Beta Bytes: Week of September 26th
Snippets of financial news calibrated to science, technology, and engineering companies as well as our client’s interests.
Big news from Facebook’s Reality Lab’s Virtual Connect Conference
Facebook is unifying its entire VR hardware lineup into one headset: the Oculus Quest 2, which is available now for pre-order to ship out on October 13th with a price tag of $299.
In partnership with Ray Band, Facebook will be creating Smart Glasses - companies like Google have attempted to launch a tech glasses concept before, but Facebook is taking a new direction with its augmented reality capability.
Facebook announced VR games based on Star Wars, Warhammer, 40,000, and more. See the full list here.
This purchase of two hotels will provide more than 330 rental housing units for San Diegans experiencing homelessness.
The funds come from California’s Project Homekey and will go toward the purchase of the Residence Inn Hotel Circle and Residence Inn Kearny Mesa.
According to San Diego’s Community Action Plan on Homelessness, the city critical need to increase permanent supportive housing by 2,659 units for individuals experiencing homelessness within a decade, with 60% of those units, or 1,595, to be developed within the first four years.
Utah’s Economy is on the Road to Recovery
Utah is practically leading the nation with a 4.1% unemployment rate as Utah’s construction industry is booming with jobs in that sector up some 7% over 2019.
Taxable retail sales volumes that are well ahead of 2019 levels and unemployment claims that have been heading back toward pre-pandemic levels since an early May peak.
However, jobs in the leisure/hospitality industry are down almost 17% since a year ago since COVID decimated tourism.
Salesforce Announces 12,000 Jobs Coming in the Next Year
CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff announced that the company would be hiring 4,000 new employees in the next six months, and 12,000 in the next year.
This follows one of Salesforce’s largest quarters ever, bringing in 5B in revenue.
Salesforce has a recent layoff of 1,000 employees, about 2% of their workforce. Salesforce is likely reallocating these positions and setting up the company for further growth.