Category: Uncategorized

Spencer Soper / Bloomberg: Shopify reports Q1 revenue up 23% YoY to $1.9B, GMV up 23% YoY to $60.9B, and expects gross margins to drop by ~50 basis points YoY in Q2; SHOP plummets 18%+  —  The company posted a loss of $273 million, after a profit of $68 million a year earlier.  The loss […]

Manya Saini / Reuters: Data collaboration software maker Atlan raised a $105M Series C led by Singapore’s GIC and Meritech at a $750M valuation, taking its total funding to $206M  —  Atlan said on Wednesday it had raised $105 million in a funding round led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC …

Bloomberg: Chinese government data: foreign-branded smartphones shipments, most of which are iPhones, grew 12% YoY to 3.75M in March, reversing a 37% drop in early 2024  —  – The performance marks an improvement from the start of 2024  — The bounce emerged after Apple and its resellers cut prices

Tesla’s gigafactory in Germany has temporarily paused production as protests ramp up.

Apple’s latest stylus will only work with its newest iPads. The long-running second-gen Apple Pencil—which the company still sells—will not.

The ACP provided a broadband subsidy for millions of Americans. Now Congress has a plan to reinstate it.

Steven Church / Bloomberg: FTX says it will have as much as $16.3B to distribute once it finishes selling all of its assets; it owes customers and other non-governmental creditors ~$11B  —  – Crypto customers to get interest on what FTX owes them  — Bankrupt firm updates plan to divide cash among creditors

Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times: The US revokes some licenses that allow companies to ship chips and other goods to Huawei; sources say the decision affects Intel and Qualcomm  —  Move marks latest effort by Biden administration to target the country’s tech sector  —  The Biden administration has revoked export licences …

Mike Murphy / IBM Research: IBM open sources its Granite code models for code generative tasks, trained on 116 programming languages, with models ranging in size from 3B to 34B parameters  —  Release  —  IBM is releasing a family of Granite code models to the open-source community.  The aim is to make coding as easy […]

Software that has been blocked from connecting to the internet should be secure from hacking attempts, but now researchers have found a way to sneak data out by varying the speed of the computer’s processor

“AI Comes Out of the Closet” is a large learning model (LLM)-based online system that leverages artificial intelligence-generated dialog and virtual characters to create complex social interaction simulations. These simulations allow users to experiment with and refine their approach to LGBTQIA+ advocacy in a safe and controlled environment. The research is both personal and political to lead […]

Since 2014, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has advanced interdisciplinary research aimed at solving the world’s most pressing water and food security challenges to meet human needs. In 2017, J-WAFS established the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Water Solutions Fellowship and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship. These fellowships provide support to outstanding […]

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville’s formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the […]

How chef Ferran Adrià and his restaurant team balance innovation with business objectives.

Despite dramatic progress in LGBTQ+ rights over the last 20 years, many of these new-won freedoms are now at risk.

Advice backed by three decades of research into thousands of team conflicts around the world.

Titles like AI Dungeon are already using generative AI to generate in-game content. Nobody knows who owns it.

From Rye Lane to the Flamin’ Hot, these are the movies you need to watch on the streaming service right now.

Kris Holt / Engadget: Twitter claims advanced notice about rate limiting would have allowed bad actors to evade detection and says rate limiting had a “minimal” effect on advertising  —  The company claims bad actors could otherwise have changed their strategies.  —  Twitter has been even more of a mess …

Murray Stassen / Music Business Worldwide: The National Music Publishers Association: in February 2023, Spotify had 44.4M US subscribers, Apple Music had 32.6M, Amazon Music had 29.3M, YouTube had 8.5M  —  MBW’s Stat Of The Week is a series in which we highlight a data point that deserves the attention of the global music industry.

Ever wish you could smash a tablet and smart speaker together? These devices offer the best of both.

Wall Street Journal: A look at Spill, an invite-only Twitter alternative designed as a safe destination for LGBTQ and Black people that added 100K+ users over the past three days  —  Designed by former Twitter employees, the app has attracted users including Questlove and garnered interest from Lizzo

Revisiting a conversation with Brandeis’ Andy Molinsky on advancing your career.

How should the consumer goods company upscale its global workforce for the future?

Four ways to work with your boredom — not against it.

Wilfa’s Uniform coffee grinder excels at prepping beans for drip, pour-over, AeroPress, Chemex, and French press. It works for espresso too if you’re not afraid of math.

