UK-based Token.io, an open banking-based account-to-account payments service, raises $40M co-led by Cota Capital and TempoCap (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: UK-based Token.io, an open banking-based account-to-account payments service, raises $40M co-led by Cota Capital and TempoCap  —  The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents …

Arm reports 2021 revenue rose 35% YoY to $2.7B, driven by licensing, up 61% YoY to $1.13B, and royalties, up 20% YoY to $1.54B; 29.2B ARM chips shipped in 2021 (Jane Lanhee Lee/Reuters)

Jane Lanhee Lee / Reuters: Arm reports 2021 revenue rose 35% YoY to $2.7B, driven by licensing, up 61% YoY to $1.13B, and royalties, up 20% YoY to $1.54B; 29.2B ARM chips shipped in 2021  —  SoftBank Group Corp’s(9984.T) chip technology firm Arm Ltd on Thursday reported record revenue for 2021, and Chief Executive …

Swiggy plans to acquire Dineout, a dining out table reservations and events service backed by Times Internet, a source says for $200M in an all-equity deal (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Swiggy plans to acquire Dineout, a dining out table reservations and events service backed by Times Internet, a source says for $200M in an all-equity deal  —  Swiggy has amassed millions of users, helping them order food and grocery online in India.  The seven-year-old firm is now looking to reach those […]

The MIT Press and Harvard Law School Library launch new series offering high-quality, affordable law textbooks

Together, the MIT Press and Harvard Law School Library announce the launch of the “Open Casebook” series. Leveraging free and open texts created and updated by distinguished legal scholars, the series offers high-quality yet affordable printed textbooks for use in law teaching across the country, tied to online access to the works and legal opinions […]

Using excess heat to improve electrolyzers and fuel cells

Reducing the use of fossil fuels will have unintended consequences for the power-generation industry and beyond. For example, many industrial chemical processes use fossil-fuel byproducts as precursors to things like asphalt, glycerine, and other important chemicals. One solution to reduce the impact of the loss of fossil fuels on industrial chemical processes is to store […]

Qualified, a Salesforce-based service that helps companies convert website visitors into customers, raises a $95M Series C led by Sapphire (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat: Qualified, a Salesforce-based service that helps companies convert website visitors into customers, raises a $95M Series C led by Sapphire  —  Qualified, a Salesforce-native platform that helps companies convert website visitors into paying customers, has raised $95 million in a series C round of funding.

Emails reveal how some police officers have become superfans of autonomous drone company Skydio and regularly help to sell or promote its products to colleagues (Matthew Gault/VICE)

Matthew Gault / VICE: Emails reveal how some police officers have become superfans of autonomous drone company Skydio and regularly help to sell or promote its products to colleagues  —  A drone company called Skydio has managed to get autonomous drones into dozens of police departments by turning cops into their biggest fans.

Analysis: Huawei spent $22.1B, or 22.4% of its revenue, on R&D in 2021, seeking to sidestep US sanctions; Meta invested 20.9% into R&D, far above its US peers (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: Analysis: Huawei spent $22.1B, or 22.4% of its revenue, on R&D in 2021, seeking to sidestep US sanctions; Meta invested 20.9% into R&D, far above its US peers  —  Few companies devote more of their revenue to research than Huawei Technologies Co., for which developing new technologies …

A smarter way to develop new drugs

Pharmaceutical companies are using artificial intelligence to streamline the process of discovering new medicines. Machine-learning models can propose new molecules that have specific properties which could fight certain diseases, doing in minutes what might take humans months to achieve manually. But there’s a major hurdle that holds these systems back: The models often suggest new […]

Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound […]

The Department of Defense hires Craig Martell, Lyft’s head of machine learning, as the Pentagon’s first chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (Billy Mitchell/FedScoop)

Billy Mitchell / FedScoop: The Department of Defense hires Craig Martell, Lyft’s head of machine learning, as the Pentagon’s first chief digital and artificial intelligence officer  —  Craig Martell has left his role as head of machine learning for Silicon Valley rideshare company Lyft to be the Pentagon’s first chief digital …

