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Shareholders sue Pinterest over pattern of race and gender discrimination

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Shareholders of Pinterest are suing members of the company’s board of directors and several top executives for allegedly ignoring or deliberately enabling discrimination against women and people of color. The suit claims that the board of directors, including Pinterest cofounders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, either actively perpetrated or knowingly ignored high-profile allegations of discrimination and retaliation against Pinterest’s former COO Francoise Brougher and two Black female executives, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks. Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment. The suit singles out Pinterest board chair, cofounder, and CEO Silbermann in particular for creating a boys’ club at the top that systematically ignored claims of pay disparity and an inability to advance for women and people of color. In addition, it alleges that even when employees told Silbermann about Pinterest’s problems, he did nothing to change the situation. “He repeatedly placed himself before the Company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s White, male leadership clique,” the suit reads. In the summer of 2020, Ozoma and Banks first shared their stories of being underpaid, underappreciated, and misleveled on Twitter. The two came forward after Pinterest issued a statement in the wake of the George Floyd protests and said that they wanted to expose the company’s hypocrisy for saying Black lives matter publicly, while mistreating its Black employees privately. (While Pinterest first denied Ozoma and Banks’s allegations, the company has since done an about-face and hired a law firm to assess its internal practices.) “I spoke up so people would know and I want accountability but don’t expect it in a white supremacist system,” Ozoma says. Their story prompted other former and current Pinterest employees to speak out , including Brougher, who filed a gender discrimination lawsuit two months later. Her suit lays out how she was given a different stock compensation vesting schedule than her peers, dramatically affecting her compensation. After she raised concerns, she says, she was cut out of meetings, including the company’s IPO roadshow—even though she was the company’s second-in-command and the only executive who’d participated in an IPO before. She was later fired. Days after Brougher went public, Pinterest employees staged a virtual walkout in support. Pinterest has not commented on the active litigation. This new lawsuit claims that the board’s and executives’ actions have resulted in a breach of fiduciary duty, waste of corporate assets, and abuse of control Read More …

This MySpace clone is the social media nostalgia hit you need right now

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Forget Snapchat or Instagram. The new social network of the moment is a shameless MySpace clone, created by a student developer who was only a few years old during that site’s heyday. The new network in question, SpaceHey , doesn’t hold back in its attempt to re-create MySpace’s mid-aughts vibe. Sign up for the site, and you can create a profile page with status updates, a personal blog, and a list of hobbies. Visit a friend’s page, and you’ll see whether they’re online along with their current mood. And yes, you can customize your profile. SpaceHey is the project of An—he goes by just his first name online —who says he’s an 18-year-old student in Germany. In a nod to MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson , An automatically befriends everyone who creates a profile on the site. On Sunday, he had about 1,000 friends. On Monday, that number had doubled , as sites such as  HackerNews and ProductHunt took notice. Over Twitter, An says that while he never experienced MySpace firsthand, he heard plenty about it on the internet and from older friends Read More …

Why is it so hard to buy a PlayStation 5 right now? ‘Grinch Bots’ are probably to blame

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Phil Nichols, 45, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been very good this year. In a concession to the pandemic, he’s managed his information technology job for the Internal Revenue Service from home and forgone weekly game nights, as well as restaurant and movie outings. To break up the monotony and also distract from his chronic pain, the disabled veteran plays video games. “You get to get out of your bubble, so to speak, and see a whole new world,” he said. So, when Sony released the new PlayStation 5 game console in mid-November, he decided to reward himself with an early Christmas present. But when we spoke, Nichols had been trying for more than a week to buy the console online without success. He blames bots, automated computer programs that people use to buy up in-demand items that they then resell for a profit. They function like ticket scalpers who have expanded into sneakers, toys, and electronics. While the nefarious software plagues e-commerce sites all year long, so-called “Grinch Bots” are especially active over the holidays, snatching up the season’s hottest gifts. When the PlayStation 5 consoles first dropped on November 12, the traffic crashed Walmart’s website . Nichols is sure that bots were beating him to the punch because every time Walmart and other retailers released more consoles, the products were gone in less than five seconds Read More …

These tricks turn Apple’s HomePod Mini into the ultimate office assistant

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When Apple released the HomePod in 2018, the focus was squarely on music , making it the kind of smart speaker you’d put in a living room or common area. The new HomePod Mini , by contrast, seems perfect for office use. Its compact design can fit more neatly on a desk, and while it can’t match the larger $300 HomePod on sound quality, it’s also much less expensive, at $100, making it easier to justify in smaller spaces such as home offices. Besides, Apple’s Siri voice assistant has become more versatile over the past couple of years, turning it into an excellent office companion. If you’ve got a HomePod Mini (or full-sized HomePod) at your desk, here are all the ways you can put it to work: Make appointments Instead of clicking around in your calendar app, use Siri to quickly create events by voice. That way you can stay focused on whatever else you’re doing. To set up events on your HomePod or HomePod Mini, first make sure you’ve enabled Personal Requests for your HomePod, using these instructions , if you didn’t enable it during setup. Then, head to Settings > Calendar > Default Calendar on your iPhone and choose your work calendar (or whichever other calendar you’d like Siri to update in response to voice commands) Read More …

‘E-commerce as entertainment’: An investor behind Goop predicts the wild future of retail

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Investor Frederic Court’s bets on e-commerce—his London-based Felix Capital has backed Farfetch, Goop, jewelry site Mejuri, among others—are poised to pay off on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday shopping season as consumers eschew traditional stores during the pandemic. Now Court is turning his attention to the next wave of online retail, which he describes as “e-commerce as entertainment.” He notes that in China and other parts of Asia, hundreds of millions of consumers already buy via streaming e-commerce, a service that’s reminiscent of a digital-only QVC. He shared his predictions with Fast Company . The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Fast Company : What are the big trends you’re seeing in e-commerce, and are you seeing simply an acceleration of trends that you had already seen forecast? What’s new? Frederic Court : This year we’ve seen acceleration on both sides of the marketplace—and acceleration of demand. On the supply side, from fashion brands to beauty brands to local restaurants, there’s a realization that if your customer cannot come to you anymore, you’ve got to go to them. If we had spoken last year, five years ago, or 10 years ago, we would have said the same thing: Every Christmas is going to be bigger [than the last Christmas]. This year is going to be significantly bigger. We don’t know what’s going to be the impact in terms of people being concerned about an [economic] crisis or unemployment. But at the micro-level of our portfolio companies, we saw, across the board, an extraordinary November. FC : In e-commerce, there are sites like Amazon that are very transactional, brands like Goop that provide information and sell products, and retailers that are trying to recreate the in-store experience. Do you see e-commerce becoming more experiential? Read More …