Many of us have been on a lot of Zoom calls during the pandemic, but you might not know that Zoom also has its very own Slack- and Microsoft Teams-esque product called Zoom Chat. On Monday, Zoom announced a small change to the name of the product — it’s now called Zoom Team Chat — alongside a handful of other handy updates coming to the collaboration software.

Let’s start with the name change. Zoom is adding “Team” because customers were getting confused about the difference between the chat you can use in Zoom meetings with the separate communication suite. Renaming the product to Zoom Team Chat “helps make the distinction that it is a full collaborative hub product,” Sharvari Nerurkar, Zoom Team Chat’s head of product, said in an interview with The Verge.

The idea for Zoom Team Chat is that it can be a singular collaboration hub where you can work with colleagues in real time on calls or asynchronously over text chat. If you’re like me, you may already be doing this mix of video, voice, and text to talk with your co-workers but across different pieces of software. (Here at The Verge, we typically chat over Slack but do video calls over Zoom.)

If your workplace uses Zoom for video calls, you can theoretically do much of your workplace communication in one place with Zoom Team Chat without having to jump from app to app. “Our customers are telling us that [they] do not want the friction of jumping to multiple different products to collaborate with the same group of people,” Nerurkar said.

To improve the experience of actually using Zoom Team Chat, Zoom has a few new features that it’s aiming to release by the end of the month. One update is that you’ll be able to share in-meeting chat right into Zoom Team Chat, making it easier to see any important notes (or your witty commentary) after the meeting is over. You’ll also be able to schedule a Zoom meeting right from a Zoom Team Chat channel, which could be useful if you’re having a text conversation that might lend itself to a call.

Image: Zoom

That said, Zoom is facing fierce competition from the likes of Slack, Microsoft, and Google, all of which are rapidly building out their own workplace communication products to help organizations adapt to hybrid work environments. While the Zoom Team Chat updates on the way seem useful, the company may have an uphill battle to convince workplaces to switch to Zoom Team Chat from platforms they might already be familiar with.

Mullen Automotive has acquired a controlling stake in electric vehicle startup Bollinger Motors, buying up 60 percent of the struggling company’s stock for $148.2 million, the companies announced Thursday.

Mullen said it will add Bollinger-designed medium-duty trucks and sport utility trucks to its inventory. The deal “positions Bollinger to capture the electric sport utility and commercial vehicle markets,” the company added.

Mullen is a relatively unknown Southern California electric vehicle manufacturer with the stated goal to build “the next-generation of premium electric vehicles that are affordable and built entirely in the United States.”

Bollinger burst onto the scene in 2015 with a pair of very cool-looking, rugged, box-like electric truck prototypes. The company has since pivoted to electric commercial vans after running into speed bumps in its quest to build a complex vehicle manufacturing business from scratch.

Earlier this year, Bollinger announced it selected Detroit auto supplier Roush as a contract manufacturer to assemble its line of platforms and chassis cabs for electric commercial vehicles. Bollinger’s Deliver-E electric van, which was announced in 2020, is slated to be built on a variable vehicle platform that allows for multiple battery sizes, such as 70kWh, 105kWh, 140kWh, 175kWh, and 210kWh.

Image: Bollinger

But it was the company’s B1 and B2 electric trucks that first captured people’s imaginations. Those vehicles were put on pause in favor of the commercial vehicles — but Mullen says that, with today’s deal, the trucks are back on.

“With years of history in class 3 truck development, intellectual property, patents, and expertise, [Bollinger’s] decision made sense to pivot into commercial vehicle development for classes 3-6,” Mullen said in a release. “As part of the acquisition, the company brings Mullen nearly 50,000 reservations previously taken for the B1 and B2 sport utility vehicles. With Mullen’s acquisition and capital injection, both B1 and B2 programs will begin after the start of production for class 3-6 commercial truck programs.”

While there has been a wave of acquisitions in recent years of autonomous vehicle startups, there has been less consolidation on the EV side. But experts predict this will soon change, with small EV startups seeking out larger companies for cash infusions into their struggling operations.

Bandcamp is bringing back its Bandcamp Fridays promotion where it waives its cut of any money you spend buying music from artists or their labels on its marketplace. Historically, the company ran the promotion on the first Friday of every month, and that appears to be the case this time around, too. According to its update page, it has Bandcamp Fridays scheduled for September 2nd, October 7th, November 4th, and December 2nd.

