Category: Uncategorized

Meta and Microsoft’s new virtual reality projects have been met with suspicion by many, but history has shown that people are often right to be wary of technological change, says James Ball

Joe Williams / Bloomberg: Okta’s CMO leaves the company, replaced by its CDO, following numerous executive departures, including its CFO, president of tech, and SVP of product management  —  Okta Inc. Chief Marketing Officer Kendall Collins has left the company after less than a year in the role …

Bloomberg: India’s 30% tax on crypto trading profits, effectively legitimizing the industry, has caused usage of Binance-owned WazirX, CoinSwitch, and others to surge  —  India’s decision to impose a 30% tax on profits from cryptocurrency trading is turning out to be a boon for the country’s digital-asset exchanges.

Chainalysis: Analysis identifies 4,068 “criminal whales” holding over $25B worth of stolen cryptocurrency, following a major jump in illicit balances in 2021  —  This blog is a preview of our 2022 Crypto Crime Report.  Sign up here to download your copy now!

Drew Harwell / Washington Post: Clearview AI tells investors that it is on track to have 100B facial photos in its database within a year, growing from 3B images to 10B+ since early 2020  —  The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in […]

Ashley Carman / The Verge: Spotify is acquiring Chartable and Podsights, two podcast analytics companies that let podcasters and networks include tags in shows to track listeners  —  Chartable and Podsights are being bought  —  Spotify is making more podcast acquisitions.  The company announced today it’s acquiring …

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Denver-based Nomad, a startup that offers financial services for small-time landlords, renters, and potential home buyers, raises a $20M Series A  —  Nomad, a marketplace that aims to provide small-time rental property owners with “guaranteed rent,” has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley […]

In the quest to make artificial intelligence that can reason and apply knowledge flexibly, many researchers are focused on fresh insights from neuroscience. Should they be looking to psychology too?

Carbon removal technologies have long been seen as an important solution to climate change, but it is only now that these ideas are becoming a reality

For the first time, artificial intelligence has been used to control the super-hot plasma inside a fusion reactor, offering a new way to increase stability and efficiency

Farah Elbahrawy / Bloomberg: Digital security company Elm, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, rises 30% in its Riyadh trading debut to $44.30 after raising $820M in its IPO  —  Elm Co., a digital security firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, surged 30% in its trading debut.

Oliver Smith / AltFi: UK-based mobile-only bank Atom Bank raises £75M+ at a £435M valuation, after raising £40M in April 2021, as the startup plans its IPO  —  Round sees the bank valued at £435m ahead of listing.  —  After shifting to a 4-day working week last month, lender Atom Bank has raised …

Cissy Zhou / Financial Times: Chinese online streaming service Bilibili plans to hire 1,000 censors after the death of a 25-year-old worker; Bilibili had 2,413 censors at the end of 2020  —  Content monitoring team to be increased 40% amid debate on overwork  —  Chinese online video streaming service Bilibili plans …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Twitter expands a beta test of Safety Mode, which temporarily blocks accounts using harmful language in replies, to 50% of users in the US and 5 other markets  —  Twitter is broadening access to a feature called Safety Mode, designed to give users a set of tools to defend themselves …

Andy Bounds / Financial Times: The European Commission approves plans for a €6B satellite internet system to rival SpaceX and others, despite previous objections from its internal watchdog  —  Brussels seeks standalone coverage despite internal watchdog previously raising doubts over proposals

Kyle Alspach / VentureBeat: Akamai says it will acquire cloud hosting company Linode, which positions itself as an AWS alternative for SMBs and independent developers, for $900M  —  Akamai Technologies announced today it has reached an agreement to acquire infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform provider Linode …

A robot with appendages that mimic the swimming legs of krill could one day be used to study these key marine food sources or explore hard-to-reach places

Between November 2020 and February 2021, Facebook introduced policies to cut down on misinformation related to covid-19 vaccines, but they only worked for about six months

Tattoos can hinder face recognition software, but deep learning algorithms can be trained to remove them, which reduces the rate of errors

Bloomberg: After India banned Sea’s lucrative Free Fire game, the Singapore-based company lost $16B+ in market value, its largest-ever daily drop  —  Sea Ltd. lost more than $16 billion of value in its biggest daily market drop after India abruptly banned its most popular mobile gaming title.

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times: LinkedIn profiles show TikTok has hired over 190 European content moderators from Accenture and others since January 2021, as its European business explodes  —  Short-form video app hires hundreds to help curb spread of harmful content  —  TikTok has poached hundreds of content moderators …

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: A key EU lawmaker steering negotiations over the Digital Services Act says she is “optimistic we can make a deal before the end of June”  —  European Union lawmakers and countries could reach a deal by the end of June on proposed tech rules forcing online platforms to better police […]

Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google: A video and images show the ability to interact with Android apps on a Pixel running Android 13 from a Windows 11 PC and a Chromebook via a special web app  —  Google has been preparing a way to stream apps and notifications from your Pixel phone to your Chromebook or […]

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Intel is close to a deal to buy Israeli chip company Tower Semiconductor for nearly $6B  —  U.S. semiconductor giant continues spending to expand its manufacturing operations  —  Intel Corp. is close to a deal to buy Israeli chip company Tower Semiconductor Ltd. for nearly $6 billion …

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Samsung has adopted Google Messages as its default messaging app in the US, starting with the Galaxy S22 series  —  Messaging on Android has been a mess for years, but the tide is finally changing.  With Google Messages bringing enhanced RCS messaging to virtually any Android user that wants it, there’s […]

A compact weapon that generates a beam of microwaves can knock out electronic devices without causing harm to people

The National Football League (NFL) has developed an artificial intelligence tool to try and reduce injuries in American football games.

