Tech

Facebook and Google have announced a policy to require employees to be fully vaccinated before returning to the company’s campuses.

Facebook released a statement via Lori Goler, Facebook’s Vice President of People, announcing the news.

“As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our U.S. campuses to be vaccinated,” Goler writes. “How we implement this policy will depend on local conditions and regulations. We will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and will be evaluating our approach in other regions as the situation evolves. We continue to work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”

According to TechCrunch, Google’s announcement was worded similarly to Facebook’s.

Amazon commented on the news as well, “We strongly encourage Amazon employees and contractors to be vaccinated as soon as COVID-19 vaccines are available to them.”

Scooter company Revel announced plans to launch a Taxi service in New York City.

The company revealed its plans to launch the Taxi service in August using 50 Teslas. The service will be available in Manhattan.

The announcement originally came in April when the company revealed it has received a exemption from the city to provide more taxis.

Revel is currently seeing a rise in demand for their scooters so adding the taxis will help their business immensely.

The company plans to launch with 15 Tesla and expects to be at its 50 taxi capacity within 3 weeks.

Spotify announced the purchase of Podz, a podcast discovery app. Read the announcement below:

At Spotify, we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience—and we’ve acquired Podz, a small, talented team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers, to help make that experience even better.

Spotify has had machine learning experts focused on improving audio discovery for almost a decade, but there is more work to be done. We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.

Powered by state-of-the-art machine learning technology, Podz generates high-quality clips that give users the opportunity to preview key moments from podcast episodes, encouraging them to discover and listen to new podcasts. This capability, combined with Spotify’s 2.6 million podcasts on the platform, learnings from our work in music discovery, and current investments in podcast recommendation, will take podcast discovery to the next level—making it easier for listeners to find the content they want to listen to, and for creators to be discovered and build a fan base.

We plan to integrate Podz’ technology into the Spotify experience, and listeners should start seeing elements of that work before the end of the year.