Category: Digital – AI & Apps

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The FCC sends letters to nine of the largest automakers, warns  about abusive partners with connected car apps to harass and track their victims

—  The Federal Communications Commission is concerned about abusive partners using connected car apps to harass and track their victims.

 

 

Kashmir Hill / New York Times:

 

Many modern cars are internet-connected and have apps that allow an owner to see a car’s location, turn it on remotely, honk its horn and even adjust the temperature. These apps for car control and tracking are designed for convenience, but a New York Times article last month detailed how they have been weaponized in abusive relationships, allowing for unwanted stalking and harassment.

 

PHOTO: The Federal Communications Commission sent letters to nine of the largest automakers, asking for more information about their connected car apps and whether the companies had processes in place to assist abuse victims.Credit…Mike Blake/Reuters

 

Domestic violence survivors and experts said car companies had not been responsive when asked to cut off abusers’ digital access to cars. Customer service agents at the car companies were unable to help when the abuser was the owner or co-owner of the vehicle, even when the victim had a restraining order or a legal judgment awarding her sole use of the car during divorce proceedings.

 

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission sent letters to nine of the largest automakers, including General Motors, Toyota, Ford Motor and Tesla, asking for more information about their connected car apps and whether the companies had processes in place to assist abuse victims.

 

“No survivor of domestic violence and abuse should have to choose between giving up their car and allowing themselves to be stalked and harmed by those who can access its data and connectivity,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the F.C.C. chairwoman, said in a statement. “We must do everything we can to help survivors stay safe. We need to work with auto and wireless industry leaders to find solutions.”

Chairwoman Rosenworcel wrote in the letters that the F.C.C. was responsible for enforcing the Safe Connections Act, a relatively new law that requires phone companies to separate a victim’s phone from a family plan shared with an abuser. To the extent that cars have become “smartphones on wheels,” automakers “may be ‘covered providers’” under the act, she wrote.

 

The agency also sent letters to the three largest wireless communications providers — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile — about the role they play in providing connectivity to cars and whether they are complying with the law.

 

Thomas Kadri, a law professor at the University of Georgia who was an adviser on the Safe Connections Act, found it surprising that the law might apply to car manufacturers. But he said he hoped the letters would cause automakers to consider how connected car apps might be used for stalking and harassment.

 

“It’s not a niche or rare issue at the scale they are operating at,” he said.

 

The F.C.C. asked for responses to the letters by the end of the month.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Culture Digital - AI & Apps Education Lifestyle Technology

How the Internet adapts Google’s algorithms, such as SEO tricks, its many websites now with similar designs 

—  How the Internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms — and into a world where websites look the same.

—  Animations by Richard Parry

 

 

Mia Sato / The Verge:

 

 

As the 14th season of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City came to a close this fall, I found myself on Reddit, reading rumors about the marriage and divorce timeline of one of the show’s stars. Redditors wanted more clues about a fishy relationship history to see if they could uncover a cheating scandal.

 

Were divorce papers public record in New York? I wondered. I did a quick Google search to find out.

 

The search results page was filled with my question’s exact words, repeated across site after site — websites for law firms, posts on forums, ads for creepy lookup tools — but the answer to my actual question was harder to find. At the top of the results page on my phone, Google offered two featured snippets of information quoting different websites. The first one: “Divorce records are not public in New York due to the sensitive nature of many divorce proceedings.” The second: “Due to the state’s underlying legislation regarding family law cases, each divorce is a matter of public record.”

 

Google bolded both snippets, but it wasn’t clear to me how they squared. I clicked on both.

 

The two law firm websites were part of an ecosystem I didn’t know existed until I accidentally went looking for it. Law firms across different fields — family law, personal injury, employment lawyers — have blogs full of keyword-addled articles being churned out at a surprisingly fast clip. The goal for firms is simple: be the top result to pop up on Google when someone is looking for legal help. The searcher might just end up hiring them.

 

Many of these blog posts are written by people like E., a self-employed content writer who juggles law firm clients that want Google-friendly content. E. does not have a legal background; they’re just a competent writer who can turn in clean copy. They trawl health department records, looking for nursing homes that get citations for neglect or other infractions. Then E. writes a blog post about it for a firm, making sure to include the name of the offender and the wrongdoing — keywords for which concerned patients or families will likely be searching. (E. requested anonymity so as to not jeopardize their employment).

 

“My bosses, they all don’t want anyone else to know that they use me or that we have the specific process that we have,” E. says. Their name is nowhere to be found, but their writing is often the first thing a searcher will see. The pages were made to be found by people like me.

 

Google controls around 90 percent of the search market, by some measures, so it’s too valuable a referral source to just leave up to luck. Search engine optimization — or SEO, the practice of tweaking content and websites to get Google to boost your visibility — is everywhere, including on the page you’re reading now. And once you see it or SEO-ify your own work, like E. has, it’s impossible not to notice.

 

Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog postsso they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.

 

The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.

 

We often hear about the latest engagement hacks on other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or X, formerly known as Twitter. But Google is consequential above all of these, acting essentially as the referee of the web. Yet deep knowledge of how its systems work is largely limited to industry publications and marketing firms — as users, we don’t get an explanation of why sites suddenly look different or how Google ranks one website above another. It just happens.

 

Bit by bit, the internet has been remade in Google’s image. And it’s humans — not machines — who have to deal with the consequences.

