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Techmeme Latest Headlines

Updated: 48 mins ago

IDC expects global smartphone shipments to rise 6.2% YoY to 1.24B units in 2024, with Android shipments growing 7.6% YoY and iPhone shipments growing 0.4% YoY (IDC)

Singapore, which has clear AV guidelines, is deploying self-driving buses and more as a way to overcome labor shortages and use its scarce land more efficiently (Sandy Ong/Rest of World)

Game console makers rethink selling more powerful machines, as performance improvements become less dramatic and consumers can't tell between 4K and 8K graphics (Bloomberg)

Study: about 85% of US unicorn startups that have gone public were unprofitable in 2023, despite most having been founded more than fifteen years earlier (Jeffrey Funk/American Affairs Journal)

A look at the evolution of China's semiconductor industry and Huawei under US export controls, as GPUs become the new focal point of US-China tech competition (Paul Triolo/American Affairs Journal)

Roblox is offering 25% more Robux for users buying on the web and via gift cards than those making an IAP via Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Huawei's HarmonyOS NEXT in Mate 70 series of smartphones is the company's first fully self-developed OS that reportedly no longer uses open-source Android code (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Sources: Elon Musk has given investors, who backed his $44B Twitter acquisition, 25% of the shares in xAI, which is set to close a $5B round at a $50B valuation (Financial Times)

Sources: OpenAI is letting current and former staff sell ~$1.5B worth of restricted stock in a new tender offer to SoftBank in a deal spurred by Masayoshi Son (CNBC)

Bluesky says it is up to outside orgs to respect user consent, after a Hugging Face employee published a dataset of 1M posts from Bluesky's API for ML research (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

An investigation suggests the third suspect behind the hacks of Snowflake clients may be a US Army soldier who is or was recently stationed in South Korea (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

Wherobots, which offers a cloud-based platform to process and analyze geospatial data from satellites and other sources, raised a $21.5M Series A led by Felicis (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

TikTok plans to block users under 18 years of age from using beauty filters and says it is tightening its systems to block users under 13 from the platform (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

OpenAI suspends access to Sora in response to a group of artists leaking access to the tool in protest of the company's treatment of creative professionals (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

Samsung names Young Hyun Jun as its co-CEO as well as head of its memory chip business and appoints Jinman Han as the company president and foundry unit head (Reuters)

Evolv reaches an agreement to resolve an FTC inquiry alleging the company made false claims about its AI-powered security system's ability to screen for weapons (Stephen Nakrosis/Wall Street Journal)

US appeals court finds the OFAC exceeded its authority in sanctioning Tornado Cash's immutable smart contracts, as they can't be owned and so are not "property" (Felix Ng/Cointelegraph)

Luma Partners: in Q3, M&A volume in ad tech rose 118% YoY and 26% QoQ and has continued to heat up in Q4 with Samba TV-Semasio, Zeta-LiveIntent, and other deals (Axios)

South Korea says it will bolster its domestic chipmakers next year with $10.2B in support including loans, citing potential economic uncertainty under Trump (Sam Kim/Bloomberg)

An analysis finds over 54% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated; LinkedIn says it doesn't track how many posts are created by AI (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

The FCC approves a license for SpaceX and T-Mobile to use Starlink to offer supplemental coverage from space in a bid to extend internet access to remote areas (David Shepardson/Reuters)

A group published a project on Hugging Face that seemingly granted brief access to OpenAI's Sora, protesting what it calls duplicity and "art washing" by OpenAI (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

HP reports Q4 revenue up 1.7% YoY to $14.1B, Personal Systems revenue up 2% to $9.59B vs. $9.74B est., forecasts Q1 profit below est.; HPQ drops 7%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

CrowdStrike reports Q3 revenue up 29% YoY to $1.01B, vs. $982.8M est., a $16.8M loss, compared to a $26.7M profit a year earlier, and raises its FY 2025 outlook (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal)

Kraken says it is shutting down its NFT marketplace almost two years after it was launched (Teresa Xie/Bloomberg)

Dell Q3: revenue up 10% YoY to $24.4B, vs. $24.67B est., Infrastructure Solutions Group up 34% driven by AI sales, net income up 12%; DELL drops 11% after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

