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This week in business

Didn’t have a chance to keep an eye on the news this week? Here’s what you missed in this week’s business news review.

  Technology

Apple unveils new products
At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple made some major announcements for their next ten years, as well as an update on their most recent product releases.

HomePod
The HomePod is Apple’s response to the Amazon Echo (my personal favorite), but they took a different angle in their presentation. Apple chose to focus on the speaker quality, as opposed to their own artificial intelligence, Siri. This was smart as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s A.I. are widely touted as superior. At least with this strategy, they’re parsing out a small portion of the market share for those who want the voice activated assistant and only the best sound quality.

Augmented Reality
Most talk about “Augmented Reality” has been in the context of wearable glasses, where digital content is overlaid on what you already see in your physical space. Apple’s not the first company to think about this as both Google and Microsoft have already been working on it. Products like Google Glass and Microsoft’s HoloLens headset are their respective examples. Apple decided to look at it differently by introducing ARKit with iOS11  (coming this fall to iDevices everywhere). ARkit will allow app developers to create apps that can provide an augmented reality experience, where digital content is combined with your surrounding environment. The future is near!

  Sustainability

Amazon’s ridiculous new headquarters
Amazon’s new campus headquarters is a workplace wonder. In fact, it pushes the categorical boundaries of what could be considered a workplace. It has bike paths, game rooms, sports fields, two dog parks, a homeless shelter, a grocery store, and so much more that you’d be out of breath if I included the rest. It’s no surprise, then, that such a forward-thinking company has also included sustainable features in their building design.

With recycled energy, healthy food options, and 25,000 plants inside their Biospheres, Amazon is stepping their game up. The 10 million square feet of building space will be partially heated by recycled energy from their biospheres. This isn’t their first rodeo though. With six LEED Gold building certifications, they’re seasoned veterans when it comes to sustainability. And let’s not forget that selling goods online already streamlines their overhead, avoiding the waste that traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores have.

All these expenditures aren’t slowing them down either. According to Geekwire, Amazon has added more than 110,000 employees in the last year. No, I didn’t make a typo adding an extra zero. The online sales giant is now bursting at the seams with 341,000 employees. That’s more than Microsoft and Google…combined. For more pictures of their new campus, click here.

  Economy

Unemployment continues to decline
According the U.S. Department of Labor’s JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey), there were six million job openings in April, an increase of four percent from March. If that wasn’t good enough, unemployment has also reached a 16-year low, says the Bureau of Labor statistics.

A recent New York Times article pointed out as baby boomers continue to retire, economists believe as many as 100,000 jobs could be added each month. That’s only good news for the nearly 2 million college students graduating each year.

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