Business

With no big movies or The Legend of Zelda games this quarter, Nintendo’s gross profits have fallen by 45 percent compared to the same period last year.

Sales of Nintendo Switch hardware, now in its eighth year since launch, have also “decreased significantly year-on-year” — and we may not see a notable improvement until the company announces its highly anticipated next-gen console sometime in 2025.

The Italian software company, which notably acquired — and limited free access to — Evernote, has added WeTransfer to its growing portfolio. WeTransfer CEO Alexandar Vassilev says the company will “continue to serve your creative tooling needs” following the acquisition.

As David Pierce wrote about the Friend AI gadget and company CEO Avi Schiffman:

He wants Friend.com to eventually become a social network for real-life and AI friends, and he wants to build more kinds of devices and try everything.

Apparently, he’s serious. 404 Media reports he spent $1.8 million on the domain after raising about $2.5 million. Schiffman said, “People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing.”

Bullying works: after TikTok users complained about Chipotle’s inconsistent portion sizes, the company announced this week it is “doubling down” on training to ensure customers get “correct and generous portions.” It will cost the company $50 million, executives told analysts.

Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:

After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not—they’ll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges?

T-Mobile is creating a joint venture with the investment firm KKR to acquire Metronet, a service that provides fiber internet to over 2 million homes and businesses in 17 states.

As part of the deal, T-Mobile will invest $4.9 billion for a 50 percent stake in the joint venture and all of Metronet’s residential customers. In April, T-Mobile announced plans to acquire the fiber optic company Lumos as well.

Comcast’s earnings report today revealed that Peacock lost 500,000 subscribers in the months leading up to the Olympics — and Peacock’s planned price hike. Despite this, Peacock is pushing toward profitability with $1 billion in revenue and losses narrowing to $348 million.

Monthly active users increased by 14 percent year-over-year to 626 million, but 5 million short of Spotify’s expectations for the quarter. Subscribers also increased by 12 percent to 246 million, with Spotify reporting a record-high operating income of €266 million (about $288.8 million).

The growth timeline “exceeded even our own expectations,” said CEO Daniel Ek. “This all bodes very well for the future.”

JD Vance’s former coworkers say the vice presidential candidate wasn’t very good at being a venture capitalist. One person said he was too consumed with his book tour around Hillbilly Elegy to show up to work.

As CEO David Zaslav looks for ways to improve WBD’s financial situation, sources tell the Financial Times that he’s considering separating WBD’s streaming and movie business from its ailing legacy TV networks — a move that would sequester the new company from a mountain of debt.

Patrick Orlando, who once led Digital World Acquisition Corp, lied to the public when he said his SPAC didn’t have a target in its S-1 form. It definitely did: Trump Media, parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social. The SEC complaint is chock-full of his texts and emails. DWAC, incidentally, already settled a similar suit.

That’s according to the Financial Times, reporting that Meta is looking to further its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban and so many other eyewear brands.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses released last year now support multimodal AI to identify what wearers are seeing. They also sold more in a few months than the previous pair did in two years, according to EssilorLuxottica’s CEO.

That’s less than the $20 billion Adobe offered for the design platform company nearly two years ago, but investors buying in the secondary share sale included Coatue Management, General Catalyst Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Eddy Cue.

Figma left the Adobe deal with a $1 billion breakup fee, which, along with a big redesign, is part of why CEO Dylan Field remains optimistic.