, said in an interview. “Many things that have been done by conference call during the pandemic will stay that way, especially when it comes to far-flung countries. This will be for costs and the environment as well as people’s wellbeing.”

Company executives travel for many reasons — from business development and customer support to trade shows, conferences and meetings with local staff. Trips for intra-company activities will likely bear the brunt of the cuts “because client relationships aren’t at stake,” said AlixPartners’ Fabre.

“We have learned how to work, develop products, sign contracts without travelling,” he said.

Deutsche Bank’s global head of Investment Banking Coverage and Advisory, Drew Goldman, said that while the bank’s client-related business travel will return to about 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, trips for internal meetings will probably be a shadow of what they were before — at 25 per cent to 30 per cent.

‘Companies have acknowledged that reducing the level of flights is one way of reducing climate change. For the next 10 years, the best way to reduce emissions from aviation is to fly less.’
Andrew Murphy, aviation director at Transport & Environment

Volkswagen is making employees jump through hoops before they can fly. Internal booking software steers them toward alternatives to flying, the most carbon-intensive form of travel. They’re also asked to justify why they can’t conduct the business online. At French defence and tech giant Thales, “trips will be for longer and probably less frequent in order to optimise costs, environmental impact and wellbeing,” said CEO Patrice Caine.

In Singapore, United Overseas Bank, Southeast Asia’s third-biggest bank, plans to cut its travel budget by as much as half, and will limit trips to cases “where face-to-face interaction is essential,” said Dean Tong, head of group human resources. On New York-based Marsh & McLennan’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Dan Glaser said, “companies, not just Marsh McLennan, will travel with more purpose and will be more thoughtful about travelling.”

Sophisticated technologies are enabling companies to do things they never imagined doing remotely. At French tire maker Michelin, new tools are already eclipsing the automatic reflex to make a trip, CEO Florent Menegaux said in an interview. The company recently used a drone for a virtual visit of its Campo Grande plant in Brazil by the top manufacturing brass in France. “We start machines remotely, have used drones to visit factories and train people from home,” Menegaux said. “We will continue to travel because human bonds are absolutely necessary to our activity, but we will most certainly have an overall reduction of about 20 per cent to 30 per cent in our travel costs.”

Royal Dutch Shell has created online control rooms with interactive 3D simulations of oil platforms and plants, giving engineers virtual access from home. In Troy, Michigan, Kevin Clark, the CEO of Aptiv, a former car parts unit of General Motors, is using drones and Oculus augmented-reality headsets to show customers the performance and manufacturing run rates of plants in Mexico, Hungary, or China.

“We won’t travel as much,” Clark said. “I think it’ll be more when we have to travel people will travel, versus, it’s nice to travel.”

For most companies, cost savings will be the primary driver to scale back, but carbon-footprint worries and employee wellbeing are not far behind, Fabre said.

Businesses globally are under pressure from investors and regulators to shrink their CO2 emissions. The European Commission rolled out an ambitious climate plan in July to force all industries to shift away from fossil fuels. Aviation has long been a target even though it accounts for only about 2.4 per cent of global human-induced CO2 emissions. That’s because the sector was growing rapidly before the pandemic and has other negative effects on the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“Companies have acknowledged that reducing the level of flights is one way of reducing climate change,” said Andrew Murphy, aviation director at advocacy group Transport & Environment. “For the next 10 years, the best way to reduce emissions from aviation is to fly less.”

Airlines are providing companies tools to blunt the impact of CO2 emissions with carbon offsets and refreshing fleets with newer, more efficient planes. But with the tons of carbon dioxide they spew, airlines can’t do much to show that flying is a sustainable way to get around. Hydrogen-fuelled planes and electric commercial jetliners are decades away, and alternative aviation fuel isn’t widely available and jacks up ticket prices.

Carriers may have to modify aircraft configurations to cut business class seats and add more premium economy places. Premium economy costs less to operate than business class and takes up less space.

Air France, for instance, is developing its so-called leisure-business category for passengers who buy premium-class tickets for holiday travel, according to Steven Zaat, the group’s CFO. Thirty-two Air France 777s are fitted with “quick change” systems that allow the airline to reduce the size of its business-class cabin. The airline is still confident about a rebound in business travel, but “we can always reconfigure our planes if necessary,” Zaat said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

While airlines grapple with the possibility of fewer business customers, some of those clients are happy not to be zipping around the world all the time.

