Category: Uncategorized

Juro Osawa / The Information: Sources: e-commerce spending on ByteDance’s Douyin in China reached $208B in 2022, up 76% YoY; shoppers in Southeast Asia spent $4.4B on TikTok in 2022  —  TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is making inroads in e-commerce.  Consumers in China last year spent 1.41 trillion yuan …

VentureBeat: Dallas-based Worlds, whose “digital twins” of industrial companies’ floor operations help boost productivity, raised a $21.2M Series A1 led by Moneta Ventures  —  Worlds Enterprises, a company that builds digital twins of floor operations for industrial companies to let them become …

Shortly after being awarded tenure in July, Cem Tasan was asked to give a talk about what it took to earn the appointment.    Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), would speak directly to his peers, his students, and others in his […]

A principled, authentic approach to pulling strings.

Learning has always come naturally to Brandon Ogbunu. When he was a child growing up in Manhattan, his mother, a teacher, instilled in him an appreciation for school, the sciences, and curiosity. At work, she taught mathematics, social studies, and special education. At home, she taught her son to embrace art, literature, and sports in […]

Extra ventilation often means using more energy — but it doesn’t have to.

Sponsor content from Deloitte.

The country’s surge in cases is a human tragedy but isn’t showing signs of changing the Covid picture in the West—where the virus is already running free.

Novelist Ning Ken’s history of Beijing’s Zhongguancun district shows how two generations of professors and tech entrepreneurs helped make the country more open.

Had a long day and still want to stream something? These tips from sleep experts will help you stay awake till the credits roll.

Financial Times: Sources: UK PM Rishi Sunak met Arm CEO Rene Haas and Masayoshi Son to revive efforts to secure a London listing for Cambridge-based Arm’s IPO alongside New York  —  Officials and London Stock Exchange face uphill battle to secure UK role for chip designer’s IPO

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: London-based insurance broker Superscript, which offers a “self-serve” platform for SMEs, sole traders, and others, raised a £45M Series B led by BHL UK  —  Superscript, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million …

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: SteamDB: Valve’s Steam platform crossed 10M concurrent in-game players for the first time on January 7 and recently exceeded 33M concurrent online users  —  Valve’s game distribution platform Steam had a record-breaking weekend, exceeding 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time …

Wi-Fi devices acknowledge each other, even when not connected to the same network, and hackers can exploit this to drain their batteries

A bit of turbulence in the job market can affect people in different ways. Consider the Egyptian scholar Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). In the early 1400s, after about a quarter-century of frustration in seeking short-lived administrative jobs and wealthy patrons in Cairo, al-Maqrizi became fed up for good. He retreated to his […]

The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same. New research shows how and why they are different.

Need to grab a clip from Twitter or remix that YouTube meme compilation? These tools can help.

Microsoft’s subscription service includes captivating titles like Potion Craft, Metal: Hellsinger, and Pentiment.

Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology: The economic downturn is hurting the creator economy, one of the most-hyped sectors of the past decade, in particular since its middle class hasn’t yet emerged  —  We’re seeing the truth about one of the most-hyped sectors of the past decade.  —  After years of hype, the Creator Economy is […]

Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal: The Cyberspace Administration of China will start regulating “deep synthesis” tech like AI-powered image, audio and text-generation software starting next week  —  Beijing is among the first governments to regulate hyper-realistic, AI-generated media

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: Meta says it is weeks away from announcing its decision on reinstating Trump, who continues to harass 2020 election workers by name, as recently as last week  —  The platform cut Trump’s indefinite suspension to two years at the urging of its Oversight Board.  But that doesn’t mean he’s coming […]

Oliver Whang / New York Times: A look at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, which is exploring questions around artificial consciousness and the possibility of self-aware robots  —  The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot.  But it comes with a slurry of difficult questions.

Beyond just getting us from A to B, 2023’s vehicles want their drivers to be happier, healthier, and safer.

WIRED photographer Roger Kisby captures the glory, madness, and optimism of the consumer tech extravaganza.