Bandcamp says that when you buy music during a Bandcamp Friday, 93 percent of that money goes to the artist or label on average (with the rest going to payment processing fees). That’s compared to an average of 82 percent the rest of the time. It started the promotion in 2020 in response to the pandemic’s impact on tours and concerts.

As far as I can tell, it’s been a few months since the last Bandcamp Friday — according to a cursory search of my email inbox, archives of Bandcamp’s update page for the promotion, and some math (the page now says it’s run the promotion 21 times, where it used to say 17 times with four future dates listed), the last one was on May 6th. After that, the company was mostly silent about the future of Bandcamp Fridays.

To be fair, it probably had a lot going on earlier this year. In March, Epic Games announced that it was acquiring the music marketplace, saying that Bandcamp would “keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community” but that it would play “an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.”

At the time, Bandcamp’s co-founder and CEO Ethan Diamond said that things would more or less remain business as usual for its users. He even promised that Bandcamp Fridays would continue, which they did for at least a little while.

While the company didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on why it took a break, I’m mostly just glad to hear that they’re back. Personally, there are some Manchester Orchestra and Car Seat Headrest albums I’ve had my eye on, and this is a perfect excuse to pick them up. How about you?

Update September 2nd, 12:30PM ET: Updated to note that it is Bandcamp Friday.

Qualcomm and Meta have signed a multi-year agreement promising to team up on custom versions of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR chips for the “future roadmap of Quest products” and “other devices,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it.

While, in some ways, the move is business as usual — the Quest 2 is powered by the Snapdragon XR2 chipset — it could provide insight into Meta’s compromises as it faces declines in revenue and tries to keep the spiraling expenses of Mark’s metaverse project in check.

What the Qualcomm deal shows is that Meta’s upcoming headsets, which reportedly include a high-end headset codenamed Cambria and, later, new versions of its cheaper Quest headset, won’t run on completely customized Meta-designed silicon.

This is despite competing companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google making product decisions around custom chip designs like M2, Graviton3, and Tensor — and the fact that Meta’s had a team dedicated to doing the same since 2018. This press release says the chips will be “customized” for Meta’s needs. Still, we don’t know how much space that can put between its “premium” devices and other manufacturers’ hardware that hews closely to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR reference designs.

In April, The Verge reported that Meta employees were working with semiconductor fabs — the companies that actually produce the physical chips — to make custom chips for its as-of-yet unannounced AR headset. That same month, The Information reported that some of Meta’s efforts to create custom chips were hitting roadblocks, pushing it to use a Qualcomm chip for its second-gen Ray-Bay smart glasses instead of its own silicon.

Qualcomm

Tyler Yee, a Meta spokesperson, said that the company doesn’t discuss details about how its roadmap has evolved and wouldn’t comment on any specific plans it may have had for custom chips for Quest products. However, Yee did share a statement on the company’s “general approach to custom silicon,” saying that Meta doesn’t believe in a “one-size-fits-all approach” for the tech powering its future devices.

“There could be situations where we use off-the-shelf silicon or work with industry partners on customizations, while also exploring our own novel silicon solutions. There could also be scenarios where we use both partner and custom solutions in the same product,” he said. “It is all about doing what is needed to create the best metaverse experiences possible.”

The backdrop to all this is a company facing a lot of pressure. Meta’s revenue has dipped for the first time (thanks in part to Apple’s changes to how apps are allowed to track users), and Zuckerberg explicitly stated plans to turn up the heat on employees while admitting, “I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” At the same time, he’s making a massive bet on the metaverse — the company is spending, and losing, billions of dollars per year on the project, which includes AR and VR headsets.

It’s a high-stakes game that Meta would presumably want to play as close to the chest as possible. But for now, it seems the hardware customers access Zuckerberg’s Metaverse with (if they’re going to do that at all, instead of just playing Beat Saber) will remain powered by somebody else’s chips.

The US government has imposed new export restrictions on high-end computers chips used to conduct AI research, citing possible military applications for the technology. Two leading manufacturers, Nvidia and AMD, have been blocked from selling certain chips to China and Russia, with the restrictions forming part of the United States’ ongoing strategy of limiting tech exports to curb the rise of rival powers.

Nvidia and AMD disclosed the new restrictions on Wednesday, with Nvidia noting in a regulatory filing that the ban affects its A100 and H100 GPUs. The US government told Nvidia it wishes to “address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia.” AMD confirmed to Reuters that its MI250 accelerator chip was also affected by the new restrictions.