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Chairman Bret Taylor told employees that the company will keep operating as usual; sources: the deal could take up to six months (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Chairman Bret Taylor told employees that the company will keep operating as usual; sources: the deal could take up to six months  —  Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal and Chairman Bret Taylor told employees on Monday that the social network …

Twitter employees say they heard little from Elon Musk, CEO Parag Agrawal, management, and Charles Schwab about what a sale to the billionaire means for them (Kate Conger/New York Times)

Kate Conger / New York Times: Twitter employees say they heard little from Elon Musk, CEO Parag Agrawal, management, and Charles Schwab about what a sale to the billionaire means for them  —  Workers say they have been left largely in the dark about what a sale to the billionaire will mean for them and […]

Estimating the informativeness of data

Not all data are created equal. But how much information is any piece of data likely to contain? This question is central to medical testing, designing scientific experiments, and even to everyday human learning and thinking. MIT researchers have developed a new way to solve this problem, opening up new applications in medicine, scientific discovery, […]

“Visualizing the Proton” through animation and film

Try to picture a proton — the minute, positively charged particle within an atomic nucleus — and you may imagine a familiar, textbook diagram: a bundle of billiard balls representing quarks and gluons. From the solid sphere model first proposed by John Dalton in 1803 to the quantum model put forward by Erwin Schrödinger in […]

Are supply chains stuck in detention?

Research from David Correll, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and co-director at the MIT FreightLab, has been getting some attention in Washington recently. Correll’s research focuses on data-driven approaches to understanding U.S. truck drivers’ utilization, retention, and quality of life. His work on how trucker “detention time” — the unpaid […]

Sources: Netflix staff morale is sagging amid its cratering stock price, subscriber losses, and an engineering restructuring to create levels, such as “junior” (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Sources: Netflix staff morale is sagging amid its cratering stock price, subscriber losses, and an engineering restructuring to create levels, such as “junior”  —  As Netflix shares plunge to their lowest point in five years, the company risks losing its most valuable resource: its star employees.

Sources: Tencent-controlled Chinese video game streaming service Huya, which rivals DouYu, will lay off hundreds of staff; Huya had 2,075 employees in 2020 (Josh Ye/Reuters)

Josh Ye / Reuters: Sources: Tencent-controlled Chinese video game streaming service Huya, which rivals DouYu, will lay off hundreds of staff; Huya had 2,075 employees in 2020  —  Chinese video game streaming site Huya (HUYA.N) has started laying off staff, three sources close to the matter said …

An easier way to teach robots new skills

With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it […]

Oracle patches a critical bug in Java 15 and above, which lets attackers forge TLS certificates and signatures, two-factor authentication messages, and more (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Oracle patches a critical bug in Java 15 and above, which lets attackers forge TLS certificates and signatures, two-factor authentication messages, and more  —  A failure to sanity check signatures for division-by-zero flaws makes forgeries easy.  —  Organizations using newer versions …

Sources: Twitter’s board met Sunday to discuss Elon Musk’s bid, which is being considered more seriously after Musk’s filing detailed $46.5B in financing (New York Times)

New York Times: Sources: Twitter’s board met Sunday to discuss Elon Musk’s bid, which is being considered more seriously after Musk’s filing detailed $46.5B in financing  —  Twitter’s 11-member board met on Sunday morning to discuss Mr. Musk’s offer to buy the company and take it private.  — Give this article- – – Read in […]

Reliance Industries calls off its $3.4B acquisition of core parts of Indian retail chain Future Group, following Amazon’s legal fight against the deal (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Reliance Industries calls off its $3.4B acquisition of core parts of Indian retail chain Future Group, following Amazon’s legal fight against the deal  —  Reliance Industries “cannot implement” its $3.4 billion deal to acquire core parts of retail chain Future Group after the latter’s secured …

Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter appears to be about preserving Twitter as a means for himself and others to continue influencing vast audiences without interference (Kyle Chayka/New Yorker)

Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter appears to be about preserving Twitter as a means for himself and others to continue influencing vast audiences without interference  —  The world’s richest man seems intent on preserving Twitter as a means for himself and others to continue influencing vast audiences without interference.