President Joe Biden accepted the resignation Monday of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander after an administration investigation found he had violated the Biden administration’s workplace policy by bullying of now-former OSTP General Counsel Rachel Wallace and disrespectful interactions with other staff. It “is clear that things I said, and the way I said them, crossed the line at times into being disrespectful and demeaning, to both men and women,” Lander said. “That was never my intention.” He plans to leave “no later than” Feb. 18 “in order to permit an orderly transfer.”

A quarter of the world’s population by 2026 will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education and entertainment, predicted Gartner Monday. It defines a metaverse as a “collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality,” it said. “Vendors are already building ways for users to replicate their lives in digital worlds,” said Gartner. “Eventually, they will take place in a single environment -- the metaverse -- with multiple destinations across technologies and experiences.” No single vendor will own the metaverse, so Gartner expects it “to have a virtual economy enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens,” it said. “The metaverse will impact every business that consumers interact with every day,” but adoption of metaverse technologies is “nascent and fragmented,” and it’s still too early to know “which investments will be viable in the long term,” it said.

Mobile in-app revenue will be 56% of the global digital advertising spend by 2026, when the market is projected to grow to $753 billion globally from $407 billion in 2022, reported Juniper Research Monday. It anticipates desktop PC advertising spend will increase $142 billion in 2026 from $97 billion this year, “despite a diversion of spend towards handheld devices and the implementation of data protection regulation impacting cookie policies.” Video ad spend is expected to grow 63% over the next four years, “as the success of popular distribution channels, such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts, continues to drive demand for video advertising and justify premium charges,” said Juniper.

Liquid Avatar Technologies and Game Credits launched the Multiverse Collective, an alliance designed to let independent metaverses share technical, business and marketing resources to create value among members. The companies’ Aftermath Islands Metaverse and Genesis Worlds companies are each building a metaverse in an interoperable environment, they said Monday. The collaboration includes joint development, marketing, authentication of users, verifiable credentials, and community engagement throughout the life cycle of each metaverse, “ensuring that users will be able to engage in a shared safe and secure experience,” the companies said. Working together early in the development process allows both metaverses, and future partners of the Multiverse Collective, to ensure their virtual spaces work together to create a “seamless experience” for users, said Genesis Worlds CEO Jason Cassidy. “Doing this from the beginning makes it much easier than attempting to add interoperability several years down the road when much of the technical plumbing has already been set up,” he said. Principles include fair game play among players, promotion of good actor strategies and creating open standards to support the build and technology stacks of members.

More than 3.5 million “fully paid” Peacock subscribers have watched WWE content since the WWE Network moved to the streaming service last March, said WWE President-Chief Revenue Officer Nick Khan on a Q4 call Thursday. The WWE Network had 1.1 million U.S. subscribers when the Peacock deal was closed in January 2021, “and expanded audience and viewership, led by a strong in-ring product and the right partner and platform, has created wins for all parties,” he said. The Peacock arrangement shows “it's evident that the marketplace puts considerable value on our IP, which has allowed us to drive more value for existing partnerships and enter into a number of new categories,” said Khan. “We currently have over a dozen scripted and unscripted projects sold based on our IP. ... Those are with existing content partners in the U.S., in addition to new buyers, networks and streamers.” The WWE stock closed 8.2% higher Friday at $51.71.

NTIA will host prenotice funding opportunity technical assistance webinars about the new broadband programs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, says Friday's Federal Register. The webinars will be 2:30 to 4 p.m. EST March 9, and 2:30 to 4 p.m. EDT March 23, April 6 and 27, and May 11. Webinars will cover the broadband equity, access and deployment program, middle-mile infrastructure program and three digital equity programs.

Though 2021 was “one of the strongest years in PayPal’s history,” with 18% year-over-year revenue growth to $25.4 billion, “exogenous” factors “did impact our results,” said CEO Dan Schulman on a Q4 call Tuesday. “Supply chain issues disproportionately impacted our cross-border volumes and our small business merchants,” while inflationary pressures “impacted spending within certain segments of our user base,” he said. Rising threats from COVID-19's delta and omicron variants cut travel and event bookings, and the elimination of government stimulus “had an impact as well” on consumer spending, said Schulman. “E-commerce growth rates during the holiday season were lower than industry expectations despite a strong two-year growth rate of almost 50%, and we are also lapping some of the strongest quarters of growth in our history. Even so, we once again grew our market share and came within our revenue guidance for the quarter.” The stock plunged 24.6% Wednesday, closing at $132.57.

E-commerce via YouTube is an “additional layer of opportunity” for Google, but an area “where it all feels very early to me,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai on a Q4 call Tuesday. “We’re making it easier for viewers to buy what they see and simpler for advertisers to drive action with innovative solutions like product feeds and video action campaigns and emerging formats like live commerce.” YouTube’s commerce capability is focused on “onboarding merchants and all the back end so that we can have the broadest and the most comprehensive inventory available,” said Pichai. “Our partnership with other e-commerce platforms is a basic foundational layer we are putting in.” Though it’s “pretty early” in the initiative, “there’s a lot of pilots underway,” including “shopping livestreams” with brands like Walmart and Target, he said. “There’s a lot more to do,” he said, “but I find the opportunity space here pretty broad, and it’s exciting.”

About 29% of U.S. internet households have adopted a smartwatch, up from 16% a year ago; 17% own an Apple Watch and 7% a Samsung wearable, said Parks Associates Tuesday. Samsung is on pace to overtake Google's Fitbit as the second-largest player in the U.S. wearables market this year, behind Apple, it said. Smartwatch owners are “a particularly enthusiastic core of the connected health market,” said analyst Kristen Hanich, saying smartwatch owners tend to own other connected devices including fitness products, weight scales and smart thermometers.

Verizon customers are already getting faster connection speeds as the carrier turns on its C-band spectrum for 5G, Ookla, which conducts speed tests, said Monday. Verizon’s average 5G download speed increased more than 50% to 116.29 Mbps after it launched the band, Ookla said: That's compares with 70.46 Mbps for AT&T, which had a more limited C-band launch, and 187.11 for T-Mobile with its 2.5 GHz spectrum. “This massive improvement in speed shows the power of Verizon’s widespread deployment of C-band spectrum and C-band’s ability to deliver fast speeds,” the firm said. “We also saw a large increase in testing for customers across the board, but especially Verizon customers who could have seen an ultra wide band icon show up on their phone for the first time after the launch.”