Mobile News - Week of November 2, 2020

The origins of the each of the calls and texts remain unclear, reflecting the sophisticated tactics that robocallers typically deploy in order to reach Americans en masse across a wide array of devices and services. State election officials have scrambled to reassure voters in response, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledging Tuesday to “work quickly to stamp out misinformation.“ The FBI also has opened an investigation into the Michigan robocalls, a Trump administration official said.

Increasing demand for silicon across a range of products and supply-chain disruptions from Covid-19 are the main causes of the shortage, according to the people. Main Apple chipmaker TSmC said in October that 5G smartphones require 30% to 40% more chip content versus 4G. That and uncertainty over the course of the pandemic is spurring customers to cache components for fear of running out, especially after major smartphone maker Huawei had stocked up massively ahead of a September deadline for U.S. sanctions.

Two questions hung over millions of people who worked for Uber, Lyft and other app companies: Should it be legal and was it fair for them to be considered independent contractors rather than employees?

This week, Californians said yes. Voters in the state overwhelmingly approved a ballot proposal, Proposition 22, that enshrines so-called gig work into law. The measure overrides a 2019 state law and a 2018 State Supreme Court ruling that would have forced the companies to treat workers in California as employees with wage guarantees and other benefits.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the popular UPI payments infrastructure, said on Thursday evening that it has granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI-powered payments in India. Like Google, Samsung and a number of other firms, WhatsApp has built its payments service atop UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of large banks in India. NPCI said WhatsApp, which has amassed over 400 million users in India, can expand payments to its users in a “graded manner,” and to start with, it can only roll out the payments service to 20 million users and has to work with multiple banking partners.

For one, it consistently ranks among the top-grossing mobile games worldwide, jostling with PUBG Mobile made by another Tencent studio Lightspeed & Quantum — gaming has long been the cash cow for Tencent, better known for its WeChat messenger. The brain behind Honor of Kings is TiMi Studios, which ramped up hiring in the U.S. this year to further global expansion.

In 2017, then-Governor Scott Walker and President Trump announced a historic deal with Foxconn to bring manufacturing jobs to Wisconsin. But none of the jobs, buildings, or promises have been fulfilled—and look like they never will.

In exchange for billions in tax subsidies, Foxconn was supposed to build an enormous LCD factory in the tiny village of Mount Pleasant, creating 13,000 jobs.