 

1. Site performance and accessibility

There’s an inherent contradiction in what Google promises is the best way to succeed on Search. Publicly, Google representatives like search liaison Danny Sullivan give a simple, almost quaint answer to business owners who want help: you just need to make great content for people, not Google’s robots.

 

At the same time, Google’s “SEO Starter Guide” is nearly 9,000 words long with dozens of links to additional material. There are several SEO industry publications, plus an untold number of scrappy blogs, marketing firms, and self-proclaimed SEO gurus promising to demystify Google’s black box algorithm. Small business owners must either learn how to do SEO or hire someone — even multiple people or special firms — to do it for them. It’s expensive, time consuming, and often confusing work, and failure to learn the ropes could mean trouble if your traffic begins to tank unexpectedly. Google executives like Sullivan often respond to the folk wisdom of the SEO industry with a six-word incantation meant to absolve them of the industry’s worst practices: that’s not what the guidelines say. It can feel like the guidelines are there to protect Google’s reputation, not actually help anyone get search traffic.

 

Optimizing pages for Google isn’t inherently a bad thing. Google uses its influence over the web to push for objectively good results, like fast-loading sites and accessibility features like alt text on images, which can help audiences understand what’s on a page if an image doesn’t load or if readers use assistive technology like screen readers. Google’s Core Web Vitals metric pushes down sites with certain kinds of intrusive ads or which have slow-loading ads that cause content on the page to shift around.

“[Google’s changes] did sort of homogenize the design of the internet.”

 

Perhaps Google’s most benevolent push has been toward a fast, mobile-first web that has forced small and large publishers alike to overhaul their publishing platforms. But even that effort has come with collateral damage — see the entire news industry reluctantly embracing Google’s AMP format — or in the case of smaller blogs, a flattening and whitewashing of web design across the board.

 

Valerie Stimac Bailey, a professional blogger of a decade, remembers in 2021 when Google began using a new metric to rank sites, called “page experience,” that emphasized giving readers a “delightful” web to browse. Passing Google’s Core Web Vitals tests became all the more important — Google would look at load times, interactivity, and whether visual elements would move around unexpectedly.

 

Bloggers like Stimac Bailey, along with an untold number of other site operators and web companies, saw the writing on the wall: Google might not like your old site, with its giant logos and custom fonts, or the ads that cause text to jump around. Companies like Mediavine, a popular ad-management company, released web design frameworks optimized for this new Google metric and Stimac Bailey, like many others, switched and redesigned her site. But she found the new theme “sterile,” she tells me, and it lacked customization options. It didn’t feel like part of her brand.

 

“I get that that probably was the impetus for a lot of people with really old, slow themes that were not handling mobile well to move to something that was faster for the world of the mobile-first indexing and internet,” Stimac Bailey says. “That was a good impact… but simultaneously, it did sort of homogenize the design of the internet.”

 

Stimac Bailey, who in the past published up to 11 blogs at a time, has experimented with different website themes. All eight of her current sites look nearly identical — her Alaska travel blog Valerie & Valise looks the same as Site School, a blog where she shares data-heavy analyses of how her portfolio of websites is performing.

 

“People spent a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of heartache and stress and psychology redesigning websites,” Stimac Bailey says.

 

Taking Google’s advice on creating good, fast, accessible websites sounds nice in theory; why not do what the search engine prefers and help your readers in the process? Creators I spoke to acknowledged that changes sometimes benefit Google and readers alike. But the line between what’s good for the search algorithm and what’s good for audiences has become blurry over time, and in some cases, the two are treated essentially as the same thing.

 

2. Page design and structure of articles

The small, behind-the-scenes changes site operators deployed over the years have made browsing the web — especially on mobile — more frictionless and enjoyable. But Google’s preferences and systems don’t just guide how sites run: Search has also influenced how information looks and how audiences experience the internet. The project of optimizing your digital existence for Google doesn’t stop at page design. The content has to conform, too.

 

Take, for example, the question-based subheadings that are rampant on pages ranging from personal finance explainers to travel tips to annual event reminders. Sections like “When should I make IRA contributions?” or “What states are getting rid of Daylight Savings time?” will cascade down a page, presumably to help a reader scan for information. But subheadings are also a piece of information Google uses to understand what a page is about and to rank it in Search. Historically, subheadings have been an easy, fast way to juice content for maximum visibility.

 

Some bloggers and outlets scrape the “People Also Ask” panel on search results pages for ideas: the Google-curated section spits out strangely worded or oddly specific questions like, “What is the healthiest vegetable 2023?” and “What two vegetables can be eaten raw?”

 

Sean Bromilow, a food writer based in Canada, has reformatted his blog posts in hopes that Google will pick up his content for placement in these fields. On a page for cucamelons, he added an FAQ section featuring questions like, “How do you eat cucamelons?” and “Are cucamelons a GMO?”

 

“I did that in direct response to Google’s [People Also Ask questions] that they introduced,” he says.

 

Some creators scrape the “People Also Ask” panel for story ideas

A Q&A format might often be the most effective way to write a story or share information — I’ve done stories in this format, too. But other times, question-based subheadings are harder to read, repeating the same phrases without adding anything substantial. Browse this article about gua sha, a massaging technique with roots in traditional Chinese medicine, and you’ll find headings including, “What is a gua sha,” “What are the benefits of a gua sha,” “How to find your gua sha,” and “How to use your gua sha.”

 

A table of contents, too, has become a common sight, appearing at the top of articles. On a post about animals to look out for in Alaska, for example, Stimac Bailey has 10 sections in the table of contents, each linking to the corresponding part of the blog post. Having a linked table of contents allows readers to skip to the part they most want to read, like if someone is strictly interested in seeing caribou.

