Friday, December 26, 2025

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google pledged a combined $67.5B in Indian investments since October, 80% of those in December, as part of an AI spending frenzy in India (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post:
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google pledged a combined $67.5B in Indian investments since October, 80% of those in December, as part of an AI spending frenzy in India  —  Amazon, Microsoft and Google have pledged a combined $67.5 billion in Indian investments since October.  Eighty percent of those commitments came this month.



Chinese government data: shipments of foreign-branded mobile phones, primarily iPhones, rose 128.4% YoY in November 2025 to 6.93M units (Reuters)

Reuters:
Chinese government data: shipments of foreign-branded mobile phones, primarily iPhones, rose 128.4% YoY in November 2025 to 6.93M units  —  Shipments of foreign-branded mobile phones, including Apple's (AAPL.O) iPhones, rose 128.4% in China in November from the same month last year …



A Google support page in Hindi says the company plans to roll out an option to let users change their Gmail addresses while retaining all data and services (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
A Google support page in Hindi says the company plans to roll out an option to let users change their Gmail addresses while retaining all data and services  —  For quite some time now, Google has allowed users to change their account email address if they are using a third-party email address …



Thursday, December 25, 2025

AI sector minted 50+ new billionaires in 2025; Crunchbase: investors poured $200B+ into AI startups in 2025, or about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024 (Alicia Park/Forbes)

Alicia Park / Forbes:
AI sector minted 50+ new billionaires in 2025; Crunchbase: investors poured $200B+ into AI startups in 2025, or about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024  —  Record activity in the AI sector this year has boosted dozens of founders and business executives into the billionaire ranks.



Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin significantly trails Waymo, deploying an estimated 30 cars with safety drivers, vs. Waymo's 200 cars without human monitors (Jack Ewing/New York Times)

Jack Ewing / New York Times:
Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin significantly trails Waymo, deploying an estimated 30 cars with safety drivers, vs. Waymo's 200 cars without human monitors  —  Shares of Tesla have hit new highs on optimism about the company's self-driving taxis.  But experts say Tesla is far behind Waymo, which has a big head start.



A look at the humans employed to rescue robotaxis; Waymo uses the Honk app to pay $20 to $24 to manually close robotaxi doors and $60 to $80 to tow its cars (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)

Lisa Bonos / Washington Post:
A look at the humans employed to rescue robotaxis; Waymo uses the Honk app to pay $20 to $24 to manually close robotaxi doors and $60 to $80 to tow its cars  —  A recent power outage in San Francisco shows how vulnerable self-driving vehicles can be when problems arise.



A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Paresh Dave / Wired:
A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges  —  Apple, Michigan taxpayers, and one of Detroit's wealthiest families spent roughly $30 million training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps.



PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which...