Wednesday, July 24, 2024

LA-based Pearl, an FDA-approved startup that uses AI to assist dentists to make diagnoses, raised a $58M Series B led by Left Lane Capital at a $400M valuation (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)

Katie Roof / Bloomberg:
LA-based Pearl, an FDA-approved startup that uses AI to assist dentists to make diagnoses, raised a $58M Series B led by Left Lane Capital at a $400M valuation  —  - Los Angeles-based startup backed by Craft Ventures, Left Lane  — Pearl is valued at $400 million in fresh financing deal



Ferrari plans to accept crypto payments for its cars at European dealers from the start of August, and internationally by the end of 2024, expanding on the US (Giulio Piovaccari/Reuters)

Giulio Piovaccari / Reuters:
Ferrari plans to accept crypto payments for its cars at European dealers from the start of August, and internationally by the end of 2024, expanding on the US  —  Ferrari (RACE.MI) said on Wednesday it would extend its scheme to accept payments in cryptocurrency for its luxury sports cars …



Kamala Harris took a leading White House role on AI, including meeting executives, and a win could mean a continued relatively smooth runway for AI companies (New York Times)

New York Times:
Kamala Harris took a leading White House role on AI, including meeting executives, and a win could mean a continued relatively smooth runway for AI companies  —  The presumptive Democratic nominee has won concessions from Big Tech leaders on A.I., but she hasn't successfully pushed Congress to regulate.



Google's failed deal with Wiz, and with HubSpot before that, puts Google in an awkward spot to grow Cloud; Wiz staff are likely upset at missing a big payday (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg)

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg:
Google's failed deal with Wiz, and with HubSpot before that, puts Google in an awkward spot to grow Cloud; Wiz staff are likely upset at missing a big payday  —  It's the second time in as many months that the tech giant has lost a deal to boost its lagging cloud business.



Sunday, July 21, 2024

How indie game developer Terrible Posture Games avoided bankruptcy after an ~$800K investment from an unlikely source: Nerd Ninjas, another indie developer (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
How indie game developer Terrible Posture Games avoided bankruptcy after an ~$800K investment from an unlikely source: Nerd Ninjas, another indie developer  —  Terrible Posture Games got funding help from an unlikely source: another indie developer  —  Hi everyone.



Indian crypto exchange WazirX has "temporarily" paused trading activities days after it suspended customer withdrawals after losing ~$230M in a security breach (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Indian crypto exchange WazirX has “temporarily” paused trading activities days after it suspended customer withdrawals after losing ~$230M in a security breach  —  WazirX, one of India's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has suspended all trading activities on its platform days …



Malaysia's Johor state is attracting billions of dollars as tech giants take advantage of cheaper land and more abundant energy to build data centers (Mercedes Ruehl/Financial Times)

Mercedes Ruehl / Financial Times:
Malaysia's Johor state is attracting billions of dollars as tech giants take advantage of cheaper land and more abundant energy to build data centers  —  Companies take advantage of cheaper land and more abundant energy  —  In what were once wild jungle and palm oil plantations in southern Malaysia …



Academics say publisher Taylor & Francis hadn't told them about selling access to authors' research as part of a $10M+ Microsoft AI deal, nor let them opt out (Matilda Battersby/The Bookseller)

Matilda Battersby / The Bookseller:
Academics say publisher Taylor & Francis hadn't told them about selling access to authors' research as part of a $10M+ Microsoft AI deal, nor let them opt out  —  Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge …



Saturday, July 20, 2024

Microsoft estimates that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5M Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines (David Weston/The Official Microsoft Blog)

David Weston / The Official Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft estimates that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5M Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines  —  On July 18, CrowdStrike, an independent cybersecurity company, released a software update that began impacting IT systems globally.  Although this was not a Microsoft incident …



The CrowdStrike debacle may have accidentally provided cybercriminals and countries like China a more detailed road map to disrupt US critical infrastructure (David E. Sanger/New York Times)

David E. Sanger / New York Times:
The CrowdStrike debacle may have accidentally provided cybercriminals and countries like China a more detailed road map to disrupt US critical infrastructure  —  With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge.  The latest chaos wasn't caused by an adversary …



CrowdStrike says a sensor configuration update to Windows systems triggered a logic error that resulted in a system crash and BSOD on impacted systems (CrowdStrike)

CrowdStrike:
CrowdStrike says a sensor configuration update to Windows systems triggered a logic error that resulted in a system crash and BSOD on impacted systems  —  What Happened?  —  On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems.



Trump's comments on Taiwan hollowing out the US chip industry are incorrect, and risks opening up a fissure for China to exploit and push its own tech sector (Tim Culpan/Bloomberg)

Tim Culpan / Bloomberg:
Trump's comments on Taiwan hollowing out the US chip industry are incorrect, and risks opening up a fissure for China to exploit and push its own tech sector  —  Viewing the US-Taiwan relationship as contentious, instead of cooperative, risks opening up a fissure for China to exploit.



A Google threat analyst says the hacker behind the Snowflake breach recently broke into a "handful" of new orgs and is likely a male based in Canada in his 20s (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg : A Google threat analyst says the hacker behind the Snowflake breach recently broke into a “handful” of new orgs and is likely...