How conflict minerals make it into our phones

Published

2 years ago

February 15, 2023

admin

Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. All of these minerals are found in our electronics and all are considered conflict minerals, due to their potential origin in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While the African country contains an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral resources, it remains mired in poverty and violence, and mining these four metals can help fund armed conflict in the region.

But the metals are integral to consumer electronics. In a smartphone, for example, tin is used to solder metal components together, while tantalum is used in capacitors, which store electrical energy. Tungsten is used in the components that make a phone vibrate, and gold is used in circuit board connectors.

In the past decade, African countries, intergovernmental organizations and companies have ramped up their efforts to clean up mineral supply chains. But consumers still can’t be sure if the minerals in their electronics are fully conflict-free, or if the mines where they originated are dangerous, environmentally destructive, or use child labor.

“The whole process is muddied,” says Oluwole Ojewale, the Regional Organized Crime Observatory coordinator for Central Africa at the Institute for Security Studies in Dakar, Senegal.

That’s largely because in the DRC and surrounding countries, hundreds of thousands of people work in the informal mining sector, toiling away using hand tools in what are known as artisanal and small-scale mines. This type of mining can be hazardous and difficult to regulate, but it’s also one of the few sources of income available to some of the world’s poorest men and women.

So while companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Tesla put out extensive reports on conflict minerals every year, usually stating that there is no reason to believe the minerals they source help to support armed groups, corruption and instability at mine sites means there are no guarantees.

Apple, Intel and Tesla did not reply to requests for comment, while a Microsoft spokesperson stated, “Microsoft remains committed to responsible and ethical sourcing and takes this issue very seriously.”

“You have the international market that has these perfect standards,” explains Joanne Lebert, the executive director at IMPACT, a nongovernmental organization focused on improving natural resource governance in areas where security and human rights are at risk.

“They want perfect environmental conditions. They want all the development factors taken in, like gender equality and anti-corruption and this and that. They want the perfect package, but that’s not the situation on the ground,” Lebert said.

The situation on the ground

Artisanal miners in the South Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo mining cassiterite, the primary ore of tin.

GRIFF TAPPER/AFP via Getty Images

Only about 2% of the world’s tin, tungsten and gold comes from the DRC and surrounding countries, so mining these minerals doesn’t usually help fund armed conflict. But 67% of the world’s tantalum comes from the DRC and Rwanda. And the eastern DRC, where these minerals are found, is mired in violence stemming from historical tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.

After the Second Congo War ended in 2003, a transitional government was unable to contain armed groups who perpetrated violence against civilians, thus giving rise to self-defense militias. Today, rampant poverty, corruption, and institutional chaos continues to drive many Congolese to join one of the over 120 armed groups operating in the eastern DRC.

“Before the artisanal miners can access the coltan mines or other places, they have to pay taxes to the armed group,” Ojewale said. Coltan is the metallic ore from which tantalum is extracted.

Beyond taxation, these groups fully take over some mines, either extracting the ore themselves or using forced labor, purchasing arms with the proceeds. And conditions in artisanal mines can be quite dangerous.

“I think in the past four or five years, every year we’ve had people being buried underground,” said Nicolas Kyalangalilwa, a pastor and civil society leader in Bukavu, a city in the eastern DRC. “So, it is a very dangerous job, both from a security side, from a financial stability side, from a health and safety side.”

Such conditions also apply to other minerals found in the DRC, like cobalt, which is surging in demand due to its importance in batteries for electric vehicles. Around 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the relatively safer southern DRC. It may not be benefiting armed groups, but there are still concerns over working conditions and the use of child labor.

Efforts to trace minerals

With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, U.S. companies are required to disclose their use of conflict minerals.

“If you’re a big company, you’re a name brand, you’re consumer-facing, you can easily spend a million on this,” explained Chris Bayer, principal investigator at the nonprofit International Development. “And the big brands that we all know, they would spend a lot more.”

This has given rise to a web of organizations working to trace and verify supply chains. For example, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Intel, Samsung and hundreds of other companies are members of the Responsible Minerals Initiative, which maintains a list of smelters and refiners that have undergone an independent audit to ensure that they’re sourcing responsibly. In its most recent conflict minerals report, Apple said it has removed 163 smelters and refiners from its supply chain since 2009, including 12 in 2021.

