Stripe says it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, as it navigates the country's evolving regulatory landscape — Stripe, the global fintech giant, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India …
Sources: TikTok pauses plans to launch its e-commerce business in major European markets to focus on growth in the US where it's fighting a divest-or-ban law — - ByteDance halts plan to roll out shopping from Spain to Italy — Company aims to entrench itself in its most lucrative market
Sony says PS5 generated $106B in revenue in less than four years vs. PS4's $107B over seven years, PS5 in-game purchases spending up 176% over PS4, and more — Sony has published its annual business briefing. Here are the key takeaways about the performance of the PlayStation business and updates to the company's gaming strategy.
After a Cruise car hit and dragged a pedestrian, executives say they're in no rush to get back on the road, as Cruise slows its breakneck development to a crawl — An incident that seriously injured a pedestrian in San Francisco led Cruise to take all of its cars off the road.
Romanian startup FintechOS, a low-code platform to help banks and insurance companies compete with neobanks, raised a $60M Series B+, after raising $60M in 2021 — Over the years, fintech startups, particularly neobanks, have thrown a cat among the pigeons in banking and finance by building whole new banking software stacks.
Didi reports Q1 revenue up 15% YoY to ~$6.8B and a ~$190M net loss, in part due to higher sales and marketing costs, as well as higher driver fees — - Sales at Chinese ride-hailing firm jumped 15% on demand surge — Didi seeks to rebuild operations prior to next IPO push
EU Agency for Cybersecurity head Juhan Lepassaar says disruptive digital attacks, many tied to Russia-backed groups, have doubled in the EU in recent months — Disruptive digital attacks, many of which have been traced to Russia-backed groups, have doubled in the European Union in recent months …
Chinese government data: foreign-branded smartphone shipments, most of which are iPhones, rose 52% YoY to ~3.5M in April, after stabilizing in March 2024 — - Official data for April showed Chinese mobile demand returning — The iPhone's bad start to the year prompted retail price cuts
OpenAI begins training its new flagship AI model, a process that could take nine months or more, and creates a Safety and Security Committee to explore risks — The advanced A.I. system would succeed GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT. The company has also created a new safety committee to address A.I.'s risks.
How pro-Russian groups exploit Telegram, which has 41M MAUs in the EU, below the DSA's 45M threshold, to spread disinformation on Ukraine, immigration, and more — Pro-Russian disinformation groups are exploiting the “very, very lax” rules on Telegram and there's little EU authorities can do about it.
Defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which collapsed in 2014, moves 140K bitcoin, worth ~$9B, to an unknown address, likely part of a plan to repay creditors — Nearly 107,000 bitcoin have been moved since early Asian hours on Tuesday, with bitcoin shedding 1.2% on expectations of selling pressure.
A look at the growing importance of ads for video streaming services, as Antenna says that 56% of new subscribers chose the cheaper ad-supported tier in Q1 2024 — Ads are here, there — almost everywhere — on streaming services now. — Not long ago, streaming TV came with a promise …
Dating apps are trying to woo Gen Z women by boosting moderation tools and more; Tinder has consistently lost MAUs since 2021 and paid subs fell under 10M in Q1 — Gen Z is a priority for Tinder and Bumble but threats and unsolicited material from potential suitors often turn users off
Elon Musk says all of the $6B in xAI's Series B is new money rather than shares “given” to investors in Musk's takeover of Twitter — - That said, there's plenty of overlap in the investor list, and it's unclear if the original Twitter/X backers also received additional equity in xAI …
Data.ai: of the top 20 education apps in the US App Store, five are AI agents that help with school assignments, the two most popular of which are Chinese-owned — Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone …
A look at the UK's $5.5B gaming industry, as PE firm EQT makes a ~$2.8B purchase offer for Keyword Studios, and other developers shore up their balance sheets — Developers shore up their balance sheets after a difficult few years — Pass the controller.
A closer look at Apple's AI strategy: Project Greymatter, local and cloud LLM data processing, Siri, approach to the chatbot partnership with OpenAI, and more — Though Apple's first set of modern AI features won't be as impressive as rival offerings, the company is betting that its massive customer base can give it an edge.
How Shein and Temu, which are spending billions on digital ads and offering steep discounts or free products, have become big threats to Amazon in the US — In the fall of 2020, Amazon looked unstoppable. The pandemic lockdowns had supercharged its e-commerce business …
Four of the top seven best-reviewed games on Metacritic in 2024, not counting remakes, are indies, with Animal Well and Balatro in the top three — Halfway through 2024, four of the top seven best-reviewed games, not counting remakes, are indies — Hi everyone.
Congress has quietly diverted $3.5B from the US CHIPS Act to Secure Enclave, a classified project proposed by Intel to build chips for defense needs — The Commerce Department was expecting to hand out new federal money to high-tech research. Congress sent it to a secretive natsec program instead.
How SLMs like Microsoft's Phi-3, which can run locally on phones or PCs without big compromises, open up new AI use cases by being more responsive and private — Research at Microsoft shows it's possible to make AI models small enough to run on phones or laptops without major compromises to their smarts.
A test of 11 WhatsApp-based fact-checking “tip lines” during elections in India finds long delays and inconsistencies in responses — Rest of World tested 11 leading WhatsApp-based chatbots that promise to help Indian voters identify misinformation.
An analysis of ChatGPT's answers to 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow: 52% of answers contain misinformation, 77% are more verbose than human answers — Not So Smart — In recent years, computer programmers have flocked to chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT to help them code …
Cohere for AI, the nonprofit research arm of AI startup Cohere, announces the open weights release of Aya 23, a family of multilingual language models — Today, Cohere for AI (C4AI), the non-profit research arm of Canadian enterprise AI startup Cohere, announced the open weights release of Aya 23 …
Google announces plans to invest nearly $350M in Flipkart, as part of a nearly $1B funding round, about $600M of which came from Walmart in 2023 — Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Indian e-commerce startup.
A profile of Lin Rui-siang, a 23-year-old Taiwanese accused by the US DOJ of running a $100M+ dark-web drug market who had an alter ego as a crypto crime expert — The strange journey of Lin Rui-siang, the 23-year-old accused of running the Incognito black market, extorting his own site's users …
Bloomberg : Google says it plans to counter Japan's FTC over claims that it hobbles rivals in search; a source says Japan's FTC s...
