Category: Uncategorized

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Germany-based Staffbase, a communications service for internal teams to send messages and measure their impact, raises a $115M Series E at a $1.1B valuation  —  The Covid-19 pandemic, with its by-product of social distancing to help reduce the spread of infection, led to many organizations working …

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat: ChannelEngine, which helps brands manage their products and inventory across multiple third-party marketplaces, raises a $50M Series B led by Atomico  —  ChannelEngine, a platform that helps brands manage their products and inventory across multiple third-party marketplaces, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding.

Michael Kan / PCMag: Microsoft brings its DirectStorage API from Xbox to Windows to improve game load times and graphics details, after promising it in September 2020  —  “Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage,” Microsoft says.  “This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times …

Jon Fingas / Engadget: Israel’s National Cyber Directorate says the country has recovered from a large-scale DDoS attack on Monday, which took down several government websites  —  Israel appears to be recovering from a large-scale cyberattack.  According to Haaretz and Kan’s Amichai Stein, attackers took …

Bloomberg: Gauntlet, which offers a financial-risk modeling platform for crypto lending, raises a $23.8M Series B at a $1B valuation led by Ribbit Capital  —  Gauntlet, a financial-risk modeling platform for crypto lending, raised a new round of funding that pushed its valuation to $1 billion.

The war in Ukraine is the subject of much online disinformation and propaganda but fact-checking organisations are tracking down how social media posts spread and debunking them

Jing Yang / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Tencent is facing a record fine after Chinese regulators found WeChat Pay flouted anti-money-laundering rules and had other regulatory lapses  —  China’s central bank found regulatory breaches and lapses during a recent inspection of the ubiquitous payments network

Gary Marcus / Nautilus: A look at the limitations of deep learning, and how “neurosymbolic” approaches to AI could offer a way forward for developing artificial general intelligence  —  Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning …

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: Foxconn is halting operations at two of its Shenzhen sites, one of which produces iPhones, after the government imposed a lockdown in the city till March 20  —  Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn is halting operations at its Shenzhen sites, one of which produces iPhones, in response to a government-imposed lockdown on […]

Reuters: Clearview AI’s CEO says that Ukraine has started using the company’s service for free to identify Russian troops, combat misinformation, and identify the dead  —  Ukraine’s defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology, the company’s chief executive told Reuters …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Thoughts on newly announced iPhone SE, iPad Air, and Mac Studio, and an in-depth look at the M2 chip, Mac Pro, iMac Pro, and Apple’s future display plans  —  Here are my thoughts on Apple’s new iPhone SE, iPad Air and Mac Studio, as well as an in-depth look at the […]

Lara Putnam / Wired: Research: 23 of the top 30 search results for the numbers 11, 12, 13 on Facebook were groups targeting children of those ages, including with sexual references  —  The platform can be quicker at recommending groups built around child predation than it is to remove them.

DNA becomes disordered inside cancer cells, and playing GENIGMA on your smartphone will help researchers discover the dangerous forms DNA can fold into, says Layal Liverpool

Rest of World: Behind the rise of Kuaishou’s short-form video app Kwai in Brazil, where it has amassed 45M+ monthly active users by appealing to people with blue collar jobs  —  Kuaishou is chasing novela creators and working-class users in Latin America to keep up with the competition.

Benjamin Goggin / NBC News: A look at growing online meth communities on Zoom, Reddit, and others as they attract little attention from content moderators, worsening the addiction problem  —  In December, Paul went home for the holidays.  Like many people, he hadn’t seen his family for almost a year.