 

But the table of contents sections also work as jump links on Google Search that appear below the headline and other metadata. Stimac Bailey gets a reasonable amount of traffic to her Pacific Coast Highway guide, not from searchers clicking the title but through people clicking on one of the jump links below. Some SEO strategists even debate whether bloggers should leave their table of contents expanded or collapsed for maximum SEO juice. Stimac Bailey keeps hers collapsed but recently heard from a person selling SEO services that your table of contents should be auto-expanded.

 

“At a certain point, I don’t care if it costs me time on site or it costs me ad views or costs me bounce rate or whatever it might be,” she says. “I like my site to look the way I want it to look, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

 

But many websites just do what they think Google wants or what’s being recommended by SEO experts, even if there’s no guarantee it will work. Google is both overbearing with manuals and withholding of clear answers. Give too much away, and everyone could game the system. In that void, creators and website operators throw things at the wall to see what sticks. And once they start designing their page for Google, it’s easy for their content to be fashioned for Google, too.

 

3. Keyword research and what content is made

For publishers handcuffed to Google Search traffic, there’s often no reason to produce content if people aren’t searching for it. So marketers, writers, and bloggers use a suite of keyword research tools to assess whether there’s enough interest to write the article or make the video in the first place. The result is that publishers end up producing a mountain of material, with Google keywords essentially acting like the assigning editor.

 

When Stimac Bailey writes for her London travel blog, for example, she strategically picks topics that the site will be able to rank highly for — keywords and topics that are too competitive get put on the backburner.

 

“[My writers and I] work on picking topics together, but we need them to be productive because not only am I [monetizing them], I’m paying people for their work, and I’m trying to pay very fairly for that work,” she says. “It’s like, ‘I gotta find these low-competition, high-volume, magic keywords.” For a popular destination like London, those magic keywords don’t really exist.

 

Catherine Cusick understands this tension well. Cusick worked in media for years — including in SEO — before creating the Self-Employed FAQin March. The subscription-driven business acts as a help guide for people who are new to self-employment or who simply have a specific question they can’t get an answer to elsewhere.

 

Most of Cusick’s answers to queries like “Do I need an accountant?” or “What are my healthcare options?” are behind a paywall, so she curates a small number of unlocked articles meant to give prospective customers a sampling of what she offers. These are what Cusick calls “SEO plays.”

 

For these articles, she is only targeting long-tail keywords — lengthier search terms that are often more specific and, as a result, have fewer people searching for them and are less competitive.

 

“The keyword search term that I am going for is, ‘How to pay yourself from a single member LLC.’ My game is entirely long-tail keywords,” she says. “I’m not even competing with ‘How to pay myself LLC.’ Like, that’s too high of a term for me, let alone something like ‘LLC.’”

 

Cusick wrestles with the disconnect between who her business is for — scared, uncertain people trying to make a living — and the SEO requirements she needs to fulfill. Time strategizing and reading technical manuals can feel like time “stolen” from making in-person connections and writing paywalled articles meant to help people through self-employment.

 

“I will need to have a different page for humans, and then another page that’s more of a directory that points humans who’ve arrived to the directory to other pages that will tell them a story,” she says. “The directory page can be structured in a way that makes search engine crawlers satisfied.” In Cusick’s view, we’re asking one piece of content to do too much: fulfill all the SEO requirements and do the careful, uninterrupted work of getting real answers to a reader.

 

I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader

In an emailed statement, Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz offered a dozen links to public documentation around search, along with generalities about keeping content “helpful” and “relevant.” All points underscored the company’s most common refrain: make content for human audiences.

 

“We’ve given longstanding guidance to create content that’s first and foremost helpful, and we work very hard to ensure that our ranking systems reward content designed for people first. Many sites perform well on Search simply by creating this helpful content, without undertaking extensive SEO efforts,” Kutz tells The Verge. “We continuously refine our ranking systems, and where we identify areas we can improve in ranking people-first content, we prioritize them. For more than a year, we’ve had focused efforts to show more content based on first-hand experience in Search, and to reduce content created solely for search engines, and this work continues.”

 

Kutz did not comment on my questions around specific strategies outlined in this piece, saying that giving granular guidance might make creators “lose sight” of the people-first guidance put forth by Google. Instead, the advice is for website operators to “ask themselves if [a tactic] would be helpful for someone visiting their site.”

 

But in order to be helpful to readers, website operators need people to visit their site in the first place. Fine-tuning content to match exact search terms is a common strategy that can entice users to click on a page that looks like it will answer their question. That doesn’t guarantee content will be better or even good — and sometimes, how users search can create an echo chamber of errors, oft-repeated misinformation, or poorly researched content.

 

One instance of errors multiplying sticks out to Bromilow, the food writer. For a while, he says that Google was returning a litany of incorrect information about Ethiopian cardamom, or korarima. Though black cardamom and korarima look similar, their flavors are not. Websites and writers — and by extension, Google results — were confusing the ingredients. At one point, Bromilow says the first picture on Google Images was of the wrong plant.

 

“If people are searching the wrong thing because that’s what they’ve been given, how do you return a result to them that explains that they’re incorrect, while also being found by them?” Bromilow says. “You don’t want to reinforce the mistake, right? It’s really weird and complicated.”

