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Red One reviews: Dwayne Johnson’s Christmas action comedy receives negative reception

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Red One reviews: Dwayne Johnson's Christmas action comedy receives negative reception

Dwayne Johnson will attempt to rescue Santa Claus in his new movie, Red One. Judging by the initial reaction, Johnson probably can’t save the film’s critical reception.

Red One’s review embargo has lifted, and the reception is anything but positive. Red One opened to 35% on Rotten Tomatoes and 37 on Metacritic. Amazon MGM Studios lifting the review embargo on election night speaks volumes. Either the studio wanted to provide a distraction from election coverage, or they knew the initial reception would be negative. The latter is the likely answer.

Red One, a Christmas action comedy, was originally scheduled for a December 2023 release on Prime Video. However, the studio delayed the film to November 2024 and switched its rollout to a theatrical release.

RED ONE | Official Trailer 2

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In April, The Wrap published an eye-opening report about Red One’s behind-the-scenes troubles. Johnson was reportedly late, an average of “seven to eight hours per day,” and missed multiple days of production. Additionally, Red One underwent significant reshoots. Add it up, and the budget was raised by at least $50 million, bringing Red One’s total cost to $250 million.

With a massive budget, Red One must be a box office hit for the studio to churn a profit. However, initial tracking pegs the film for a domestic opening weekend of $36 million, which would be a rocky start.

Directed by Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’s Jake Kasdan, Red One stars Johnson as Callum Drift, commander of the E.L.F. Drift’s mission is to protect Santa Claus (J. K. Simmons) — code name: RED ONE. After Santa’s abduction, Callum recruits bounty hunter Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to help find Saint Nick and save Christmas. Lucy Liu also stars.

Red One opens in theaters on November 15, 2024.

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Black Friday deals bring the Google Nest wired indoor camera down to just $70

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Black Friday deals bring the Google Nest wired indoor camera down to just $70

The Google Nest wired indoor camera as part of an early Black Friday deal. The cam is normally $100, so this represents a savings of 30 percent. This is close to a record low price, which is never a bad thing. The sale includes three colorways, including white, beige and light blue.

The second-gen wired device is designed for indoor use, thus the name, and is capable of capturing 1080p HDR video. It’s motion sensitive and uses a bit of AI trickery to discern between people, animals and vehicles. The camera also includes night vision and an hour of event recording on the device itself, which comes in handy in the case of a Wi-Fi outage.

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There’s a two-way audio function, as the camera includes both a microphone and a speaker. People can boot up the affiliated Google Home app to spark up a conversation. This app also lets you instantly call up emergency services if the conversation doesn’t go as planned, though that requires a Nest Aware subscription.

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This brings us to a fairly significant caveat, though this one pops up with most modern security cameras. A whole lot of stuff is locked behind that aforementioned Nest Aware paywall, . This plan gives purchasers 60 days of video history and the ability to watch live streams on smart displays and even smart TVs. Subscribers will even receive alerts when familiar faces are recognized by the camera.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

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Startup Battlefield 200: Celebrating outstanding achievements

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Startup Battlefield 200 reception

This year, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 showcased the incredible talent and groundbreaking ideas of our 2024 Startup Battlefield 200 cohort.

Out of thousands of applications, we selected 200 of the most promising startups, each bringing unique innovations to their respective industries. The competition culminated in an electrifying event where these startups had the opportunity to pitch and demonstrate their solutions live over three days.

From the Top 20 Finalists, TechCrunch editorial selected the top five companies who battled it out for the $100,000 equity-free prize money and the coveted Disrupt Cup. The well-deserved win went to Salva Health, with a strong runner up, Gecko Materials

Among the Startup Battlefield 200 companies were many industry-defining companies exhibiting and pitching on the Showcase Stage; here are the standouts: 

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Best Showcase Stage pitch by industry group 

Hardware, Robotics + IoT

Avol uses autonomous drones to deliver lab samples, speeding processing up to 11x faster at lower costs.

Health Tech + Biotech

Ovum Health merges molecular diagnostics, medicine, and behavioral science for healthier moms and babies.

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Security, Privacy + Social Networking  

Factiverse aids finance and media in verifying information, acting like Grammarly for fact-checking.

Fintech + Edtech  

Untapped Solutions connects justice-impacted individuals with jobs and services via an AI-driven CRM.