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Stilt, a provider of financial services to immigrants, raises a $14M Series A and $100M in debt and launches an API to help fintechs offer credit building tools  —  Stilt, which started its life as a provider of financial services for immigrants, has raised $14 million in Series A funding […]

Casey Newton / Platformer: Interview with CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks’ responsibility to open up, including by doing and sharing their own research  —  CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks’ responsibility to open up  —  Brandon Silverman knows more about how stories spread on Facebook than almost anyone.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Twitter updated its iOS app to let users swipe between the algorithmic Home and reverse chronological Latest timelines but users can’t make Latest the default  —  You won’t be able to default to the chronological timeline  —  Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly …

Dust drastically lowers the output of solar panels, but applying an electric field to the panels can make dust particles repel each other and disperse

Bojan Pancevski / Wall Street Journal: People are sending news about Ukraine to Russians using a website that randomly selects from a list of ~20M phone numbers and ~140M email addresses in Russia  —  Website developed by hackers is new initiative in West’s battle to counter Russia’s propaganda campaign

Financial Times: Sources: Chinese brands have cut their smartphone shipments to Russia in half since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of the ruble’s collapse and sanctions  —  Currency and sanctions stop China’s companies from taking advantage of exodus of western brands

Scott Stedman / Forensic News: An investigation into OnlyFans owner Leo Radvinsky, who has attracted law enforcement scrutiny amid reports of wage theft and potential underage sexual activity  —  The first digital trace of Leo Radvinsky dates back to 1997 when Radvinsky, then just 15-years-old, acted as a webmaster …

Reuters: Sources: India’s market regulator has tightened scrutiny of IPO-bound firms after Paytm’s IPO debacle, worrying startups which fear delays in listing plans  —  India has tightened scrutiny of IPO-bound firms by questioning how key internal business metrics are used to arrive at valuations …

Victoria Song / The Verge: Mark Bernstein, a prominent Russian Wikipedia editor, is detained in Belarus for “distributing fake anti-Russian information” after being doxxed on Telegram  —  The editor was doxxed on Telegram prior to the arrest  —  The Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus …

Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge: Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, acquires NFT collections CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs, along with 400+ CryptoPunks and 1.7K+ Meebits  —  Yuga Labs now controls three of the most valuable NFT collections on the market  —  Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club […]

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Uber will add a temporary $.45-$.55 surcharge per trip for US and Canada riders, and $.35-$.45 for Uber Eats due to higher gas prices; fees will go to drivers  —  – Uber is adding a surcharge on fares and deliveries in the U.S. and Canada in response to surging gas prices, […]

Locating meteorites on Earth’s surface is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but using AI to analyse images captured by drones pinpointed a tiny space rock in just four days

Training artificial intelligences to identify faces or digitise text involves thousands or millions of iterations of a two-stage process known as back-propagation, but a new approach could save time, energy and computing power

Is Russia holding off on cyberwarfare while it has troops in Ukraine, or are cyberattacks failing to land thanks to vast international efforts to protect the country?

Financial Times: EU and the UK open an antitrust probe into Google and Meta’s Jedi Blue deal on online ads; EU is also probing whether Google acted without Meta’s knowledge  —  Europe’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager tells FT that ‘Jedi Blue’ deal represents ‘giant problem’ in industry

Annie Njanja / TechCrunch: India-based 100ms, which lets developers add video conferencing to their apps, raises a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $24.5M  —  100ms, the live video conferencing infrastructure startup based in India, has raised $20 million in Series A funding to power the next generation of live video apps …

Jessica Lucas / Input: A look at Loli Police Department, a police roleplay group in VRChat allowing nearly 11,000 of its members move through the ranks based on their activity level  —  Early last year, Jura was at the spa, chilling in a communal bath and having a casual chat with friends, when the Loli […]

Ilena Peng / Bloomberg: Twitter removes tweets by Russia’s embassy in London that claimed images from the Mariupol hospital bombing in Ukraine were fake, citing hateful conduct policy  —  Twitter Inc. has removed false tweets from the Russian embassy account in London that claimed images from the bombing of a children’s …

Zhiyuan Sun / Cointelegraph: NonFungible: Axie Infinity had $3.5B in NFT transactions in 2021, almost two thirds of the blockchain gaming industry; NBA Top Shot had $827M and Loot $242M  —  In second and third place were sports highlights marketplace NBA Top Shot with $827 million and community gaming platform Loot with $242 million, respectively.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Oracle reports Q3 revenue of $10.51B, up 4% YoY, cloud services and license support revenue of $7.6B, up 5% YoY, but misses with EPS of $1.13 vs est. of $1.18  —  – Oracle met expectations for revenue but fell short on earnings for the fiscal third quarter.

