Salesforce says online Black Friday sales hit $74.4B globally, up 5% YoY, and $17.5B in the US, up 7% YoY; Adobe says US online sales hit $10.8B, up 10.2% YoY — The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang.
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus says there was no legal or regulatory angle for the government to kill its Libra project and “it was 100% a political kill” — How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan's pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a
Google, which joined the Open Cloud Coalition, denies its offer of €100M+ in incentives to CISPE was linked to CISPE's antitrust complaint against Microsoft — El Reg has seen the presentation to CISPE members which sources say was intended to keep the lawsuit over licensing alive
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia says generative AI tools have helped it lower frauds by 30% and reduce call center customer wait times by 40% in 2024 — - Customer scam losses at Commonwealth Bank cut in half — CEO Matt Comyn says many more AI use cases in development
Japan allocates another $9.9B to boost its chip, quantum computing, and AI endeavors, with an undisclosed amount going to chip startup Rapidus — - Ishiba promised more than ¥10 trillion in outlays on chips, AI — Some of the funds are seen going to foundry startup Rapidus
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reports Q3 revenue up 22.4% YoY to $12.9B, net profit up 3x YoY to $1.78B, and core delivery business up 20.2% YoY to $9.57B — China's largest food delivery firm Meituan (3690.HK) posted a bigger-than-expected 22.4% rise in third-quarter revenue on Friday, defying sluggish Chinese consumption.
Australia's Senate votes to pass a social media ban for children under 16, brushing aside lawmaker concerns on both sides; tech companies could be fined A$50M — - Australia's social media laws to be among strictest in world — Children under age of 16 will be banned from opening accounts
Cloud backup startup Eon raised $70M led by BOND at a $1.4B valuation, taking its total funding to $200M since its January 2024 founding by AWS alumni — - BOND led a $70 million funding round, Eon's third this year — Cloud backup startup was founded by Amazon Web Services alumni
Reddit COO Jen Wong says ~50% of current users are located outside the US, and the company is developing new search tools to simplify navigation on Reddit — Reddit is ramping up efforts to attract more users outside of the U.S., putting countries like India and Brazil in focus as it looks …
Alibaba releases QwQ-32B-Preview under an Apache 2.0 license and claims the “reasoning” AI model beats OpenAI's o1 models on the AIME and MATH tests — A new so-called “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It's one of the few to rival OpenAI's o1 …
Anthropic updates Claude to add custom writing styles tailored to users, aiming to personalize its replies, following similar ChatGPT and Gemini features — Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI assistant that will give users more control over how the chatbot responds to different writing tasks.
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 — Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to grow 6.2% year-over-year in 2024 to 1.24 billion units, according …
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 — The tiny country has embraced autonomous vehicles as a way to overcome labor shortages and use its scarce land more efficiently.
Game console makers rethink selling more powerful machines, as performance improvements become less dramatic and consumers can't tell between 4K and 8K graphics — The human eye can't really tell the difference between 4K and 8K resolution. — Video game console manufacturers …
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 — Google has proposed more changes to its search results in Europe after some smaller rivals complained about lower traffic …
New York Times : Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force...