Nvidia, the far larger of the two companies, notes that the ban will affect the estimated $400 million sales it projected in China for the third quarter of the year (it also notes that it doesn’t currently sell products to Russia). The company says it may seek a license from the US government to sell these chips to certain customers, but that it “has no assurance that the [US] will grant any exemptions.” Nvidia’s stock fell more than 6 percent on Wednesday after it disclosed the restrictions.

The US has not given exact details on what criteria it’s using to target chips, but the A100, H100, and MI250 all occupy the top-end of the AI chip market. These systems are used to train a range of machine learning applications from facial recognition to text generation, and the biggest US tech giants use them to create in-house supercomputers for R&D. Meta, for example, has built an “AI supercomputer” powered by thousands of Nvidia A100 chips.

It’s not out of the question that the same chips could be used for military research. For example, training automated targeting systems for drones or the facial recognition systems China uses to surveil its population.

A number of prominent figures in the US tech industry have, in the past, warned about China’s increasing AI capabilities as a threat to US national security. In a report published last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt claimed that the US was “not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era.” However, other experts have said AI competition between the US and China does not constitute an arms race, and that such rhetoric is damaging to both diplomatic relations and the safe development of machine learning technology.

In response to the block, China’s ministry of commerce said the restrictions would “hinder international scientific and technological exchanges and economic cooperation, and have an impact on the stability of global industrial and supply chains and the recovery of the world economy,” reports The New York Times. The country’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, said the ban was typical of the United States’ desire for “scientific and technological hegemonism.”

After Elon Musk tried to get out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter and the company sued to hold him to it, his lawyers unsuccessfully tried to hold off the trial until next year, and now they’re pushing for another delay. The Musk team’s proposing a new timeline that would push the week-long trial’s start from the currently scheduled October 17th date until some time in mid- to late-November.

This time, they cite the testimony of former Twitter security head Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who has filed a whistleblower claim against the company accusing it of security flaws, making “false and misleading statements” to users and the FTC, and hiring agents of foreign governments. His lawyers also submitted an amended filing adding more complaints against Twitter. The filing was submitted under seal, but attached to it is the whistleblower documentation submitted by Zatko, who is scheduled to give a deposition on September 9th.

A second termination letter from Musk’s lawyers to Twitter that was delivered yesterday and filed with the SEC lays out the reasoning for the delay. According to Musk’s lawyers, the evidence provided by Zatko is more reasons, in addition to the claims laid out in the original termination letter he sent on July 8th, to determine that Twitter is the one in breach of their buyout agreement.

Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick has not yet entered a ruling on the request or proposed a new schedule.

Netflix has found an executive to lead its plan for an ad-supported tier: Snap’s chief business officer and top ad exec, Jeremi Gorman.

Gorman on Tuesday told colleagues at Snap that she was leaving to join Netflix along with Peter Naylor, Snap’s vice president of ad sales for the Americas, according to two people familiar with the matter. Russ Caditz-Peck, a Snap spokesperson, confirmed the departures.

Both Gorman and Naylor are leaving Snap amid a restructuring of its ads team and layoffs hitting the social media firm this week. Snap plans to cut roughly 20 percent of its workforce starting Wednesday, The Verge earlier reported.

Netflix has had its own rounds of layoffs this year, cutting hundreds of employees and paring back programming after reporting its first subscriber loss in a decade. Now the company is preparing to launch a cheaper tier supported by advertising that could cost between $7–$9 per month and exclude extras, like the ability to download videos.

Kumiko Hidaka, a Netflix spokesperson, confirmed that Gorman will be the company’s President of Worldwide Advertising and that she’ll report to COO Greg Peters. Naylor will lead Netflix’s ad sales organization and report to Gorman. AdAge first reported on the hires.

“Jeremi’s deep experience in running ad businesses and Peter’s background in leading ad sales teams together will be key as we expand membership options for consumers through a new ad-supported offering,” Peters said in a statement.

Bandcamp is bringing back its Bandcamp Fridays promotion where it waives its cut of any money you spend buying music from artists or their labels on its marketplace. Historically, the company ran the promotion on the first Friday of every month, and that appears to be the case this time around, too. According to its update page, it has Bandcamp Fridays scheduled for September 2nd, October 7th, November 4th, and December 2nd.

