The news: Recent job listings at Google reveal the Big Tech company’s plans for a mobile augmented reality (AR) platform intended to reach billions of users. Why it’s worth watching: After being a pioneer in AR with Google Glass, Google shied away from consumer VR and refocused its technology on enterprise.

Once relegated to the children’s market, virtual characters are entering the mainstream in China. Fictional as these digitally rendered avatars may be, they hold real jobs, from pop star to influencer, to even news anchor. And they’re becoming increasingly interactive and humanlike, thanks to improvements in technologies such as AI, motion capture, and virtual reality (VR). Recent advancements in augmented reality (AR), in particular, have enabled virtual avatars to step out of social media and make live appearances alongside flesh-and-blood celebrities.

While TikTok's popularity was picking up well before COVID-19, individuals secluded in their homes have been in search of new forms of entertainment, causing TikTok's US unique vistor count to rise 48.3% between January and March.

Gajria added that between 2022 and 2025, Equiano will indirectly create 1.7 million jobs in Nigeria and South Africa. Trendspotting: Big Tech companies continue to invest heavily in network connectivity in emerging countries as a way to own not just the content and data on the internet, but physical infrastructure and services.

An Apple spokesperson told The Verge that the company has “always put our users at the center of everything we do, and the App Store is the cornerstone of our work to connect developers and customers in a way that is safe and trustworthy,” noting that the App Store supports 2.1 million jobs across all 50 states.

For Google, losses from ditching China’s relatively small market were less than the potential brand deterioration it would receive in other, larger markets for being associated with censoring search. Google largely maintained its absence in China until 2018, when the Intercept revealed the  company began working, in secret, on a new Chinese search engine called Dragonfly.

LinkedIn was facing intense competition in the Chinese job-seeking app market with homegrown competitors like Zhaopin, MaiMai, Chinahr, and 51job.com. More on this: LinkedIn joins a long line of Western internet companies that have either stopped doing business in China, or were blocked outright.

Consumers spent $72.3 billion in the Apple App Store in 2020, which Apple claims supports 2.1 million jobs in the US. The lawsuit was filed in June 2019 by developers who claimed Apple had an “abusive monopoly” in the iOS App Store and in-app distribution service.

II: What has surprised you about the job? AH: I’ve never worked with this much data before. We use know-your-customer (KYC) practices on all of our customers—we verify who they are, their ages, their location.

The silver lining: After news of the Zoom firings exploded, Google searches for Better.com reportedly surged 4,400% globally in one day. Daily searches for the brand name Better.com jumped to 31,700 from an average global daily search volume of 730, according to search analytics tool Ahrefs.

The news: The number of marketing job listings related to creators has surged 4,645 times since 2018, peaking at 92,900 positions earlier this year—and Amazon was the single largest job poster, with 40 active roles as of May 2021, according to Thinknum data cited by The Information. That beats out social media companies like Facebook, ByteDance, and Google, which all cracked the top 10.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September 2021. What if it doesn’t work? Companies need to handle this work transformation carefully or risk losing talent to competitors during a time of high turnover due to the “Great Resignation,” or the trend of millions of workers leaving jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, many tech workers looking to change jobs are seeking more flexibility around remote work per Fast Company. Twitter closed its San Francisco and New York offices due to the current surge. The company announced Wednesday that they are pausing future office reopenings after considering CDC guidelines.

An October 2020 Telus Survey revealed that 90% of remote workers would jump ship for another job that prioritizes their mental health, for instance. So, it makes sense telemental health providers like Talkspace have markedly expanded their employer rosters over the last year:.

But the expansion of the creator economy is gradually making “creator” as a job title more feasible, as the new monetization options are opening the door for many up-and-coming creators to get their businesses off the ground and grow their channel.

With the $70 million raise, the insurtech will further gamify the industry, and a recent uptick in online searches for life insurance and a need for better employee benefits can increase growth.