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Sustainability, Mobility + Logistics  

Prosal helps business development teams at federal government contractors automate capture research to save time predicting contract opportunities using AI.

SaaS, Enterprise + Productivity – Session 1

Eticas.ai identifies black box algorithmic vulnerabilities and retrains AI-powered technology with better source data and content.

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SaaS, Enterprise + Productivity – Session 2  

OMADEUS is a dynamic network of self-aware AI agents to replace outdated productivity software for SMEs.

Best Booth — It’s a tie! 

The Best Booth award ended in a tie.

Cloneable.ai hand-built and painted a utility pole out of Styrofoam to demonstrate their innovations in safety inspection for utility workers. Wave Therapeutics used the clever sign “In the Business of Saving Your Ass” as a nod to their tech designed to prevent bedsores.

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Spirit of Disrupt Award

The Spirit of Disrupt award goes to Yasin Abbak from GroupUps, who went above and beyond to create connections and opportunities for fellow founders. The Startup Battlefield is more than a pitch competition; it’s an opportunity to build relationships with investors, potential customers, and fellow founders to support each other on their entrepreneurial journeys. 

As we celebrate the achievements of this year’s winners, we are excited to see how they will shape their industries and drive innovation in the months and years to come. Congratulations to all the participants of the Startup Battlefield 200, and a special thank you to our judges and sponsors for their support in making TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 a resounding success.

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One solar stock to buy after Trump’s win hit the sector, analysts say

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One solar stock to buy after Trump's win hit the sector, analysts say




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Why Amazon, Disney, and others are pushing employees back to the office

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Why Amazon, Disney, and others are pushing employees back to the office

Today, we’re talking about work. Specifically, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the covid-19 pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to the office from their bosses, and there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back.

Here on Decoder, I’ve talked to lots of CEOs about the benefits of working fully remote versus hybrid or having everybody back in the office over the past several years, and I’ve heard the full spectrum of responses. Some executives are adamant that people need to be in the office, and others are equally adamant that fully remote is the way to go. We’ll play some of those answers for you as we go so you can get a sense of the enormous range of opinions here.

If you look at the surveys, it’s basically 50/50 — quite a lot of people want to work remotely, and they can be pretty loud online. But there are a lot of people, who are often quieter, who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons. Some folks just don’t have the space to work from home, or they’re simply tired of making video calls in sweatpants all day and never really leaving the house. I know some people who really like just being able to leave work at the office when they head home for the day, and I’ve heard from a lot of younger people who are struggling to get face time with the more senior and experienced people at their companies in order to build relationships and grow their networks.

The messy middle of all this is what quite a few companies have settled on: hybrid work, which allows for a combination of in-office and remote work. This is how The Verge runs, and I quite like it — but it’s not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days where I go into a mostly empty office and then sit on Zoom in a phone booth, and there are days when I realize I’m the only one in a meeting sitting at home because everyone else has gone into the office. 

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Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long-term cultural project that we really only started in 2020. While there are some obvious benefits, it’s not clear if anyone’s really cracked it in a way that scales across different kinds of companies.

Now, some companies have decided the nuance just isn’t worth it. In September, Amazon mandated that all employees would return to an office five days a week starting in January. In the memo announcing the change, CEO Andy Jassy argued that the company had “observed that it’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture,” that “collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective,” and that “teams tend to be better connected to one another” when everyone is in the office.

Amazon isn’t alone in wanting employees back at their desks. Companies like Disney and Salesforce have also pushed for employees to come back to the office at least four days a week, making similar arguments. Other companies, like Apple, have been steadily pressuring workers to come back for quite some time — that beautiful new spaceship office in Cupertino wasn’t built to stay empty. 

But is the return to office really about building company culture and being more creative and productive? I have to tell you, there is a huge chunk of The Verge and Decoder audience that is absolutely convinced that any big return-to-office policy change is actually just a layoff in disguise — we get emails making this case virtually every time one of these moves is announced.

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Jassy even addressed this directly, just a few days ago, in an all-hands meeting. Responding to claims that the return-to-work mandate is a quote “backdoor layoff,” he told employees that that is simply not true. We’ll come back to that later on. 

So I wanted to know what’s been going on, what the real reasons behind return-to-office might be, and where this is all headed next. To explain it, I caught up with two experts on the subject: Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at workplace culture consultancy Culture Partners. 