 

That Ethiopian recipes are being translated from Amharic to English also brings a host of problems: how should Bromilow spell the names of dishes? Should he use whatever spelling people are searching for the most? A post on savory pancakes sums it up, in which the Canadian Bromilow explains why he’s opted to omit the “u” in savoury: “The choice, while it breaks my maple-syrup filled heart, is obvious — savory is searched for more often, and using that spelling is more likely to [get] a recipe noticed by the all-powerful and oft-mysterious search engine algorithms.”

 

To understand what pure SEO-optimized writing looks like, I put my recent story about Google-optimized local businesses through an SEO tool called Semrush that’s reportedly used by 10 million people.

 

Among its suggestions: write a longer headline; split a six-sentence paragraph up because it’s “too long”; and replace “too complex” words like “invariably,” “notoriety,” and “modification.” Dozens of sentences were flagged as being confusing (I disagree) — and it really hated em dashes. I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader. I finally chose one thought per sentence, broke up paragraphs, and replaced words with suggested keywords to get rid of the red dots signaling problems.

 

The result feels like an AI summary of my story — at any moment, a paragraph could start with “In conclusion…” or “The next thing to consider is…” The nuance, voice, and unexpected twists and turns have been snuffed out. I’m sure some people would prefer this uncomplicated, beat-by-beat version of the story, but it’s gone from being a story written by a real person to a clinical, stiff series of sentences.

 

Now imagine thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing.

 

 

Read more

 

 

— Techmeme

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 Apple appeals EU’s DMA designation of App Stores as a single service, iOS interoperability, and iMessage NIICS designation 

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:

 

 

—  Apple (AAPL.O) has challenged EU tech rules designating its five App Stores as a single core platform service subject to onerous obligations, saying that EU regulators have misinterpreted and misapplied the new legislation that took effect last May.

 

The company also disputed the characterisation of its operating system iOS as an important gateway for business users to reach end users and the interoperability obligation that goes with that label.

 

(PHOTO: Apple logo is seen on the Apple store at The Marche Saint Germain in Paris, France July 15, 2020. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights)

 

The iPhone maker challenged the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in November last year but did not provide details.

The European Commission made “material factual errors, in concluding that the applicant’s five App Stores are a single core platform service,” Apple said in its plea to the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe’s second-highest.

The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device.

DMA requirements that would affect Apple include allowing third parties to inter-operate with its own services and letting business users promote their offers and conclude contracts with their customers outside its platform.

Apple’s lawsuit also took issue with the Commission’s designation of its messaging service iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service (NIICS) that prompted an EU investigation into whether it should comply with DMA rules.

The company contends that iMessage is not a NIICS as it is not a fee-based service and it does not monetise it via the sale of hardware devices nor via the processing of personal data.

 

Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Andrew Heavens

— Techmeme

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Streaming Hot: Here’s how to watch every ‘Real Housewives’ city and series online

From the shocking season of ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ to the glamour of Beverly Hills, here’s how to stream the Bravo reality show online

 

 

Every Bravo-holic has their “Real Housewives” city of choice, but the most loyal devotees don’t play favorites. Lukas Gage from “The White Lotus” said in a recent interview that they’re “all beautiful in different ways” after being asked which series is his favorite.

 

According to Gage, New Jersey is “unhinged;” New York is “classy;” Beverly Beverly Hills is the “O.G.”

 

“Real Housewives” fans also know that different cities will usher in high levels of drama every year. Salt Lake City, for example, has quickly delivered some of the most entertainment value in its four short seasons of existence. The 90-minute episode that sees Jen Shah go on the run as the police show up to arrest her might have been one of the best episodes of TV all year (the former reality star has now been sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for fraud). Now, the season four finale has left viewers stunned and desperate to know more.

 

You can watch now watch “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” finale (and binge all four seasons) on Peacock. The NBCUniversal streaming site lets you catch up on the Bravo drama and watch “Housewives” live on TV or replay episodes of the reality show on-demand from just $5.99 a month.

 

You can also watch Bravo and the “Housewives” shows live on TV without cable through DirecTV Stream. The streaming service has a 5-day free trialthat you can use to stream the show online free.

 

Right now, four out of the eight “Real Housewives” series are currently on air: Salt Lake City, Miami, Beverly Hills and Potomac. “Vanderpump Rules” and Peacock’s “The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip,” the only show featuring Housewives from multiple series, are also set to release new episodes.

 

While all of the new episodes are broadcast on Bravo, cable-cutters can access the new episodes as they come out on live TV streaming services such as Fubo TV, DirecTV Stream, Sling TV and Hulu + Live TV. Hulu and Peacock‘s expansive libraries even have cancelled series such as D.C and and Dallas, while Peacock exclusively rebooted “The Real Housewives of Miami” when it was cancelled in 2011 after three seasons.

 

Below, check out all the best ways to stream every “Real Housewives” city online, include free trial offers to take advantage of to watch the “Real Housewives” online for free.

 

Access more than 85 top channels, including Bravo, with Hulu’s Live TV plan, which costs $69.99/month. In addition to live sports, news and cable networks, you can also access the streamer’s entire ad-supported Hulu streaming library, which also includes previous seasons of “Real Housewives” favorites such as New Jersey, Potomac and Beverly Hills. Plus, Hulu + Live TV is now also bundled with Disney+ and ESPN+, saving you nearly $15/month from subscribing to each service individually.

 

 

 

— Variety

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Rocket Pharmaceuticals to present at 42nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

CRANBURY, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RCKT), a fully integrated, late-stage biotechnology company advancing a sustainable pipeline of genetic therapies for rare disorders with high unmet need, on Wednesday announced that Gaurav Shah, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, is scheduled to present at the 42nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Monday, Jan. 8, 2024, at 3:45 p.m. PT.