Depending on who you are, this can be much more complicated than “whenever I feel like it.”

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Seattle Public Schools sue TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and their parent companies for allegedly causing a youth mental health crisis  —  A new lawsuit filed by Seattle Public Schools against TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and their parent companies alleges …

Allison Johnson / The Verge: After years of hype, 5G took a back seat at CES 2023, as the industry focuses on laying the groundwork for self-driving cars, AR, and expanding IoT in cities  —  When it wasn’t being overshadowed by covid resurgences, CES, for the past few years, has partially functioned as a big […]

When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans. But what exactly are these deep learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in clinical images, for example, actually […]

Aside from color-morphing concepts and Tron-inspired bikes, this year’s show was about how car and tech companies will work closer together in the future.

Bloomberg: Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of California’s pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a $90K-$900K pay range  —  A Tesla Inc. software engineer could earn anywhere from $83,200 to $417,600.  Netflix Inc. has one job posting advertising …

Callum Cyrus / Tech.eu: Marseille-based Volta Medical, whose AI assistant helps surgeons in cardiac ablation procedures, raised a €36M Series B, bringing its total funding to over €70M  —  Marseille-based Volta Medical is preparing for additional clinical trials, after successfully winning CE and FDA-approval …

Plus: Apple reportedly cancels the next iPhone SE, Google gets HD maps into cars, and all the CES news you could ever want.

Plus: Russian spies uncovered in Europe, face recognition leads to another wrongful arrest, a new porn ID law, and more.

Kylie Robison / Fortune: Sources: some former US Twitter employees finally received their severance agreements, offering only one month of base pay as severance and no prorated bonuses  —  Following further delays this week, some former Twitter employees finally received their official severance agreements on Saturday …

The technology could draw more players into the pricey hobby by allowing people to design their own pieces and even develop their own games.

Darío Gil / Fortune: IBM SVP and Director of Research says the company will no longer pursue numeric patent leadership and will instead focus on open innovation and collaboration  —  For 29 years straight, IBM has led the United States in minting patents, at its peak filing over 10,000 US patent applications …

Andy Greenberg / Wired: Mandiant: Russian cyberespionage group Turla piggybacked on other hackers’ decade-old malware that spread via USB drives to stealthily access victim networks  —  The infamous, FSB-connected Turla group took over other hackers’ servers, exploiting their USB drive malware for targeted espionage.

From gaming headsets to electric in-line skates, here’s everything announced at the tech trade show that you can actually order today.

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: IBM’s US patent count fell 44% YoY in 2022 to 4,743, behind Samsung’s 8,513, losing its top spot after decades as the company refocuses on its core businesses  —  International Business Machines Corp. dropped from the top spot for US patents in 2022, the first time in decades Big Blue …

The exposure of hundreds of millions of email addresses puts pseudonymous users of the social network at risk.

Try as they might, crypto companies pressured by the trading platform’s collapse are failing to bail themselves out.

Staff laid off by Elon Musk were assured they would be compensated following mass cuts. As the deadline passes, the silence has been deafening.

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Amazon S3 will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side using AES-256; AWS has had server-side encryption for over a decade  —  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side, using AES-256 by default.

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: Irish DPC’s €390M Meta fine, issued at the behest of the European Data Protection Board, fits with the EU’s plan to crack down on Big Tech in the next two years  —  Meta Platforms Inc. is used to batting away the occasional fine from European regulators as a cost of doing […]

Wired: Some Twitter staff in the US and other countries laid off by Elon Musk in November say they have not received information about the severance they were promised  —  Staff laid off by Elon Musk were assured they would be compensated following mass cuts.  As the deadline passes, the silence has been deafening.

There is a limit to how big existing wind turbine designs can get, which limits the power they can produce, but a new approach inspired by palm trees could help them scale up

The stock of language data that artificial intelligences like ChatGPT train on could run out by 2026, because AIs consume it faster than we produce it

Sponsor content from Hisense.

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient […]

How to recognize the influence you already have — and wield it more effectively.