We dive into what’s been happening to the nature of work today, and you’ll hear both of them lay out some of the key reasons behind the return-to-office push. We also try to figure out whether Amazon is just an outlier or, as you’ll hear Jessica say, “the tip of the spear” in what could be something much bigger.

Here are some of the news stories, surveys, and studies we discussed in this episode, if you’d like to learn more:

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  • Amazon is making its employees come back to the office five days a week | The Verge
  • Amazon CEO Andy Jassy denies that 5-day office mandate is a ‘backdoor layoff’ | CNBC
  • Bob Iger tells Disney employees they must return to the office four days a week | CNBC
  • A quarter of bosses admit return-to-office mandates meant to make staff quit | Fortune
  • More Americans now prefer hybrid over fully remote work, survey finds | Axios
  • Google tells staff: stay productive and we’ll stay flexible | Business Insider
  • The list of major companies requiring employees to return to the office | Business Insider
  • Thinking Inside the Box: Why Virtual Meetings Generate Fewer Ideas | Columbia
  • Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you addicted to learning | Decoder
  • The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings | Decoder
  • Sundar Pichai on managing Google through the pandemic | The Vergecast

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What will power the future of digital commerce?

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What will power the future of digital commerce?

Today, digital commerce is a primary business driver for retailers, brands, and distributors. According to an analysis of US Census Bureau data by research firm Stratably, 2024 revenue from digital is projected to grow 8.4% in the U.S. market compared to in-store growth of 1.2%.

As digital commerce has grown in importance there has been a corresponding explosion of downstream channels where brand manufacturers must send content, from retail stores to marketplaces to social shopping and direct-to-consumer websites. Each of these channels has distinct rules for the product data they will accept and these rules change often; Target, Walmart and Amazon changed their data ingestion requirements nearly 1,000 times combined in 2023. The reasons for these changes vary: differing regional regulatory requirements, unique merchandising opportunities the channel requires, or varying rates of digital maturity between the channels.

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Will you benefit from the Apple TV’s new 21:9 aspect ratio?

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Will you benefit from the Apple TV's new 21:9 aspect ratio?

Apple this week released the latest developer beta of tvOS 18.2, the software that powers the company’s Apple TV 4K streaming media devices. As previewed during the WWDC 2024 keynote, the new software includes support for 21:9 and several other aspect ratios that are wider than 16:9, which has become the dominant shape for modern TVs.

Why does that matter?

Most of us have experienced letterboxing or pillarboxing — that’s when a set of horizontal or vertical black bars frame the content on our TVs. It happens when there’s a mismatch between the aspect ratio of a movie or show and the aspect ratio of your screen.

A lot of modern content, especially shows and movies developed for streaming services like Netflix, Max, Paramount+, or Apple TV+, is shot in 16:9, so letterboxing that content on 16:9 TVs isn’t necessary. On the Apple TV 4K, even the user interface is formatted for this ratio, which keeps things looking good.

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However, some folks own projector screens or widescreen monitors with non-16:9 aspect ratios. For these people, all Apple TV 4K content ends up with those pesky black bars because the device’s signal is formatted for 16:9. When tvOS 18.2 arrives for everyone in December, the software should automatically detect the ratio of your display, and reformat itself to match.

tvOS 18.2 Aspect Ratio settings.
Sigmund Judge / X via FlatpanelsHD.com

If that detection fails, a new Aspect Ratio settings menu will let you manually select the appropriate one for your setup. Available ratios are 16:9, 21:9, 2.37:1, 2.39:1, 2.40:1, DCI 4K, and 32:9.

It will be the first time that someone who owns a 21:9 projector, or who uses an anamorphic lens to achieve a ratio like 2.39:1, can get the Apple TV 4K to produce a perfectly proportioned and fullscreen image.

So how many people will benefit from the new settings? “It really won’t affect very many,” said Jeff Gosselin, chief experience officer at Cloud 9 AV, a Toronto-based custom home theater installer. “Any new theaters we have done in the past 15 years have all used 16:9 screens. For any ultrawide projection systems, this will be an enhanced viewing experience.”

Pillarboxing will still likely occur when watching 16:9 content on such a screen, but when 21:9 content is available, it should play in fullscreen, with no black bars.

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Presumably, app developers — like the services mentioned above — will have to update their apps to ensure that their content displays correctly under the new aspect ratio settings. But eventually, this will become the norm.






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