Then there are the organizations actually doing on-the-ground tracing and due diligence at mine sites. The International Tin Supply Chain Initiative is the main player in the DRC and surrounding region, working in over 2,000 mines. The organization trains government agents to tag and seal bags that come from registered mines. But no system is foolproof, and if agents are corrupt, they might accept minerals from outside, unregistered mines and tag them anyway.

“You also have the issue where the agents were actually selling the tag to other mines,” says Guillaume de Brier, a natural resources researcher at the International Peace Information Service. “At the end, even when the system was working, those minerals were melted with the minerals from other mines.”

Ultimately, it’s just really hard to stop bad actors in the system. But experts say the answer is not boycotting minerals from the DRC or from artisanal and small-scale mines overall.

A woman in the South Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo breaks stones that contain cassiterite, the primary ore of tin.

Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

“If we recognize, for example, that artisanal mining is the most important rural, non-farming activity, employing tens of millions throughout Africa, generally, 30 to 40 percent of which are women, making sure that we’re decriminalizing that and recognizing that as legitimate is the first step to supporting them,” Lebert of IMPACT said.

Lasting change will likely only come when the DRC stabilizes.

“Ultimately the conditions that we see on the ground or the human rights issues that are of concern to us all are very much linked to governance, poverty,” Lebert said. “We need to get at these more systemic issues if we want to see lasting changes in supply chains, not just de-risking in the short or medium term for a company’s benefit.”

Watch the video to learn more about why it’s so difficult to rid the supply chain of conflict minerals.

Technology

Meet Partiful, the Gen Z party-planning staple that’s taking on Apple

Published

19 hours ago

April 19, 2025

admin

Meet Partiful, the Gen Z party-planning staple that's taking on Apple

Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao

Courtesy: Partiful

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”

The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.

Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.

The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.

Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.

Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.

Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.

What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.

“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.

For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.

It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.

Sample invitations from the Partiful app

Source: Partiful

Bringing people together in real life

Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.

Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”

“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”

Meta declined to comment.

Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.

“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.

She and Tao took the leap.

With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.

Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaking Gen Z’s language

What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.

Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.

Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.

Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.

“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”

For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.

As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.

Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Partiful is free, at least for now.

Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.

That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.

For now, Partiful remains confident.

“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.

WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs

Apple in 'eye of storm' as Trump tariffs on China remain high, causing possible iPhone price hikes

Technology

How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Published

2 days ago

April 18, 2025

admin

How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company’s most ambitious bets yet. They’re attempting to develop the world’s most advanced quantum computers.

“In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth,” said Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI.

Google has been viewed by many as late to the generative AI boom, because OpenAI broke into the mainstream first with ChatGPT in late 2022.

Late last year, Google made clear that it wouldn’t be caught on the backfoot again. The company unveiled a breakthrough quantum computing chip called Willow, which it says can solve a benchmark problem unimaginably faster than what’s possible with a classical computer, and demonstrated that adding more quantum bits to the chip reduced errors exponentially.

“That’s a milestone for the field,” said John Preskill, director of the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. “We’ve been wanting to see that for quite a while.”

Willow may now give Google a chance to take the lead in the next technological era. It also could be a way to turn research into a commercial opportunity, especially as AI hits a data wall. Leading AI models are running out of high-quality data to train on after already scraping much of the data on the internet.

“One of the potential applications that you can think of for a quantum computer is generating new and novel data,” said Kelly.

He uses the example of AlphaFold, an AI model developed by Google DeepMind that helps scientists study protein structures. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“[AlphaFold] trains on data that’s informed by quantum mechanics, but that’s actually not that common,” said Kelly. “So a thing that a quantum computer could do is generate data that AI could then be trained on in order to give it a little more information about how quantum mechanics works.”

Kelly has said that he believes Google is only about five years away from a breakout, practical application that can only be solved on a quantum computer. But for Google to win the next big platform shift, it would have to turn a breakthrough into a business.

Watch the video to learn more.

Technology

Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

Published

2 days ago

April 18, 2025

admin

Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.

Isabel Infantes | Reuters

Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.

Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.

Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.

Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.

“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”

The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.

However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”

It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.

WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games