Bandcamp says that when you buy music during a Bandcamp Friday, 93 percent of that money goes to the artist or label on average (with the rest going to payment processing fees). That’s compared to an average of 82 percent the rest of the time. It started the promotion in 2020 in response to the pandemic’s impact on tours and concerts.

As far as I can tell, it’s been a few months since the last Bandcamp Friday — according to a cursory search of my email inbox, archives of Bandcamp’s update page for the promotion, and some math (the page now says it’s run the promotion 21 times, where it used to say 17 times with four future dates listed), the last one was on May 6th. After that, the company was mostly silent about the future of Bandcamp Fridays.

To be fair, it probably had a lot going on earlier this year. In March, Epic Games announced that it was acquiring the music marketplace, saying that Bandcamp would “keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community” but that it would play “an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.”

At the time, Bandcamp’s co-founder and CEO Ethan Diamond said that things would more or less remain business as usual for its users. He even promised that Bandcamp Fridays would continue, which they did for at least a little while.

While the company didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on why it took a break, I’m mostly just glad to hear that they’re back. Personally, there are some Manchester Orchestra and Car Seat Headrest albums I’ve had my eye on, and this is a perfect excuse to pick them up. How about you?

Netflix’s forthcoming ad-supported tier may cost between $7 and $9 per month, according to a report from Bloomberg. Depending on which plan you currently pay for, that could be a significant savings; the company currently offers plans at $9.99, $15.49, and $19.99 per month.

After the company reported that it lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade, co-CEO Reed Hastings indicated in April the company was ready to consider a cheaper offering supported by advertising, despite years of spurning the idea of ads. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos confirmed the ad tier was in the works in June, and Netflix announced Microsoft as the technological partner helping to deliver ads in July.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ad-supported tier will have some downgrades from the no ads plans; executives have said that some content will be missing from the ad tier at launch, while code spotted in its mobile app indicates Netflix may not let users on the ad-supported tier download shows for offline viewing.

Bloomberg’s Friday report sheds light on a few more details of the ad tier. The company aims to sell approximately four minutes of ads per hour and wants to show ads ahead of and in the middle of content. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Netflix doesn’t plan to include ads with its kids content or original movies. Netflix is targeting to launch the ad-supported plan in “half a dozen markets” in the final quarter of this year, Bloomberg says. The company plans to launch the tier more broadly in early 2023.

In an email to The Verge, Netflix spokesperson Kumiko Hidaka said that Bloomberg’s report is “all just speculation at this point.” She said that the company is “still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower priced, ad supported tier and no decisions have been made.”

The new ad plan arrives at a turbulent time. After April’s shocking drop in subscribers, Netflix reported another subscriber drop three months later. Netflix also raised its prices across all of its plans in the US in January — its third price hike in recent years —and is testing ways to turn password-sharing viewers into customers who pay for extra streams. And the company is facing competition from other streaming services like Disney Plus, whose own ad-supported plan is set to launch in December, and HBO Max, which launched a $10 ad-supported plan in June 2021 that comes without downloads or 4K streaming.

Update August 26th, 8:17PM ET: Updated with Netflix’s statement on the report.

This morning CNN and The Washington Post reported new whistleblower claims by Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, that the company’s statistics on bot activity are misleading, its security approach sucks, and that execs aren’t incentivized to look further.

The timing of the report is key, given Elon Musk’s arguments about why he should be allowed to break his agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion, and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has responded to the charges in an email sent to employees, posted to Twitter by CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan.

In the letter, Agrawal repeats Twitter’s public statement by claiming Zatko was fired earlier this year for “ineffective leadership and poor performance.” As far as his accusations, the CEO claims the company is looking over what has been published but that what they’ve seen is “a false narrative that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and presented without important context.”

The letter even claims Mudge “was accountable for many aspects of this work that he is now inaccurately portraying more than six months after his termination.”

Ahead of an October 17th trial date for Twitter’s case against Musk, Elon’s legal team subpoenaed Zatko as well as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Speaking to the Post, Zatko said, “This would never be my first step, but I believe I am still fulfilling my obligation to Jack and to users of the platform.” How much his statements change the case remains to be seen as well as what evidence there is of Twitter execs intentionally misleading the board and investors. The Post article cites University of Chicago Law School professor of law and economics Anthony Casey, who says, “It adds to (Musk’s) case, but I still think he’s got a weak case.”