There has been “major improvement” in recent weeks to ease congestion across the Port of Los Angeles, “but there’s still so much work to do,” Executive Director Gene Seroka told a Washington Post webinar Thursday. The profound shortage of truckers and warehouse labor in Southern California remains a severe problem that won’t ease anytime soon, he said.
The tech industry should create a regulatory body to set best practices for protecting children, and Communications Decency Act Section 230 immunity should be earned through adhering to those protections, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri told the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee at a Wednesday hearing.
Amazon artificially inflates consumer prices by charging third-party sellers exorbitant and unavoidable fees, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine (D) said Tuesday during a Senate hearing. Amazon declined comment.
The semiconductor industry is in a “renewed drive” amid the chip crunch to install more factory capacity at “the mature nodes” for automotive, industrial and IoT applications, and “as the chip market leads, the photomask market follows,” said Photronics CEO Peter Kirlin on an earnings call Wednesday for fiscal Q4 ended Oct. 31. Photronics manufactures photomasks for producing chips and flat panels, and analysts consider the company a bellwether of semiconductor and display industry health. The stock soared 26% higher Wednesday, closing at $17.91.
Sonos disclosed its first climate action plan Wednesday in its 2021 Listen Better report, commiting to driving its value chain to carbon neutrality by 2030 and to net zero by 2040. The company worked with VitalMetrics to map the footprint of its value chain -- including sourcing materials, packaging, product use and end of life -- to guide cuts in greenhouse gas emissions across products, supply chain, distribution and direct operations, it said.
Global supply chain challenges will continue into next year, said Conn’s CEO Chandra Holt on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q3 ended Oct. 31. Higher international freight costs dinged the cost of goods sold, which rose to $211 million from $160 million in the year-ago quarter, she said.
Though comments aren't due until Jan. 18 in the Food and Drug Administration’s rulemaking to create a category of affordable over-the-counter hearing aids for U.S. adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, audiologists and other clinicians have already begun voicing concerns that the agency’s proposed OTC hearing aids rule poses risks to consumers’ health and safety.
When Apple and Amazon wrapped hi-res music into their standard music subscription packages in the spring, a fifth of all music streaming subscribers had access to high-quality music, said a December Futuresource report. Though the music services helped enable a “mass-market migration” toward hi-res audio -- delivering to their music streaming subscribers hi-res tracks “almost overnight, at no extra cost” -- challenges are blocking widespread adoption, said Futuresource's Simon Forrest.
The 2021 holiday season is poised to top the National Retail Federation's strong growth forecast, despite supply chain disruptions, inflation, early shopping and concerns over the COVID-19 omicron variant, said NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz Friday.
The audio functionality that's at the heart of the Sonos patent fight with Google “is only a small piece” of what Google smart speakers provide, and excluding them from U.S. importation “would harm U.S. consumers and the U.S. economy,” commented the Computer & Communications Industry Association Thursday (login required) in the International Trade Commission’s 337-TA-1191 docket.