“A nice side effect of fewer long-haul business trips is less stress for the people who fly,” Hans-Ingo Biehl, the head of VDR, the German Business Travel Association, said in an interview. A study by the Baylor College of Medicine found frequent fliers have the same cancer risk as obese people. Also, companies have found that jet lag hurts productivity.

“There are a lot of myths and fantasy about travel, but it’s really very tiring,” said Michelin CEO Menegaux. “We should do it only when it’s absolutely necessary. I travel a lot and I can tell you it’s physically gruelling and takes a heavy toll.”

Clubhouse App No Longer Invite-Only Across All Platforms

Clubhouse has announced that it is no longer invite-only across all mobile platforms. As revealed by company co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth via its official blog, this major change is made effective immediately through the latest version of the app that is now available for download on both iOS and Android platforms. 

The decision to remove its invite-only approach is a long time coming, the company revealed. Ever since its launch a year ago, Clubhouse has always been intended to be accessible by anyone in order to have “meaningful conversations” with each other – bypassing limitations such as distance, especially during these trying times.

“The invite system has been an important part of our early history. But we’ve always wanted Clubhouse to be open,” the company said in its latest blog post. “Everyone in the world should have access to meaningful conversations. And the best rooms on Clubhouse are the ones where you meet people from far outside your social circle, with very different views and lived experiences, who change your perspective on the world.”

It added that the invite-only approach was necessary in order to keep things under control during its early stages, especially while the company continues to introduce newer features and improvements to its app. However, this also unintentionally gave Clubhouse a members-only, closed-doors appeal – a similar vibe given by exclusive nightclubs or even secret groups.

Further building up the public’s desire to gain access during this phase are the multitudes of endorsements by public figures and celebrities, who hold exclusive talks or hangout sessions via Clubhouse. This led to a good number of existing members taking advantage of their limited app invites by selling them on various e-commerce platforms, usually at exorbitant prices. Thankfully, this cheeky way of profit-making has become obsolete now that the app finally opened its doors to the public – a move that would definitely anger both scalpers and those who previously paid a premium in order to score an invite.

Along with the announcement, Clubhouse also unveiled its new logo (shown on top) in the same blog post. This will be used to represent the company for general usage such as marketing and so on but will not replace its app icon, it noted. Clubhouse will continue its tradition to update its icon every month, featuring a monochrome image of selected public figures to represent the platform’s community.

With its invite-only element now gone, will Clubhouse retain its appeal? Being a pioneer to the audio-only chat room craze that has spawned numerous clones by competing social media companies, it looks like the app will see no problem by removing the restriction. If anything, it might cause it to flourish even further, especially with the number of well-known names that have been relying on the platform throughout the months since its debut.

Facebook Will No Longer Ban Posts Claiming COVID-19 Was Man-Made

Facebook said it would no longer take down posts claiming that COVID-19 was man-made. This comes as US President Biden ordered further investigation into the origins of the virus, which are disputed in both the scientific and intelligence communities.

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps,” a Facebook spokesperson said, according to a Reuters report.

She said the company would continue consulting with health experts and update its policies as new facts and trends emerge. Facebook, like other social media platforms, have committed to removing falsehoods and misinformation about the virus.

The claim that the virus came from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan has long been dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory. Former US President Donald Trump famously floated the theory, which at the time was widely rejected by the scientific community.

But according to the BBC and other news outlets, a recently disclosed US intelligence report said that three researchers from the Wuhan laboratory were treated in hospital in November 2019 – just before the virus broke out in the city.

As news of the report spread, the Biden administration admitted that the US intelligence community was split on whether the virus came from a laboratory accident or emerged naturally (from human contact with an infected animal). The US president wants officials to look into the question again and get him answers within 90 days, the BBC said.

China, unsurprisingly, has rejected the lab leak theory.

Sony No Longer Lists A-Mount Alpha DSLR Cameras On Its Website

It appears that Sony has finally closed the lid on its A-mount Alpha cameras, which have been on hiatus for several years now. First spotted by Sony Alpha Rumours, the company has removed the three remaining mirrored DSLRs, the a99 II, a77 II and a68, from the camera product list on its website.

