Good morning,
After a prolonged slump in the toy industry, Hasbro is making big bets to get back on track.
But the toymaker’s CFO Gina Goetter tells Forbes its physical toys like Nerf guns or My Little Pony figures may play less of a role in its turnaround than its board, video or digital versions of its popular games, like Monopoly.
Gaming has been a bright spot for the company—particularly the popular mobile game Monopoly Go!, which was developed by Scopely under a licensing agreement. It’s also investing hundreds of millions of dollars into video game studios.
“We’re going to leverage our IP and keep growing it in a free way for us with digital partners, but then we are also taking our IP and putting it into the video game space,” she said.
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U.S. stock indexes staggered toward their worst day in weeks, with losses from trillion-dollar technology companies like Nvidia fueling the decline, while oil prices also fell to their lowest level this year earlier in the day. The declines came amid lingering concerns about global economic growth as a morning report revealed lighter manufacturing activity in the U.S. than was previously forecasted.
Nvidia was subpoenaed as part of a Justice Department antitrust investigation, according to Bloomberg, bringing regulators closer to filing a formal complaint against the tech giant. Antitrust officials believe Nvidia may be making it more difficult for buyers to switch to other chip suppliers while penalizing those that do not exclusively purchase their AI chips.
Controversial U.S. facial recognition company Clearview AI, which has been embraced by law enforcement agencies, was fined more than $30 million by the Netherlands’ data protection watchdog on Tuesday for building “an illegal database” containing billions of faces taken from social media and the internet. Clearview uses the database to sell facial recognition services to intelligence and investigative services such as law enforcement, who can then use Clearview to........