Harriet Agnew / Financial Times: London-based Lendable, which connects global institutional investors with borrowers, raises £210M led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan at a £3.5B valuation  —  Ontario Teachers’ investment in fintech group part of broader shift into private assets

Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: A look at the Islamic world’s debate over cryptocurrencies, seen as gambling by some, as millions of people in Indonesia and the Middle East invest in crypto  —  Mu’aawiyah Tucker is a religious man.  Because the Koran forbids the practice of earning interest on loans, Tucker has for years […]

Sami Fathi / MacRumors: Display analyst Ross Young expects Apple will release a 27-inch mini-LED display in June; Kuo says Apple “may not launch” mini-LED products in 2022 due to cost  —  Apple plans to launch a “Pro” version of its new Studio Display in June of this year that measures 27-inches …

Two teams of engineers have taken separate approaches to enable drones to carry out research or rescue operations with a reduced risk of crashing

Stephen Totilo / Axios: Eight more current and former PlayStation employees add their accounts of sexist treatment to a class action lawsuit filed against the company in November 2021  —  Eight more women, former and current employees at Sony PlayStation, have added their accounts of sexist treatment …

Bloomberg: SoftBank’s Z Holdings plans to launch an NFT marketplace in 180 countries and double its fintech unit PayPay’s users to 90M, tapping a five-year ~$4.3B budget  —  SoftBank Group Corp.’s Z Holdings Corp. unit is betting on non-fungible tokens and its PayPay service to drive growth …

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Twitter tests labeling images with alt text with an “alt” badge, which will show an image’s description by clicking on it, rolling out globally in April  —  A long-awaited accessibility upgrade  —  Twitter has announced that it’s testing new accessibility features …

Ryan Smith / AnandTech: An in-depth look at Apple’s M1 Ultra: combines two M1 Max chips using UltraFusion, 800GB/second memory bandwidth, 64 GPU cores to exceed the RTX 3090, and more  —  As part of Apple’s spring “Peek Performance” product event this morning, Apple unveiled the fourth and final member of the M1 family of […]

Shashank Pathak / Entrackr: Bengaluru-based Jiffy.ai, a B2B automation service, raises a $53M Series B led by Eight Roads Ventures, after raising an $18M Series A in June 2020  —  B2B automation platform Jiffy.ai has raised $53 million in its Series B round led by Eight Roads Ventures.

Andrew Duehren / Wall Street Journal: Biden will sign an EO instructing federal agencies to study the risks posted by digital assets, such as undermining sanctions, and investigate a digital dollar  —  Federal agencies to explore financial and environmental concerns and inform regulatory action

Rainbow, an algorithm that was supposed to protect data from hacking by quantum computers, has been defeated using a standard laptop

Mathew Di Salvo / Decrypt: SEC charges two siblings with defrauding investors out of $124M+ through their Ormeus Coin offering, alleging they acted as “modern-day snake-oil salesmen”  —  The “ground-breaking digital money system” Ormeus Coin was actually a scam, the SEC alleges.  —  In brief

Chris J. Preimesberger / VentureBeat: Employment data startup Argyle launches a SaaS tool that lets companies access user-permissioned employment records and raises a $55M Series B led by SignalFire  —  Having your updated and accurate personal and financial information under your control and ready to use at a moment’s notice …

Karen Weise / New York Times: AWS has stopped letting new customers in Russia and Belarus open accounts; AWS says its biggest customers in Russia are multinational firms with local dev teams  —  The policy change for Amazon Web Services started over the weekend but was not publicly announced until Tuesday.

Mandiant: Google plans to acquire cybersecurity company Mandiant for around $5.4B, or $23 per share, with the deal closing later in 2022; Mandiant will join Google Cloud  —  Acquisition to bring Google speed and scale to Mandiant’s unparalleled intelligence and expertise – at a time when security has never been more important