HomeDaily Wrap: Mass Suicide Threatened at Foxconn and More
Workers at Foxconn threaten to commit suicide in protest of poor working conditions. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
Over 300 employees at the Foxconn factory in China climbed atop the building and threatened to commit suicide en masse. The Taiwan-based Foxconn, most known for manufacturing the XBox360, the iPhone and iPad, the Playstation 3, the Wii and the Kindle, has long been under fire for difficult working conditions and the irony that the workers who earn so little are making the most popular recreational luxury items on the planet.
From the comments:
KathrynTerry — “Making toys for by comparison, rich capitalists,while being an underfeed,overworked human beings.
Free labor is just wrong especially when making non-essential toys, that carry hefty price tags. Shame on Xbox,Kindle,I Phone. Profits must be outlandish. Why not have decent working conditions for all??? People take their own lives in despair.”
A year ago Nokia was talking about hurling itself off a burning platform into a cold and dark ocean. The world wondered if the largest cellphone maker on Earth was committing suicide by phasing out Symbian smartphones and ditching the MeeGo operating system. Nokia, the company that brought many consumers their first cellphones, was crumbling in front of our very eyes. (more)
Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month’s magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title “Tackling Business Problems.” The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls. (more)
We all knew it was coming the minute we laid eyes on the Kinect. The wireless, motion-based controller for the XBox 360 was designed for gaming but its potential uses for other human-machine interactions were immediately obvious. We saw it in the way the device let users flow through film selections in the Netflix UI using only their hands. The Kinect’s potential also wasn’t lost on hackers and tinkerers, who wasted no time making the device do all kinds of things outside of the scope of the XBox. (more)
Visa is beginning to make its move in the mobile payments space. While MasterCard has heavily featured its near field communications capabilities and exclusive partnership with the Google Wallet, Visa has been working behind the scenes to set up mobile payments strategy. Visa announced today that its payWave NFC mobile wallet application has been certified for a variety of smartphones giving the payments giant its first real steps into unleashing NFC wallets. (more)
Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you’re already using Google’s Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing! (more)
In an age of smartphone addiction, you’ll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?
Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. (more)
If you’re attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you’ll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport. (more)
As beloved as Firefox is by its users, the open source browser has had a harder time finding hardcore fans among IT managers at large companies and other organizations. That’s because its rapid release cycle has always been notoriously tricky for them to keep up with. On top of that, Mozilla would sometimes end support on a particular older version of its browser before enterprise clients were ready. (more)
The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company’s overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15. (more)
The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.
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