The phasing out of the A-mount camera line is a long time coming. With the Sony a99 II flagship being the last of its kind launched back in 2016, no newer models or lenses from the same product line were introduced ever since. By then, the company had already fully shifted its focus to the more advanced E-mount mirrorless cameras, which have been well received by consumers and fans alike.

The A-mount system itself has an interesting history. Before Sony entered the picture, the system was originally developed by Minolta in 1985 and first introduced on its then-latest SLR camera known as the Maxxum 7000 – or better known as the Alpha 7000 in Japan and Asia. 

Minolta, which later eventually became Konica-Minolta after the merger of the two companies in 2003, continued to release newer A-mount SLRs and DSLRs – up to its withdrawal from the camera market in 2006. Fortunately, it wasn’t the end for the system just yet, as Sony acquired its assets as well as the Alpha branding not long after Konica-Minolta’s departure. Under its new owner, the A-mount system lived on for another decade.

Until recently, that is. After 36 years being part of the camera market, the curtains have finally closed on the system – marking an end of an era.

Fortunately, not all is lost for the A-mount – or rather, the lenses that feature it. Back in September of last year, Sony released the LA-EA5 lens adapter which allows its current generation E-mount mirrorless cameras to utilise the legacy lenses. On top of that, it also comes with an internal AF drive that enables the older optics to be used with autofocusing abilities, even those that lack the necessary built-in focus motors. This indeed has brought new life to the wide-range of A-mount lenses that Sony has released over the years.

Nearly Two-Thirds Of Google Searches End With No Clicks At All

Almost two-thirds (or 64.82%) of Google searches in 2020 ended without people clicking through to another website, market research firm SparkToro found using data from SimilarWeb. In other words, people mostly just looked at the search results page and then decided to move on.

While that may be surprising, it really shouldn’t be. It can be argued that Google isn’t a search engine anymore, but an all-knowing guru. Type in any question and chances are, you’ll receive an answer on the search results page itself with no further clicking required.

This obviously applies to currency and time conversions, weather queries, and mathematical calculations. But it also helps that Google is integrated with Wikipedia – search for “nyan cat” and you’ll see a preview of its Wikipedia entry.

This is generally a good thing and Google deserves much credit for anticipating what users need and want. But it also implies that the tech giant has created this closed ecosystem and hogs all the traffic for itself.

So Google pushed back pretty hard against SparkToro’s findings, saying that they were based on “flawed methodology”. The company said that people searching multiple times as they reformulated their queries would falsely inflate the search-to-click ratio.

Someone looking for sneakers, it said, might go through a few zero-click searches before ultimately clicking through to a retailer’s website. Furthermore, people directly connecting with businesses, or navigating directly to apps would skip the traditional click-through altogether.

“We send billions of visits to websites every day, and the traffic we’ve sent to the open web has increased every year since Google Search was first created,” the company declared.

Are you wondering why Google even bothered to respond? Consider that the tech giant has recently been in the sights of US and European regulators over antitrust issues.

Xiaomi Believes Future Phones Don’t Need Ports; Unveils One with Quad-Curved Waterfall Display

After revealing the Mi Air Charge Technology, Xiaomi has decided to showcase yet another conceptual product in the form of the quad-curved waterfall display concept smartphone. This particular concept device is pretty much an attempt by Xiaomi’s engineers to design a phone that is almost fully covered by the glass screen.

Xiaomi stated that among the challenging aspect of this project is to craft the hyper-curved glass panel which has an angle of 88-degrees and requires a long list of complex procedures to make it a reality. The company also claimed that it finally managed to come out with the final product after thousands of attempts.

Since all sides of the concept phone are covered by glass, the functions that were traditionally performed by physical buttons have been taken over by touch gestures. One such example shown in the video released by Xiaomi is how users just need to slide their fingers on the side of the concept phone to adjust its volume.

What made the concept phone even more interesting is the fact that it has no port as well which the company believes is a new direction for future phones. Xiaomi claimed that it has plenty of solutions that can make this happen including piezoelectric ceramics, flexible display acoustic technology, under-display camera, wireless charging, pressure-sensitive touch sensors, eSIM, and many more.

In fact, the new concept device was made possible through the usage of the company’s 46 patented technologies that were developed in-house. While Xiaomi has a habit of releasing its concept phone into the market, this particular model is likely not ready for the public as the company not only didn’t provide any details regarding its specs and availability but there is no product name for it as well.