Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption

Here's what we're serving up today:

• Virgin Galactic Taking Off 🚀

• Amazon’s Being Cheeky with Prime 🧑‍⚖️

• Asteroids ☄️

• ToolBox Thursdays ⚒️

Virgin Galactic Taking Off 🚀

Today, we're going to look at the shooting star, Virgin Galactic.

Well, it appears that our interstellar amigos at Virgin Galactic are finally going on a paid trip. Yes, you heard that right!

For the first time ever, they'll be jet-setting three Italian Air Force thrill-seekers to the edge of space on June 27th. Could this be the beginning of the space tourism era?

However, as you might have guessed that traveling to space is going to cost a lot more than your average coach ticket and it ain’t cheap!

• The company has sold around 600 tickets at a price ranging from $200,000-$250,000.

• However, that early bird offer is no more as now tickets are going up for grabs for around $450,000.

Yeah, as if we could have afforded the earlier price. *Cries in corner.*

The company said that come August, they plan to fly people to the space every month. That seems like a nice plan for cashflow right?

Well, some reports say that their cosmic calculator may be off. Analysts suggested that if Virgin does’t ramp up frequency or space-crafts (both of which require more capital), they’re projected to rake in only $18 million/year for the next 8 years.

Now, that may seem a lot but take into account that these are space-flights we’re talking about. Virgin Galactic had over $500 million in operating costs alone last tear.

Our space-faring friends might be left star-gazing at their bottom line for a while.

The wolves however have no regards for math that goes on for 8 years. They were simply happy that flights were on and as such, the stock (NYSE:SPCE) became the darling after the announcement shooting more than 33%.

Amazon’s Being Cheeky with Prime 🧑‍⚖️

This just in: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Amazon are set to have a Prime-time showdown.

Allegedly, Amazon has been leading a game of cat and mouse, deceiving customers into signing up for Prime and then creating an escape room-style cancellation process.

The FTC is suing Amazon, accusing it of using "dark patterns". No, that's not the name of Amazon's new Gothic clothing line, but design tactics that subtly steer users toward decisions they didn't mean to make.

Like, say, finding yourself enrolled in a Prime membership while you were just trying to buy your granny's favorite tea biscuits.

• Amazon’s checkout page project was named “Iliad”.

• The lawsuit describes the Iliad process as “Prime’s Four-Page, Six-Click, Fifteen-Option Iliad Cancellation Process” because that’s how many steps it takes to cancel a Prime subscription.

• FTC also highlighted that some customers trying to buy Prime Video ended up with the full Prime membership as Amazon capitalized on some customers not understanding the difference between "Prime" and "Prime Video", making them sign up for the pricier option without even knowing it.

This isn't the FTC's first rodeo on their crackdown of “dark patterns”.

• Fortnite creator Epic Games had to cough up a whopping $520 million for duping players into buying in-game cosmetics.

• It also settled a $100 million lawsuit with telecoms provider, Vonage after accusing them of creating an artificially difficult cancellation process to lock people into their subscriptions.

Prime is more than just a shiny crown jewel for Amazon, with over 200 million members globally and $25 billion in annual revenue. So it’s no wonder that Amazon’s initial comment on this was that all of this was false on the facts and law.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Apple's just made its visionOS SDK available for developers to start building apps for the Vision Pro. They're hoping a full App Store and familiar tools will generate excitement ahead of the 2024 launch. 🎉😎

Warner Bros. Discovery is in talks to bring HBO titles to Netflix! If it happens, we could see our favourite shows on Netflix, even as they stay on HBO's own platform, Max. 🎥🍿 

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match. After a series of online zingers, it seems they're planning a cage fight. Musk suggests the Vegas Octagon for their showdown. 🥊👀.

⚒️ ToolBox Thursdays ⚒️

Hotjar - AI Based survey assistant

gitStream - Automate code reviews

PlaybookAI - Creative storae for AI art

CollovGPT - Design your dream interior real-time with an AI chatbot

Factiverse - Find factual mistakes in AI-generated content

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