Kris Holt

For the fourth time this year, Peloton has announced a round of layoffs. The struggling fitness company is cutting another 500 jobs, CEO Barry McCarthy told CNBC. In a memo to employees, McCarthy wrote that the company needed to make the move as part of efforts to reach break-even cash flow by the end of Peloton’s 2023 fiscal year (i.e by the end of next June).

“I am acutely aware many of those impacted by these changes aren’t just colleagues but are also close friends,” McCarthy wrote in the memo, which Bloomberg obtained. “I know many of you will feel angry, frustrated and emotionally drained by today’s news, but please know this is a necessary step if we are going to save Peloton, and we are.”

The latest cuts make up around 12 percent of Peloton’s headcount. In February, just as McCarthy took on the job, the company eliminated around 2,800 positions. In July, Peloton laid off approximately 570 people as part of a move to outsource all manufacturing. Then in August, it cut another 784 jobs to reduce costs.

Given that the latest round of layoffs leaves Peloton with around 3,825 employees, that means the company has reduced its headcount by more than half this year. That said, McCarthy noted that, with these cuts, “the bulk of our restructuring work is complete.”

However, Peloton plans to close most of its retail stores in North America starting next year, which will likely lead to further cuts. McCarthy noted that Peloton lost north of $100 million on its retail operations last year, so changes were necessary.

Peloton saw a boom in business following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were looking for ways to work out at home. However, as the world has opened back up and people have returned to offices and gyms, Peloton was left with excess inventory and the business has taken a significant hit. It incurred an operating loss of $1.2 billion in the April-June quarter. As Bloomberg notes, McCarthy sees subscriptions to Peloton’s suite of fitness classes and services, partnerships and making content more broadly available on third-party devices as the keys to increasing revenue.

The company has started selling its connected fitness gear through Amazon, and products will soon be available at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Peloton has also started offering its Bike for rent and announced a smart rowing machine.

“A key aspect of Peloton’s transformation journey is optimizing efficiencies and implementing cost savings to simplify our business and achieve break-even cash flow by the end of our fiscal year. With that in mind, we have made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by approximately 12 percent,” a Peloton spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. “This will result in the reduction of approximately 500 global team members. Decisions like this are incredibly difficult and Peloton is doing all we can to help our impacted colleagues. As we pivot to growth, today marks the completion of the vast majority of our restructuring plan we began in February 2022.”

After months of teases and leaks, Google is finally ready to show off the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch. Those who are curious about what Google has in store can find out the full details as soon as the company announces them by watching the Pixel Event livestream. The festivities start at 10AM ET and you can watch via the video embedded below.

Engadget Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low and Senior Reporter Sam Rutherford will be breaking down the news as it happens on our liveblog. We’ll have full coverage of everything you need to know from the showcase on our Pixel 7 event page as well.

Google has already confirmed that the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro will run on a next-gen Tensor chip and Android 13. The Pixel Watch, meanwhile, is the first smartwatch that Google has designed and built in-house. It will blend Google features with Fitbit’s health and fitness knowhow, and have an overhauled Wear OS experience.

It might be worth keeping close tabs on the event if you’re already interested in buying a Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel Watch or new Nest device (Google will have some announcements on that front too). All the devices that Google will show off during the event are going on sale today.

Follow all of the news from Google’s Pixel 7 event right here!

Teenage Engineering’s latest drum machine probably isn’t one that you’re going to use to add percussion to your next piece. The company teamed up with designer Love Hulten to create CHD-4 in the aim of raising awareness about congenital heart disease.

The drum machine has four modules that produce rhythms based on the echocardiogram (ECG) scans of four children with heart defects. The scan results revealed the shape, pace and BPM of their heartbeats, Teenage Engineering said. It added the data to a four-track circular sequencer. The patterns can be played together or individually in order to create sounds that exemplify “each child’s irregular heartbeat.” A video gives a sense of the kinds of haunting soundscapes the machine can create:

“Drum machines are defined by order – beats, pace, and rhythm,” Hulten said. “This machine disrupts that system, the same way life is disrupted when a child is born with congenital heart disease.” The machine also has an OLED screen that depicts the audio and beat in a similar fashion to a proper ECG machine.

It’s an art project, no doubt, but it’s a fascinating one that’s raising awareness of an important issue. If you’re lucky, and have deep enough pockets, you might be able to add CHD–4 to your collection. It will be auctioned on Valentine’s Day (February 14th), with all proceeds going to the Swedish Heartchild Foundation.

Teenage Engineering/Love Hulten

Spotify has bought a company it says will help it detect and address harmful content on the platform. Kinzen uses machine learning and human expertise to analyze possibly harmful content and hate speech across multiple languages, Spotify said in a statement. It added that Kinzen will “help us more effectively deliver a safe, enjoyable experience on our platform around the world” and that the company’s tech is especially suited to podcasts and other audio formats.

Looking for signs of harmful audio content across hundreds of languages is a difficult task, particularly since there may be nuances that certain systems and non-native speakers may not pick up on. As such, Spotify says Kinzen will help it to “better understand the abuse landscape and identify emerging threats on the platform.”

The two companies have actually been working together since 2020, with the aim of preventing misinformation in election-related content. They forged their partnership before Joe Rogan started spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on his Spotify-exclusive show, which is said to be the most-listened-to podcast on the planet. 

There was a significant backlash against Rogan and Spotify earlier this year. Hundreds of doctors and scientists urged Spotify to enact a policy to stem the spread of misinformation. Weeks later, Spotify started adding a content advisory to podcast episodes that included discussions about COVID-19 and made its content guidelines public.

Several prominent artists pulled their music from Spotify in protest against Rogan, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The host and editor of Spotify-owned podcast Science VS also pledged to stop making episodes (except ones in which it fact-checked Rogan and countered misinformation on the platform) unless the company did more to stem the flow of harmful falsehoods.

It may be the case that Spotify sees employing Kinzen’s tech as a means to help it avoid similar PR catastrophes in the future. However, it’s unclear how effective it will be in preventing the spread of misinformation. Were harmful content to be featured on a popular podcast, it may gain traction on social media and in press coverage before Spotify can act. Still, at least it’s trying to do more to stamp out misinformation.

Bulletin, Meta’s foray into the newsletter subscription space, is going away in early 2023, as The New York Times first reported. The company confirmed to Engadget that it will pay out all Bulletin writer contracts. Writers can keep earning subscription revenue until the service shutters, and take their email lists and content archives to other platforms if they wish.

“Bulletin has allowed us to learn about the relationship between Creators and their audiences and how to better support them in building their community on Facebook,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “While this off-platform product itself is ending, we remain committed to supporting these and other Creators’ success and growth on our platform.”

Meta launched the Bulletin platform in June 2021 amid a boom in newsletter subscription services driven by the likes of Substack. Closing down Bulletin in early 2023 means it will have lasted a little over 18 months.

The company brought in prominent figures including Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Malcolm Gladwell and Queer Eye‘s Tan France to use Bulletin, but it evidently wasn’t as successful as Meta hoped. The Times notes that some of the writers have six-figure contracts.

Meta will shift resources from Bulletin into Facebook, with the aim of making the latter more of a place where people can discover engaging content. It plans to take what it learned from Bulletin and apply that to its other creator-focused products.

Recent reports have suggested that Meta is restructuring parts of the company as part of an effort to focus on core products and cut costs. The company has also reportedly warned staff about possible layoffs. Many other tech companies are feeling the sting of an economic slowdown. Substack, which just released an Android version of its app, laid off 14 percent of staff in June.