X files an objection to including X accounts belonging or related to Infowars in the outlet's bankruptcy auction, arguing it has ownership of all X accounts (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

A lawsuit between two Amazon influencers over allegations of copyright infringement shows the challenges of defining originality and ownership in content (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Uber launches a data labeling service called Scaled Solutions, accepting gig worker signups from India, the US, Canada, Poland, and Nicaragua (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Meta says Threads has seen 35M new users sign up for the platform since November 1 and is now going on three months of more than one million signups per day (Sara Fischer/Axios)

/dev/agents, which plans to build a cloud-based OS for AI agents that can work across phones, laptops, and cars, raised $56M, a source says at a $500M valuation (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Interpol arrested 1,006 suspects in 19 African countries from September 2 to October 31 to clamp down on cybercrime that left 35,000 victims with $193M losses (Mark Banchereau/Associated Press)

OpenAI, Meta, and Orange plan to train AI models on African languages, starting with Wolof and Pulaar, addressing a shortage for Africa's thousands of dialects (Bloomberg)

Bluesky says it is working to comply with EU rules and is consulting with its lawyers, after the bloc accused the social network of flouting its regulations (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

An interview with Margrethe Vestager, the EU's tech antitrust enforcer since 2014, on her "partly successful" tenure, US collaboration, Trump, the DSA, and more (Adam Satariano/New York Times)

Cradle, which uses AI to help design proteins and says its SaaS model has proven popular, raised a $73M Series B led by IVP, after a $24M Series A in 2023 (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)

Google proposes Search tweaks in Europe to comply with the DMA, including removing the map showing hotel locations and results in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Q&A with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on running the company since 2019, competing with social media, Squarespace, Wix, and more, AI, the Airo platform, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

The US awards Intel up to $7.865B under the CHIPS Act to help build or expand plants in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon, including $1B+ later in 2024 (Thomas Gryta/Wall Street Journal)

Huawei unveils the $760+ Mate 70 series, powered by its HarmonyOS Next, calling the flagship device the "smartest" Mate phone, as it faces US chip curbs (New York Times)

Drake launches legal action against UMG and Spotify for allegedly using bots, payola, and more to inflate Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, a track attacking Drake (Bill Donahue/Billboard)

Sources: Xiaomi prepares its own mobile chip for its smartphones, to reduce reliance on Qualcomm and MediaTek, with mass production expected to begin in 2025 (Bloomberg)

Sources: Apple held talks with local tech firms to help power Apple Intelligence in China; a CAC official says approval will be difficult without local partners (Financial Times)

A government source says Japan's FTC raided Amazon Japan on November 26 suspecting it's inappropriately urging its sellers to lower their prices on its platform (Reuters)

Sources: Qualcomm's interest in an Intel acquisition has cooled; CEO Cristiano Amon says "right now, at this time, we have not identified any large acquisition" (Bloomberg)

A look at Bluesky's moderation efforts amid a growth spurt; Bluesky plans to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100 (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Telegram's H1 2024 unaudited financial docs: $525M in revenue, up 190% YoY, a $335M post-tax profit, and digital assets worth $1.3B, up from $400M at 2023's end (Financial Times)

Brazil's antitrust regulator says Apple must allow app developers to link to external payment methods and to offer other in-app payment processing options (Reuters)

A ransomware attack on Blue Yonder, a major supply chain software provider, is disrupting operations at Starbucks, the UK's Sainsbury's, and other retailers (Wall Street Journal)

N-able, which sells software for managed service providers and spun off from SolarWinds in 2021, acquires DC-based cybersecurity company Adlumin in a $266M deal (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)

Zoom reports Q3 revenue up 4% YoY to $1.18B, vs. $1.16B est., net income of $207.1M, up from $141.2M, and changes its corporate name to Zoom Communications Inc. (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Tron founder Justin Sun invests $30M in Trump's World Liberty Financial, making him the largest investor in the DeFi project (Teresa Xie/Bloomberg)

A US judge sets an April 14 trial date for an FTC lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleging that Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp violated antitrust laws (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

The US DOJ and Google made their closing arguments in the ad-market antitrust case before Judge Leonie Brinkema, who expressed some skepticism toward both sides (Washington Post)

