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A12 TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday 29 december 2020

From Zoom to Quibi, the tech winners and losers of 2020

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and "Animal Crossing: New Ho-
MAE ANDERSON rizons," which debuted
AP Technology Writers March 20 and has now
We streamed, we Zoomed, sold a cumulative 26 million
we ordered groceries and units globally, according to
houseplants online, we cre- Nintendo.
ated virtual villages while According to the NPD
navigating laptop short- Group, during the first 11
ages to work and learn months of 2020, Nintendo
from home. When it comes Switch sold 6.92 million units
to technology, 2020 was a in the U.S. It has been the
year like no other. best-selling console in units
Here are the year's tech sold for 24 consecutive
winners and losers: months, a record.
___ — Zoom
LOSERS: All video conferencing soft-
— Virtual Reality ware from Microsoft Teams
As the world adjusted to a to WebEx thrived during the
new stuck-at-home real- abrupt shift of tens of mil-
ity, the pandemic could lions of people to remote
have been virtual real- working and schooling dur-
ity's chance to offer an ing pandemic. But only one
escape. With the use of became a verb.
special headsets and ac- In this Feb. 27, 2020, file photo, game demonstrator Alex Chang uses a disinfectant wipe to clean Zoom Video Communica-
couterments like gloves, a game console at the Nintendo Switch exhibit at the Pax East conference in Boston. tions was a relatively unher-
the technology lets people Associated Press alded company before the
interact with a 360 degree and videos. demic kept many people Earlier this month, a federal pandemic hit, but its ease
view of a three-dimension- "Some or all of the con- at home. It announced it judge blocked a potential of use let to wide adop-
al environment, seemingly tent shared in this Tweet was shutting down in Oc- ban. tion during the pandemic.
a good fit for people stuck is disputed and might be tober, just months after its It was the latest legal de- There were some growing
indoors. misleading about an elec- April launch. feat for the administration pains, including lax security
But people turned to easier- tion or other civic process," — Uber and Lyft in its efforts to wrest the app that lead to "Zoom bomb-
to-use software and games read one typical label ap- Fresh off of their initial pub- from its Chinese owners. In ing" breaches early on. The
that they already had. Few plied to a tweet by Presi- lic offerings the year before October, another federal company revamped its se-
rushed to spend hundreds dent Donald Trump. and still struggling to show judge postponed a shut- curity and remains one of
of dollars on a clunky new But many experts said that they can be profitable, the down scheduled for No- the popular platforms to
headset or tried to learn while the labels made it ap- ride-hailing services were vember. host remote meetings and
the ropes of virtual reality pear that the companies clobbered by the pan- Meanwhile, a government classes.
meeting software. And no were taking action, "at the demic in 2020, as people deadline for TikTok's parent, — Ransomware purveyors
VR games broke into the end of the day it proved to stopped taking cars and ByteDance to complete The ransomware scourge
mainstream. So virtual real- be pretty ineffective," as huddled down at home. a deal that would have — in which criminals hold
ity, on the verge of success Jennifer Grygiel a professor In May, Uber laid off 3,700 Oracle and Walmart invest data hostage by scram-
for decades, missed its mo- at Syracuse University and people, or about 14% of in TikTok has also passed, bling it until victims pay up
ment, again. social media expert, put it. its workforce. Lyft also an- with the status of the deal — reached epic dimen-
— Social media election — Quibi nounced job cuts. unclear. sions in 2020, dovetailing
labels Less than a year ago, Quibi But there are some signs of While President-elect Joe terribly with the COVID-19
It was the year of labels launched a splashy Super hope. After significantly re- Biden has said TikTok is a plague. In Germany, a pa-
on Facebook, Twitter, You- Bowl ad that posed the ducing costs by restructur- concern, it's not clear what tient turned away from the
Tube and even TikTok. question "What's a Quibi?" ing in the second quarter, his administration will carry emergency room of a hos-
Ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. People may still be scratch- Lyft said last month it ex- on the Trump administra- pital whose IT system was
presidential vote, the com- ing their heads. pects to have its first prof- tion's attempts at a ban. paralyzed by an attack
panies promised to clamp Quibi, short for "quick bites," itable quarter at the end ___ died on the way to another
down on election misinfor- raised $1.75 billion from in- of 2021. And the compa- WINNERS: hospital.
mation, including baseless vestors including major Hol- nies scored a major victory — Nintendo Switch In the U.S., the number
charges of fraud and can- lywood players Disney, NB- in California, where vot- Even in a year herald- of attacks on healthcare
didates' premature decla- CUniversal and Viacom. ers passed Proposition 22, ing splashy new consoles facilities was on track to
rations of victory. And the But the service struggled to granting them an others from Xbox and PlaySta- nearly double from 50 in
most visible part of this was reach viewers, as short vid- an exception to a law that tion, the Nintendo Switch 2019. Attacks on state and
the bevy of labels applied eos abound on the internet sought to classify their driv- was the console that local governments were up
to tweets, posts, photos and the coronavirus pan- ers as employees, an ex- could. Launched in 2017, about 50% to more than
pense that analysts thought the Switch became a fast 150. Even grammar schools
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— U.S. TikTok ban
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