 

A webcast of the presentation will be available under “Events” in the Investors section of the Company’s website at https://ir.rocketpharma.com/.

 

About Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RCKT) is a fully integrated, late-stage biotechnology company advancing a sustainable pipeline of investigational genetic therapies designed to correct the root cause of complex and rare disorders. Rocket’s innovative multi-platform approach allows us to design the optimal gene therapy for each indication, creating potentially transformative options that enable people living with devastating rare diseases to experience long and full lives.

 

Rocket’s lentiviral (LV) vector-based gene therapies target hematologic diseases and consist of late-stage programs for Fanconi Anemia (FA), a difficult to treat genetic disease that leads to bone marrow failure and potentially cancer, Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I (LAD-I), a severe pediatric genetic disorder that causes recurrent and life-threatening infections which are frequently fatal, and Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), a monogenic red blood cell disorder resulting in increased red cell destruction and mild to life-threatening anemia.

 

Our adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based cardiovascular portfolio includes a late-stage program for Danon Disease, a devastating heart failure condition resulting in thickening of the heart, an early-stage program in clinical trials for PKP2-arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM), a life-threatening heart failure disease causing ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, and a pre-clinical program targeting BAG3-associated dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a heart failure condition that causes enlarged ventricles.

 

For more information about Rocket, please visit www.rocketpharma.com and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.

 

Rocket cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements

Various statements in this release concerning Rocket’s future expectations, plans and prospects, including without limitation, Rocket’s expectations regarding the safety and effectiveness of product candidates that Rocket is developing to treat Fanconi Anemia (FA), Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I (LAD-I), Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), Danon Disease (DD) and other diseases, the expected timing and data readouts of Rocket’s ongoing and planned clinical trials, the expected timing and outcome of Rocket’s regulatory interactions and planned submissions, Rocket’s plans for the advancement of its Danon Disease program, including its planned pivotal trial, and the safety, effectiveness and timing of related pre-clinical studies and clinical trials, may constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other federal securities laws and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and assumptions. You should not place reliance on these forward-looking statements, which often include words such as “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “will give,” “estimate,” “seek,” “will,” “may,” “suggest” or similar terms, variations of such terms or the negative of those terms. Although Rocket believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, Rocket cannot guarantee such outcomes. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including, without limitation, Rocket’s ability to monitor the impact of COVID-19 on its business operations and take steps to ensure the safety of patients, families and employees, the interest from patients and families for participation in each of Rocket’s ongoing trials, our expectations regarding the delays and impact of COVID-19 on clinical sites, patient enrollment, trial timelines and data readouts, our expectations regarding our drug supply for our ongoing and anticipated trials, actions of regulatory agencies, which may affect the initiation, timing and progress of pre-clinical studies and clinical trials of its product candidates, Rocket’s dependence on third parties for development, manufacture, marketing, sales and distribution of product candidates, the outcome of litigation, and unexpected expenditures, as well as those risks more fully discussed in the section entitled “Risk Factors” in Rocket’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, filed February 28, 2023 with the SEC and subsequent filings with the SEC including our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. All such statements speak only as of the date made, and Rocket undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts

Media
Kevin Giordano

media@rocketpharma.com

Investors
Brooks Rahmer

investors@rocketpharma.com

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PGIM launches two buffer ETF series

Attractively priced at 0.50%, PGIM’s new ETFs seek potential downside risk protection with 12% and 20% buffer options

NEWARK, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — PGIM,1 the $1.2 trillion global investment management business of Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE: PRU), has launched two buffer ETF series, the PGIM U.S. Large-Cap Buffer 12 ETF series and the PGIM U.S. Large-Cap Buffer 20 ETF series “(the ETFs),” listed on the Cboe BZX. The series will consist of a total of 24 ETFs, with 12% and 20% buffer ETFs launching on a rolling basis the first business day of each month throughout the year.

 

The ETFs will be offered at a 0.50% net expense ratio, making them the lowest cost one-year target outcome buffer ETFs in the marketplace.2

 

The Buffer ETFs provide exposure to an ETF that seeks to track the performance of the S&P 500 Index “(the Underlying Fund),” offering investors a defined range of potential outcomes. The ETFs seek to match the return of the underlying fund up to a predetermined upside cap, while providing a limited downside buffer against the first 12% (for the PGIM U.S. Large-Cap Buffer 12 ETF series) or 20% (for the PGIM U.S. Large-Cap Buffer 20 ETF series) of the underlying fund’s losses over a one-year target outcome period. 3

 

“In times of market uncertainty, our clients are looking for ways to participate in the market’s upside, while tempering downside risks,” said Stuart Parker, president and CEO of PGIM Investments. “Buffer ETFs provide investors with a more narrowly defined outcome range, which can offer more predictability in volatile markets.”

 

The Buffer ETFs are sub-advised by PGIM Quantitative Solutions (PGIM Quant), the quantitative equity, multi-asset and liquid alternatives specialist of PGIM.

 

“PGIM Quant has been managing options trading strategies for institutional investors for more than 30 years,” said Linda Gibson, CEO of PGIM Quantitative Solutions. “The Buffer ETF series represents yet another enhancement to our suite of offerings for clients who are looking for meaningful upside access while helping to mitigate risk.”

 

With the launch of the initial Buffer ETFs, PGIM Investments now offers 16 active ETFs, doubling its lineup over the last year.

