Good morning and welcome to Tech News Now, TheStreet’s daily tech rundown.
In today’s edition, we’re covering New York City suing Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok over children’s mental health, OpenAI’s latest product is taking aim at Google, PlayStation’s next move, and a laptop that looks straight out of sci-fi.
NYC sues social-media giants
New York City is taking aim at the companies behind Snapchat (SNAP) , YouTube, Facebook (META) , Instagram, and TikTok over concerns of children’s mental health.
A suit filed in California Superior Court in Los Angeles County on Feb. 14, 2024, cites the apps, as well as Snap, Alphabet’s (GOOG) Google, Meta, and ByteDance, for “fueling the nationwide youth mental health crisis.”
The case comes from Mayor Eric Adams’s administration. The complaint contains three main counts that cite the four companies and five platforms.
The first count lays out the city’s complaint this way:
Defendants, through their conduct designing, developing, marketing, supplying, promoting, advertising, operating and distributing their social media platforms in the manner described above, have created, caused and contributed to the youth mental health crisis in New York City, causing damage to the public’s health and safety, interfering with the use of public places, including schools, and endangering or injuring the health, safety, comfort or welfare of a considerable number of persons, including youth.
And in a news release the city says: “The lawsuit alleges that companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. …”
New York City is demanding that the companies stop their efforts that cause the damage it describes. And the city’s complaint is asking for actual, compensatory and punitive damages but did not specify amounts.
You can see the full announcement of the case from NYC here, and the filed suit here.
OpenAI is coming for Google’s crown
With just over 80% of the market using it, Google (GOOG) has long ruled the web search space so dominant that few have challenged it.
But now a brave new warrior has appeared: OpenAI.
The Microsoft-backed (MSFT) company is developing a web search product intended to compete directly with Google, according to a new report from The Information. The product is also partly powered by Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which has been making major moves to embrace AI in the past year and to integrate a wide range of new possibilities.
This has been in the pipeline for a while, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the topic roughly a year ago, around the time the company said that OpenAI would power Bing.
“Today, if you look at the search category, it’s great,” Nadella told The Verge on a 2023 episode of its Decoder podcast.
“It works 50% of the time. It doesn’t work for the other 50% of the time. So I think what I really want to do is to go back and say, ‘Look, is there some new powerful technology that can make search a better product without fundamentally changing how search gets permission to even exist as a product, which is other people’s content organized in useful ways so that users can find them.’ To me, that is the category. And so, we will live and die by our ability to help publishers get their content to be seen by more people.”
PlayStation’s move beyond consoles
Sony
On the most recent earnings call for Sony (SONY) — PlayStation’s parent — it reported sales up by 22%, but noted that hardware costs reduced that number. Sony also noted that the PlayStation 5 shipping target was missed. But PlayStation Chairman Hiroki Totoki used this as an opportunity to speak to the future.
Totoki noted that at first an exclusive title can help propel the console, but he continued: “But there is a synergy to it. So if we have a strong first-party content, not only with our console, but also other platform like computers. And the first-party can be grown with multi-platforms and that can help operating profit to improve.”
Sony has released first-party titles like “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales,” “Spider-Man 2” and “The Last of Us” on the PC. And considering the brand’s continued investment in first-party titles, opening them up beyond the PS5 will likely mean more players and more revenue for Sony.
Lenovo’s rumored concept laptop looks like pure Sci-Fi
Here’s another look at that transparent laptop concept Lenovo’s bringing to MWC. pic.twitter.com/uH2g98q64Q
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) February 15, 2024
The Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona on Feb. 26, and we’re expecting all sorts of gadgets from phones to laptops with wearables and earbuds in between. But thanks to a fresh leak from Evan Blass (@evleaks on X), we know what Lenovo might be readying as a concept device.
It’s most likely a transparent laptop that looks as if it had been taken out of a sci-fi film. It wouldn’t be Lenovo’s first unique device, considering they’ve had the 180-degree folding Yoga series for a while, as well as the foldable ThinkPad X1 Fold and laptops with an e-ink display on the hood.
This one is particularly unusual because it’s a transparent top screen that overlaps apps and windows with clear visibility of your environment.
I’m curious about what Lenovo will showcase as workflows or features alongside the design. Additionally, the shared image shows off a Windows 11-esque wallpaper, what appears to be a flat, touch keyboard, and a stylus off to the side.
What remains to be seen is whether this concept gets a limited release or is just meant to showcase what might be coming in the future.
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