Technology

Bloomberg Vertical agriculture company Plenty Inc. has an unusual selling point: Its crops of arugula, kale and microgreens are grown in an indoor farm run by robots. That hasn’t always been a winning proposition. Two years ago, the company had to scale back an ambitious international expansion plan, realising it wasn’t ready to bear the cost of pricey new markets ...

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp. said it will close its physical store locations permanently but will continue to invest in a digital storefront that, along with third-party retailers, has driven sales of products such as the Xbox game player and Surface tablets. The move will result in a pretax charge of about $450 million, or 5 cents a share, in the current ...

Bloomberg Consumers around the world will soon be able to know intricate life details of salmon they eat with a new blockchain initiative from top exporter Norway. The Norwegian Seafood Association has partnered with International Business Machines Corp. and technology provider Atea ASA to gather data on how salmon is bred, stored and shipped, information that consumers will eventually access ...

Bloomberg Twitter Inc. will let users record and post their tweets as short audio clips directly in the app, which other users can then listen to from their Twitter feed. The idea is to give people more space to share than allowed by typing the maximum 280 characters. “Sometimes 280 characters aren’t enough and some conversational nuances are lost in ...

Bloomberg Just a month ago, the chief executive officer of Wirecard AG boasted on Twitter that the future would still be bright for the digital payments company when “all the noise and dust settles.” At the time, Markus Braun was a paper billionaire. But over the course of a couple of days, the fintech veteran has been forced to step-down ...

Bloomberg Inmarsat Group Holdings Ltd. says it’s found a way to safely fly civil drones over long distances, a step that may help pave the way for mass adoption by industries from transportation to energy and infrastructure. Current rules mean most non-military users have to keep drones where they can see them and can only operate one at a time ...

Bloomberg AT&T Inc. is considering a sale of Warner Bros. video-game unit, a business that could fetch about $4 billion and help the company pare down its almost $200 billion in debt, CNBC reported. Activision Blizzard Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. are interested in potentially buying the division, according to CNBC, which cited unidentified people familiar ...

Bloomberg After succesfully deploying drones to enforce a lockdown and curb the spread of the coronavirus, Rwanda has now enlisted the help of five robots. The nation that’s been at the forefront of technology adoption on the continent will use the Belgium-made robots at a Covid-19 treatment center to test patients’ temperatures and to alert security when people don’t wear ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. removed podcast apps Pocket Casts and Castro from its App Store in China at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the apps’ developers said this week. “We believe podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship,” Pocket Casts wrote on Twitter. “As such we won’t be censoring podcast content at their ...

Bloomberg Worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to fall by 11.9% this year — their biggest annual drop ever — indicating things are going to get worse for the industry before they get better. In its latest market forecast, research firm IDC anticipates shipments of 1.2 billion in 2020, down from just under 1.4 billion last year. The annual forecast follows ...