 

ABOUT PGIM INVESTMENTS

PGIM Investments LLC and its affiliates offer more than 100 funds globally across a broad spectrum of asset classes and investment styles. All products draw on PGIM’s globally diversified investment platform that encompasses the expertise of managers across fixed income, equities, alternatives and real estate.

 

ABOUT PGIM QUANTITATIVE SOLUTIONS

PGIM Quantitative Solutions is the quantitative equity, multi-asset and liquid alternatives specialist of PGIM. For more than 45 years, PGIM Quantitative Solutions has helped investors around the world solve their unique needs by leveraging the power of technology and data as well as advanced academic research. As of Sept. 30, 2023, PGIM Quantitative Solutions managed $89 billion in client assets.4 For more information, please visit pgimquantitativesolutions.com.

 

ABOUT PGIM

PGIM, the global asset management business of Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE: PRU), is a leading global investment manager with more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management as of Sept. 30, 2023. With offices in 18 countries, PGIM’s businesses offer a range of investment solutions for retail and institutional investors around the world across a broad range of asset classes, including public fixed income, private fixed income, fundamental equity, quantitative equity, real estate and alternatives. For more information about PGIM, visit pgim.com.

 

Prudential Financial, Inc. (PFI) of the United States is not affiliated in any manner with Prudential plc, incorporated in the United Kingdom or with Prudential Assurance Company, a subsidiary of M&G plc, incorporated in the United Kingdom. For more information please visit news.prudential.com.

 

1 The term PGIM as used in this announcement includes PGIM Investments LLC, an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Prudential Financial, Inc.

2 Source: Morningstar Direct as of Nov. 30, 2023.

3 Before fees and expenses.

4 AUM totals shown include assets of PGIM Wadhwani LLP, which is a separate legal entity.

 

Consider a fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information about the fund. Contact your financial professional for a prospectus and summary prospectus. Read them carefully before investing.

Investing in ETFs involves risks. Some ETFs have more risk than others. The investment return and principal value will fluctuate and shares when sold may be worth more or less than the original cost and it is possible to lose money.

 

The Funds are actively managed exchange traded funds (ETFs) and thus do not seek to replicate the performance of a specified index. ETF shares are not individually redeemable from the Funds. Shares may only be redeemed directly from the Fund by Authorized Participants in Creation Units.

 

Investment products are distributed by Prudential Investment Management Services LLC, a member FINRA and SIPC. PGIM Quantitative Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of PGIM. © 2023 Prudential Financial, Inc. and its related entities. PGIM and the PGIM logo are service marks of Prudential Financial, Inc. and its related entities, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.

 

Investment products are not insured by the FDIC or any federal government agency, may lose value, and are not a deposit of or guaranteed by any bank or any bank affiliate.

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Kylie Scott

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PARTS iD announces delisting from NYSE American

CRANBURY, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — PARTS iD, Inc. (NYSE American: ID) (“PARTS iD” or “the Company”) on Wednesday announced that it received notification from the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) that the NYSE has initiated proceedings to delist the Class A common stock of PARTS iD, Inc. from NYSE American.

 

The NYSE also indefinitely suspended trading of the Company’s Class A common stock effective Dec. 26, 2023. PARTS iD does not intend to appeal the NYSE’s determination.

 

The NYSE determined that the Company is no longer suitable for listing and will commence delisting proceedings pursuant to Section 1003(c)(iii) of the NYSE American Company Guide in light of the disclosure on Dec. 26, 2023 that the Company filed a voluntary petition for relief under Chapter 11 of title 11 of the United States Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

 

About PARTS iD, Inc.

PARTS iD is a technology-driven, digital commerce company focused on creating custom infrastructure and unique user experiences within niche markets. Founded in 2008 with a vision of creating a one-stop eCommerce destination for the automotive parts and accessories market, we believe that PARTS iD has since become a market leader and proven brand-builder, fueled by its commitment to delivering a revolutionary shopping experience; comprehensive, accurate and varied product offerings; and continued digital commerce innovation.

 

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

All statements made in this press release relating to future financial or business performance, conditions, plans, prospects, trends, or strategies and other such matters, including without limitation, expected future performance, consumer adoption, anticipated success of our business model or the potential for long term profitable growth, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In addition, when or if used in this press release, the words “may,” “could,” “should,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “predict,” “potential,” “confident,” “look forward,” “optimistic” and similar expressions and their variants, as they relate to us may identify forward-looking statements. We operate in a changing environment where new risks emerge from time to time and it is not possible for us to predict all risks that may affect us, particularly those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine, which have had wide-ranging and continually evolving effects. We caution that these forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, which change over time, often quickly and in unanticipated ways.

 