Elon Musk appears to confirm that posts containing links in their main text are deprioritized on X, saying it is to stop "lazy linking" (David Gilmour/Mediaite)

Threads begins testing an option to set For You, Following, or a custom feed as the default feed, another improvement seemingly sparked by Bluesky competition (Chris Welch/The Verge)

Anthropic announces the Model Context Protocol, an open source standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Austin-based anti-ransomware startup Halcyon raised $100M at a $1B valuation led by Evolution Equity Partners, bringing its total funding to date to $190M (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)

Instagram adds the ability for users to share their locations with friends via DMs for up to one hour, in select countries (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Sources: the prototypes of the thin iPhone are between 5 and 6 millimeters thick, and may be too thin for a physical SIM, which could dampen China sales (The Information)

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W review: the new $7 microcontroller is low cost, faster, and adds more RAM and Wi-Fi connectivity, but still uses micro USB (Les Pounder/Tom's Hardware)

Tel Aviv-based Appcharge, which helps publishers build websites to sell gaming currencies and other virtual goods, raised a $26M Series A at a $100M valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Nvidia unveils Fugatto, an AI model for generating music and audio that can also modify voices, trained on open-source data, and weighs whether to release it (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

The EU says Bluesky breaches its rules for not disclosing key details about itself, and has asked 27 governments to see "if they can find any trace of Bluesky" (Financial Times)

Klarna reports ~$1.85B in Q1 to Q3 2024 revenue, up 23% YoY, pretax loss down 99% YoY to ~$180K, and Q3 net income up 57% YoY to ~$19.7M, as its US IPO nears (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)

PlayAI, which uses AI to clone voices for $49 per month and recently rolled out AI agents, raised a $20M seed co-led by 500 Startups and Kindred Ventures (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Italian PE firm Bending Spoons plans to take cloud video platform Brightcove private in a $233M deal; Brightcove, founded in 2004, makes monetization tools (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

MicroStrategy bought 55,580 bitcoin for ~$5.4B at an average price of $97,862 between November 18 and November 24, taking its holdings to 386,700 bitcoin (James Hunt/The Block)

The EU says Corning offered commitments in a bid to settle an antitrust probe over alleged exclusive Gorilla Glass deals, including waiving exclusive clauses (Peter Chapman/Bloomberg)

Insurance broker Howden: cyberattacks have cost UK businesses ~44B in the past five years and 52% of private sector companies have reported at least one attack (Carolyn Cohn/Reuters)

Airbnb plans to let tenants in nearly 1,500 flats owned by Greystar in London to sublet homes on a part-time basis, expanding on a 2022 Greystar partnership (Eri Sugiura/Financial Times)

US coding boot camp graduates are facing a tough job market due to AI coding tools and mass layoffs; CompTIA: developer job listings are down 56% since 2019 (Sarah Kessler/New York Times)

Sources: Sony is in the early stages of developing a portable console to play PS5 games, building on the PlayStation Portal, although its launch is years away (Bloomberg)

A skeptical look at the new AI scaling "laws", including post-train duration and "inference time compute", and why they may fail to predict AI model performance (Gary Marcus/Marcus on AI)

A look at the rise of super clusters that use ~100K of Nvidia's GPUs for training giant AI models and the new engineering challenges arising from such clusters (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)

A bitcoin strategic reserve is a resilience strategy for the "hodlers", not the US state, as a bet on bitcoin is bullish on permanent institutional collapse (Brendan Greeley/Financial Times)

Sources: Intel, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, will see its funding drop to less than $8B from the $8.5B that was announced earlier in 2024 (New York Times)

A look at the shortcomings of Google's Tensor SoC for Pixel devices, with four generations failing to impress in key performance and power efficiency metrics (Robert Triggs/Android Authority)

Sources: Marc Andreessen, Travis Kalanick, and others are involved in Department of Government Efficiency; Andreessen is acting as a networker for recruitment (Washington Post)

Shares of Japan's Fujikura, which specializes in fiber optic cables for data centers, are up 400%+ in 2024 due to the AI boom, leading the Nikkei 225 index (Aya Wagatsuma/Bloomberg)

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