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: South Africa-based Stitch, which enables businesses to build, optimize, and scale financial products using its APIs, raises a $21M Series A  —  Open finance continues to be a significant theme in the world of fintech as businesses tap APIs to access customers’ financial accounts and provide …

Mike Oitzman / The Robot Report: NYC-based Viam Robotics, still in stealth mode, raises a $30M Series A led by Tiger Global for its “standardized building blocks” approach to robotics  —  Viam Robotics announced the close of a $30 million Series A round led by Tiger Global, with participation …

Charles Mandel / BetaKit: Canada-based 7shifts, which provides employee scheduling and workforce management software to restaurants, raises an $80M Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2  —  Startup says it added more than 10,000 restaurants to its platform last year.  —  On the heels of what it called a significant year of growth …

Tom Mitchelhill / Cointelegraph: Ethereum L2 scaling project Optimism fixes bug that left it open to unlimited ETH token creation in its accounts; $2M+ bounty given to Jay Freeman of Cydia fame  —  Ethereum scaling startup Optimism disclosed a “critical bug” fix in the project’s Geth fork that would have allowed malicious hackers to create […]

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico: European Commission says it is planning to propose a bill for a digital euro in early 2023; the ECB expects to start working on a prototype at the end of 2023  —  The European Commission announced Wednesday it’s planning to propose a bill for a digital euro early next year.

The National Football League (NFL) has developed an artificial intelligence tool to try and reduce injuries in American football games.

Tom Hegel / SentinelOne: Research: ModifiedElephant APT has targeted activists, journalists, lawyers, and others in India to spy on or plant digital evidence since at least 2012  —  Executive Summary  — Our research attributes a decade of activity to a threat actor we call ModifiedElephant.

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: How warehouse automation startups like Accelerate360 and Attabotics, grocery services like Misfits, and delivery firms like Veho are transforming supply chains  —  Startups are developing better ways to move products around, from snapping up goods stranded by logistics snafus to automating warehouse work

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Wallaroo, a NY-based startup that helps enterprises deploy, run, and observe ML models in production at scale, raises a $25M Series A led by Microsoft’s M12  —  Enterprises are increasingly looking to AI for opportunities to boost revenue as their operations move online.

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: Paris-based Silvr, which offers revenue-based financing to e-commerce and SaaS companies in Europe, raises an €18M Series A and €112M in debt  —  French startup Silvr has raised a $20.6 million (€18 million) Series A funding round and has opened a $128 million (€112 million) debt line for its activities.

Mia Sato / The Verge: Bored Ape Yacht Club members, who have full IP rights for the ape character they own, are pursuing licensing deals to put ape characters on cannabis packaging  —  When Richard Lee first brought his business proposal to Backpack Boyz, he could sense skepticism from the California-based cannabis company.

Kim Lyons / The Verge: Twitch has updated its policy to ban usernames that include “references to sexual acts, arousal, fluids, or genitalia” and references to hard drugs from March 1  —  Cannabis and alcohol are still allowed  —  Video streaming website Twitch has updated its policy to ban usernames …

Samuel Osborne / Sky News: UK’s largest insurer Aviva says VR headset-related damage claims increased by 31% in 2021, with an average claim of ~£650 and TVs being the most damaged item  —  Aviva has said home contents claims involving the gaming headsets rose by 31% last year and have increased by 68% in five […]

A fish built from human heart cells that swims like a zebrafish could teach us how the human heart functions.

More than a hundred years after Ernest Shackleton’s famous Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition, a new exhibition showcases some of the most iconic and rare images ever taken of the most southerly continent

The nuclear fusion experiment at the Joint European Torus in Oxford on 21 December saw a ball of super-hot plasma sustained for 5 seconds

Arjun Kharpal / CNBC: China’s SMIC reports record $5.4B revenue in 2021, up 39% YoY, and $1.7B profit, up 138% YoY, as it looks to add more chip production capacity amid US sanctions  —  – China’s largest chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation reported record revenue and a surge in profit last year.

Gian M. Volpicelli / Wired UK: A profile of OpenSea, whose Web3 credentials have been called into question by crypto hardliners, as it tries to deal with security incidents and copycat NFTs  —  Security issues and endless copycat listings are rife, but the platform’s attempt to stop them is angering everyone.  —  What is a […]

Dennis Schaal / Skift: Booking.com will cut and outsource 2,700 call center jobs globally in the next few months, after Booking Holdings laid of ~25% of its workforce in 2020 and 2021  —  Skift Take  —  We could hear more about Booking Holdings’ rationale for eliminating a chunk of Booking.com’s customer service workforce …

Ben Dummett / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Apollo Global is nearing a deal to acquire the point-of-sale terminal business of Paris-based payments company Worldline for close to $2.3B  —  Pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments over cash  —  Apollo Global Management Inc. is nearing a deal to acquire the point …

Tim Marchman / VICE: A profile of the couple accused of conspiring to launder around $5B in stolen bitcoin, pieced together from sources, filings, and a voluminous online record  —  Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein wanted to be famous.  Now, after being accused of laundering billions of dollars of crypto, they are.

Grid News: Review of 80K+ donations to the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” reveal a Bangladeshi digital marketing firm helmed two of the biggest Facebook groups promoting events  —  As American politicians call for stateside convoys, a Grid investigation finds signs that foreign actors, QAnon and hate pervade the movement’s support.

Insights from a synthetic fish built from plastic and gelatine and powered by human cardiac cells might one day be useful for treating heart disease