These bendable lights are super easy to set up and customize, but they aren’t great for gamers.

Berlin-based Open Funk is tackling throwaway culture with a blender that’s as easy to fix as to replace.

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times: Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone says the company is profitable as a private firm and plans a future IPO; Lanzone joined after Yahoo’s September 2021 spinout from Verizon  —  Yahoo, one of the internet’s oldest and best-known brands that had once been a dotcom stock market darling, is planning to return […]

Hyunjoo Jin / Reuters: Samsung Display sues BOE in Texas, accusing the Chinese rival of infringing five of its patents for mobile OLED displays; Samsung dominates the OLED market  —  South Korea’s Samsung Display has filed a lawsuit against BOE Technology (000725.SZ), accusing the Chinese rival of infringing five …

An artificial intelligence targeting system is better than humans at identifying valid targets, claim its makers, though the full results are classified

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Marques Brownlee details the Nothing Phone (2) in a video: slightly bigger than the Phone (1), tweaked LEDs on the back, a curved glass rear design, and more  —  Carl Pei’s Nothing is just a week or two away from the full launch, and after showing off the camera earlier today, […]

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Instagram’s Twitter competitor Threads is expected to launch on iOS on July 6, 2023 according to a pre-order listing in the App Store  —  Instagram’s rumored Twitter competitor just dropped on the iOS App Store in the US.  The app will be called Threads, and according to App Store data, is […]

The iconic brand’s first foray into electric vehicles is impressive, but its traditional approach left some tech opportunities on the table.

@twittersupport: Twitter says in 30 days users must be Verified to access TweetDeck, as it updates TweetDeck with support for full composer functionality, Spaces, and more  —  We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ by selecting “Try the new […]

Marc Schneider / Billboard: Tidal to increase prices of its base HiFi tier by $1 to $11/month and family tier by $2 to $17/month in the US starting August 1; HiFi Plus pricing is unchanged  —  The trend of music streamers increasing their rates continues.  Next up: Spotify?  —  Following similar moves by Apple …

When photosynthetic cells absorb light from the sun, packets of energy called photons leap between a series of light-harvesting proteins until they reach the photosynthetic reaction center. There, cells convert the energy into electrons, which eventually power the production of sugar molecules. This transfer of energy through the light-harvesting complex occurs with extremely high efficiency: […]

A plastic, wedge-shaped device could medical particle accelerators 100 times more efficient at generating the protons that can be used for cancer treatment

Strategies to balance the power dynamic.

Maybe that conversation can wait? What to focus on—and say—when it can’t.

Sorry LG. With gorgeous quantum dots and perfect black levels, this pedestal-mounted flagship is among the best TVs of 2023.

New York Times: A look at the cottage industry of Russian tech contractors, many owned by oligarch-linked Citadel Group, building digital surveillance tools for use by the FSB  —  Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine.

AI can help you search smarter.

The mosquito-borne disease was eliminated here long ago. Now “revenge travel,” global migration, poor public funding—and maybe climate change—could help it come back.

Wall Street Journal: How some crypto miners want to repurpose their rigs to train AI models, which isn’t easy or cheap but may be more affordable than AWS and cloud alternatives  —  Demand for high-end chips allows cryptocurrency companies to repurpose idle equipment  —  The boom in demand for high-end chips powering …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: TweetDeck users report major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load, after Elon Musk’s new read-limits; home timelines still load  —  Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping.

Stuart A. Thompson / New York Times: A look at uncensored and loosely moderated AI chatbots like WizardLM-Uncensored and Open Assistant setting off a polarizing debate about free-speech and risks  —  A new generation of chatbots doesn’t have many of the guardrails put in place by companies like Google and OpenAI, presenting new possibilities — […]

Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac: Report: Apple is working on new external display for Macs that can double as a smart home display in low-power mode, to release next year “at the earliest”  —  In the latest Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman writes that he understands Apple is working on a new Mac external display option […]

Bernhard Warner / New York Times: How researchers at Amazon and other companies are making AI-powered devices and bots more conversational by tackling the voice disentanglement issue  —  For Alexa to speak like a Dubliner, Amazon researchers had to crack a problem that’s vexed data scientists for years: voice disentanglement.

There’s a surprisingly straightforward answer to how many numbers are needed to fill an infinite grid so that identical numbers never get too close together.