Important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties, including without limitation: the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia has affected and may continue to affect our business; competition and our ability to counter competition, including changes to the algorithms of Google and other search engines and related impacts on our revenue and advertisement expenses; the impact of health epidemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, on our business and the actions we may take in response thereto; disruptions in the supply chain and associated impacts on demand, product availability, order cancellations and cost of goods sold including inflation; difficulties in managing our international business operations, particularly in the Ukraine, including with respect to enforcing the terms of our agreements with our contractors and managing increasing costs of operations; changes in our strategy, future operations, financial position, estimated revenues and losses, product pricing, projected costs, prospects and plans; the outcome of actual or potential litigation, complaints, product liability claims, or regulatory proceedings, and the potential adverse publicity related thereto; the implementation, market acceptance and success of our business model, expansion plans, opportunities and initiatives, including the market acceptance of our planned products and services; developments and projections relating to our competitors and industry; our expectations regarding our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection and not infringe on the rights of others; our ability to maintain and enforce intellectual property rights and ability to maintain technology leadership; our future capital requirements; our ability to raise capital and utilize sources of cash; our ability to obtain funding for our operations; changes in applicable laws or regulations; the effects of current and future U.S. and foreign trade policy and tariff actions; disruptions in the marketplace for online purchases of aftermarket auto parts; costs related to operating as a public company; the Company’s intention to continue operations during the Chapter 11 Cases; the Company’s ability to conduct its business in an uninterrupted manner during the Chapter 11 Cases; the potential outcome and timing of the delisting of the Company’s Class A common stock; the Company’s ability to obtain timely approval of the Bankruptcy Court with respect to motions filed in the Chapter 11 Cases; and the possibility that we may be adversely affected by other economic, business, and/or competitive factors.

 

Further information on the factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ from any forward-looking statements are contained in our filings with the SEC, which are available at https://www.sec.gov (or at https://www.partsidinc.com). The forward-looking statements represent our estimates as of the date hereof only, and we specifically disclaim any duty or obligation to update forward-looking statements.

Contacts

Investors:

Brendon Frey

ICR

ir@partsidinc.com

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Conveyer Policy APIs bring federal rules into businesses’ data ecosystems

TopicLake™ technology unlocks regulatory insights to put companies in control of compliance processes.

 

 

HACKENSACK, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Conveyer, a revolutionary AI platform transforming the way that businesses operationalize data, today announced the launch of its Curated Data Repository, a powerful Data as a Service (DaaS) platform that organizes, summarizes, and filters large and complex datasets to enable seamless knowledge discovery.

 

The first dataset accessible via the Curated Data Repository is Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data solution, a unique, constantly growing resource comprised of more than 16,000 regulations drawn from over 400 federal agencies and sub-agencies.

“Our U.S. Policy Data enables businesses to drink from the full firehose of regulatory policy information in real time, while providing the clear structure and trustworthy data analytics needed to make regulatory information immediately actionable across the enterprise,” says Carolyn Parent, Conveyer CEO.

 

“That’s a game-changer for government agencies, contractors, and enterprises — and a clear sign of the transformative power of Conveyer’s Curated Data Repository.”

 

A suite of flexible APIs enable organizations to rapidly unlock the full power of Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data, drawing on a constantly expanding dataset that already incorporates over 16,000 enacted and proposed federal rules dating back to 2020. Conveyer also announced the first free-to-use public version of a subset of its U.S. Policy Data, allowing enterprise customers and other interested parties to explore the solution’s capabilities online via a powerful Microsoft Power BI front end.

 

Using Conveyer’s proprietary TopicLake™ technology, the Curated Data Repository automatically digests federal regulations into over 328,000 unique Topics, each representing an individual concept or idea. The Topics and underlying text are then further processed to yield over 10.2 million unique GenAI artifacts — including summaries, keywords, categories, auto-generated Q&As, and sentiment analysis — which can be seamlessly activated across existing data ecosystems to enable powerful analytics or create intuitive new tools for non-specialist users.

 

Conveyer’s Curated Data Repository and U.S. Policy Data bring key benefits including:

  1. Democratized data access, making data insights accessible across the organization for strategic decision making, advanced analytics, compliance assessments, and more.
  2. Dependable data quality, with robust pre-processing to validate and vet content before it reaches users, customers, or downstream AI models.
  3. Transparent data provenance, enabling insights to be activated with confidence and seamlessly verified by compliance teams and legal specialists.
  4. Effortless implementation, with IT teams able to connect to policy data using existing headcount and infrastructure, enabling end-users to seamlessly self-serve data insights.

 

Using the Curated Data Repository, organizations of all kinds can now seamlessly integrate Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data into their operations. Key use cases include accelerating product innovation by enabling teams to navigate complex new privacy or security regulations; increasing the speed of legal discovery across disparate datasets; and helping clinicians and healthcare administrators to improve patient care by amplifying the value of existing tools.

 

“For any business impacted by federal rulemaking, the U.S. Policy Data Source is a game-changer,” Parent says. “We’re turning unstructured federal rules and policies into structured data — and our new APIs enable that data to be harnessed across organizations to enable innovation, support compliance, and drive strategic planning at all levels.”

 

A subset of Conveyer’s U.S. Policy Data can be explored online, and the Conveyer team is available to discuss off-the-shelf and bespoke API implementations to give enterprises instant access to the full range of federal rulemaking.

 

About Conveyer

Conveyer is a revolutionary AI platform that ingests organization-wide data and quickly generates high-trust, high-accuracy topics, metatags, and new data for AI models. With 80% of the world’s content unstructured, Conveyer makes the power of AI more accessible across a wide band of high-value use cases.

 

Conveyer’s Data Transformation product is already trusted and deployed in production by Fortune 100 companies across a variety of sectors, including automotive, industrial, materials, technology, and utilities. These products are a powerful demonstration of the core technology: the ability to transform data using AI into high-trust business applications that dramatically reduce costs and support development of future AI applications by creating pre-packaged, cleaned training data for company-wide digital transformation.

Find out more at www.conveyer.com

Contacts

Ben Whitford

ben.whitford@conveyer.com

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Amazon Prime Video plans to start showing ads on Jan. 29, with option for customers to pay extra $2.99 per month for no ads

Movies and TV shows on Amazon’s streaming service will start getting broken up with ads in January — unless you’re willing to pony up an extra fee each month.

