Monday, April 24, 2023
Analysts, investors, and founders expect a hard year for tech startups, including more down rounds; PitchBook says 400+ unicorns haven't raised funds since 2021 (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
Analysts, investors, and founders expect a hard year for tech startups, including more down rounds; PitchBook says 400+ unicorns haven't raised funds since 2021 — The startup world has had a tough year — plagued by mass layoffs, plummeting venture capital investment and the chaotic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Super.com, formerly Snapcommerce, raised $60M in equity and $25M via a credit facility to launch a super app for deals, taking its total funding to $200M+ (Christine Hall/TechCrunch)
Super.com, formerly Snapcommerce, raised $60M in equity and $25M via a credit facility to launch a super app for deals, taking its total funding to $200M+ — The current inflation environment has all of us looking for ways to cut costs and save some money.
Google may be working on AI-powered cloud offerings
A look at LAION, a free AI training data set with 5B+ images used in Google's Imagen and Stable Diffusion, created by high school teacher Christoph Schuhmann (Bloomberg)
A look at LAION, a free AI training data set with 5B+ images used in Google's Imagen and Stable Diffusion, created by high school teacher Christoph Schuhmann — In front of a suburban house on the outskirts of the northern Germany city of Hamburg, a single word — “LAION” — is scrawled in pencil across a mailbox.
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Sources: the Biden administration has asked South Korea to encourage Samsung and SK Hynix to hold back from boosting sales to China if Beijing bans Micron chips (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)
Sources: the Biden administration has asked South Korea to encourage Samsung and SK Hynix to hold back from boosting sales to China if Beijing bans Micron chips — White House has tried to enlist Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in its semiconductor battle with Beijing
Q&A with Katherine Forrest, a former federal judge for the SDNY, on copyright and generative AI, the Copyright Office's guidance on AI-generated work, and more (Nabiha Syed/The Markup)
Q&A with Katherine Forrest, a former federal judge for the SDNY, on copyright and generative AI, the Copyright Office's guidance on AI-generated work, and more — A conversation with Katherine Forrest — Subscribe to Hello World … Before they gobbled up headlines everywhere …
Twitter restores gold badges to some news organizations, including the BBC, The New York Times, and Bellingcat; the BBC and Bellingcat say they did not pay (Zoe Kleinman/BBC)
Twitter restores gold badges to some news organizations, including the BBC, The New York Times, and Bellingcat; the BBC and Bellingcat say they did not pay — Some Twitter accounts with more than one million followers have had their blue tick badges re-instated by Twitter without paying to subscribe.
Proliferation of hacker group naming schemes complicates tracking of threat actors, but the fog of war in cybersecurity research makes this issue hard to fix (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
Proliferation of hacker group naming schemes complicates tracking of threat actors, but the fog of war in cybersecurity research makes this issue hard to fix — Pumpkin Sandstorm. Spandex Tempest. Charming Kitten. Is this really how we want to name the hackers wreaking havoc worldwide?
Sources: details on Apple XR headset's external battery pack and charging cable, and a look at its app strategy - throw everything but the kitchen sink at users (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
Sources: details on Apple XR headset's external battery pack and charging cable, and a look at its app strategy - throw everything but the kitchen sink at users — Apple is taking a scattershot approach to the upcoming Reality headset's features, hoping that a wide variety of options will get consumers to try the product.
A California judge rules that the RR/BAYC NFTs, which featured primates in similar poses to the BAYC under the pretense of satire, violated Yuga Labs' copyright (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)
A California judge rules that the RR/BAYC NFTs, which featured primates in similar poses to the BAYC under the pretense of satire, violated Yuga Labs' copyright — Use of BAYC trademarks by Ripps' RR/BAYC was intended to confuse consumers, a U.S. judge in California has ruled
Saturday, April 22, 2023
Report: cheap Chromebooks, due to their short lifespans and lack of repairability, are less sustainable and more expensive for schools than pricier devices (Monica Chin/The Verge)
Report: cheap Chromebooks, due to their short lifespans and lack of repairability, are less sustainable and more expensive for schools than pricier devices — Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops …
Filing: Sundar Pichai received compensation of ~$226M in 2022, including stock awards of ~$218M; Alphabet announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs in January, 2023 (Rishabh Jaiswal/Reuters)
Filing: Sundar Pichai received compensation of ~$226M in 2022, including stock awards of ~$218M; Alphabet announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs in January, 2023 — Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) Chief Executive Sundar Pichai received total compensation of about $226 million in 2022 …
Sources: Joe Biden plans to sign an EO in the coming weeks limiting new investments by US businesses in China, focusing on chips, AI, and quantum computing (Jenny Leonard/Bloomberg)
Sources: Joe Biden plans to sign an EO in the coming weeks limiting new investments by US businesses in China, focusing on chips, AI, and quantum computing — President Joe Biden aims to sign an executive order in the coming weeks that will limit investment in key parts of China's economy …
Sources: UK plans to propose a bill next week enabling CMA's digital markets unit to target Big Tech companies with revenues of £25B+ globally or £1B in the UK (Financial Times)
Sources: UK plans to propose a bill next week enabling CMA's digital markets unit to target Big Tech companies with revenues of £25B+ globally or £1B in the UK — Draft bill expected within days that will put CMA's digital markets unit on a statutory footing
Sources and messages: Binance compliance officer Tigran Gambaryan told executives and Nigerian contacts of a $150M crypto bribe request, prior to his arrest (New York Times)
New York Times : Sources and messages: Binance compliance officer Tigran Gambaryan told executives and Nigerian contacts of a $150M crypt...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Andrew Tarantola / Engadget : An adapted excerpt from the book “Your Computer Is on Fire”, on how voice assistants like Siri and Alexa al...