 

 

Chris Welch / The Verge:

 

 

—  Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.

 

“This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

 

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

 

The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from canceling over this decision. Verge readers were none too pleased about the initial news back in September:

 

Amazon Prime currently costs $14.99 each month or $139 annually. (Prime Video can be subscribed to individually for $8.99/month.) The new charge for ad-free streaming would bring Prime to just under $18, and would push standalone Prime Video to just under $12.

 

Amazon also operates Freevee, a free, ad-sponsored streaming service. The company’s email notes that “live event content such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising.”

 

The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board and push ads upon customers on their cheapest monthly plans. Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, and Paramount Plus all include ads on their most affordable tiers. The monthly cost of Amazon Prime itself isn’t changing, but if you want to preserve the same experience you have today starting on January 29th, you’ll end up paying more.

 

 

Read more:

Amazon Prime Video plans to start showing ads starting on January 29, with an option for customers to pay an additional $2.99 per month to avoid the ads

 

 

— Techmeme

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After testings, South Korean Internet giant Naver plans to let companies use its Rookie office helper robots to deliver meals and parcels

—  Korean tech company ready to export IT systems that direct automated workforce through the 5G cloud

 

 

Song Jung-a / Financial Times:

 

 

At a Starbucks in the futuristic headquarters of Naver, South Korea’s biggest Internet company, a line of robots is on standby to fetch coffee for the company’s employees.

 

About 100 robots on wheels — called Rookies — wander around the offices, carrying out simple tasks such as delivering meals and parcels and testing the boundaries of human interaction with machines in one of the first examples of a robot-friendly building.

PHOTO: Naver’s Rookie robots act as office helpers as they roam from floor to floor in its futuristic headquarters in South Korea © Naver

 

Naver has been experimenting with integrating service robots into office life for more than a year in the 36-storey building on the southern outskirts of Seoul. These “brainless” robots roam around the building, rolling through security gates and taking lifts, powered by Naver’s cloud system that enables them to see, recognize and operate seamlessly.

 

The company is now keen to export the cutting-edge 5G-based cloud robotics technology, with many countries in Europe as well as Japan and Saudi Arabia expressing interest in benchmarking its system.

 

“There are not many companies globally who can offer this high-quality robot service at this scale,” said Seok Sang-ok, chief executive of Naver Labs, Naver’s research and development unit, in an interview with the Financial Times.

 

“This requires a lot of seamless co-operation with many of our affiliates. Naver’s wide-ranging services, including search engines, online shopping and social networking, have allowed us to experiment with various robot technologies and services, all in-house.”

 

Like Amazon, Naver sells products online and operates a sizeable cloud business. It spends about a quarter of its annual sales on R&D with Naver Labs in charge of developing artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving. Naver’s “digital twin” technology — a 3D scan of cities and buildings — also helps the robots to recognise their surroundings and find the most efficient routes. As they operate with just a normal video camera and without advanced processors and navigation tools, it costs much less to make them, Naver says.

 

“We’ve tested the robots for more than a year and now have a lot of data on human interaction with robots,” said Seok.

 

“We’ll focus on exporting IT services, as I believe our robotics technology using the cloud will become much better in two to three years.” Park Sang-soo, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, said Naver faced export challenges, with the complexity of its technology meaning it was not as easy as “selling just a fleet of robots.”

 

“Naver’s robots are working well in its offices because the building was designed for that purpose, but it should consider the non-technological factors of the target countries such as their IT infrastructure and regulation to sell its platform solution,” he said.

 

South Korea has a thriving domestic robot industry, most of them being deployed in factories, as the country sees AI and robots as key to alleviating labour shortages in the face of the world’s lowest birth rate.

 

According to the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea has the highest “robot density” in the world, with 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, compared with 399 in Japan, 322 in China, and 274 in the US. Robots are widely used in Korea’s car and semiconductor plants, but they are also becoming an increasingly visible part of day-to-day life.

 

Sales of service robots in South Korea are expected to almost double from $530mn this year to $1bn in 2026, an average annual increase of 23 per cent, according to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. Naver is looking to sell a combination of systems for industrial and server robots. Last month, it opened Asia’s largest data centre to accelerate its push into AI and the cloud. In the vast building in Sejong City that houses 600,000 servers, multiple robots carry heavy servers between IT warehouses and server rooms, while self-driving shuttles are in operation for employees and visitors to the campus.

PHOTO: Naver uses a variety of robots in its vast new data centre, opened in November in Sejong City © Naver

 

“We have a full portfolio [of technologies] that can cover many new use cases,” said Albert Wang, Naver Labs’ principal researcher.

 

“A lot of companies focus on single applications. We are really looking at the system levels. We have multiple types of robot systems co-operating together.”

 

Despite being a technology powerhouse, South Korea remains weak in software development, with its tech exports mostly confined to hardware such as chips, electronics and electric vehicle batteries. Naver is trying to change that picture, with exports of IT services like digital twins, robotics and AI tools, although it has so far failed to gain a foothold abroad with its powerful search engine. Earlier this year, the country won its first major high-tech export contract to the Middle East to build and operate digital twins or virtual versions of five cities including Riyadh, Medina and Mecca, for five years. It is also looking to offer tailored versions of its latest ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence model to foreign governments concerned about US data controls.

 

“We are just beginning to export our IT services, which can become the country’s new export driver,” said Seok. “We aim to become the leading exporter of the country’s IT services in the medium to long term.”

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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