Techmeme
September 16, 2021, 11:35 AM

Top News

Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
Initial benchmarks show iPhone 13's A15 chip offers a roughly 15% improvement for GPU performance and 10%-18% improvement for CPU performance over A14  —  Earlier today, we reported on a Geekbench Metal result for the iPhone 13 Pro showing an approximately 55% graphics performance improvement compared to the iPhone 12 Pro.
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:
David McLaughlin / Bloomberg:
FTC says Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft made 819 unreported acquisition deals of $1M+, including for patents and acquihires, from 2010 to 2019  —  - Report shows hundreds of deals by tech giants went unchecked  — Antitrust enforcers must close loopholes, FTC Chair Khan says
Katie Roof / Bloomberg:
Discord raises $500M led by Dragoneer, Fidelity, and others, source says at a ~$15B post-money valuation, more than double its valuation from last year  —  - Discord raised $500 million, led by Dragoneer Investment Group  — Startup turned down $12 billion offer from Microsoft
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg:
Brooklyn-based Genius, a music-annotating startup that provides context for lyrics, sells its assets for $80M, less than the total funding it raised  —  The sale price is less than the total funding raised.  —  Music-annotating startup Genius Media Group Inc., a site that drew attention …
Ash Parrish / The Verge:
After being sued by the state of California, Activision Blizzard is sued by a group representing employees, alleging it tried to prevent them from organizing  —  Organized by CODE-CWA, the suit claims Activision Blizzard engaged in coercive and intimidating behavior
Hugh Son / CNBC:
Goldman Sachs is acquiring buy now, pay later fintech GreenSky for about $2.24B, in an all-stock deal  —  - Goldman Sachs is acquiring fintech lender GreenSky for $2.24 billion as the investment bank pushes further into consumer finance.  — The all-stock deal for GreenSky …
Wenxin Fan / Wall Street Journal:
China's biggest movie star, Zhao Wei, who had 86M Weibo followers, was erased from China's internet on August 26, amid a clampdown on its entertainment industry  —  Zhao Wei was the Reese Witherspoon of China, then she was censored by the Communist Party amid a clampdown of the country's entertainment industry
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
French startup Skello, which develops a SaaS tool that lets companies manage their work schedules, raises €40M led by Partech  —  French startup Skello has raised a $47.3 million funding round (€40 million).  The company has been working on a software-as-a-service tool that lets you manage the work schedule of your company.
More: Tech.eu and EU-Startups
Andrew Fedorov / Input:
A look at CouchSurfing.com, which is now headed by Palantir alum Patrick Dugan, as it abandoned its always-free ethos at the start of the pandemic  —  Back in spring 2011 — the end of black truffle season, before the climbing roses bloomed — the Couchsurfers gathered at the Palazzo Massarucci …
Patrick Howell O'Neill / MIT Technology Review:
Sources: US firm Accuvant, now part of Optiv, sold iPhone hacking tool Karma to the UAE for $1.3M in 2016; the tool has been used against hundreds of targets  —  An American cybersecurity company was behind a 2016 iPhone hack sold to a group of mercenaries and used by the United Arab Emirates.
Christine Hall / TechCrunch:
CodeSignal, which automates technical assessments to reduce recruitment bias, raises $50M Series C led by Index Ventures, bringing its total raised to $87.5M  —  In less than a year after raising $25 million in Series B funding, technical assessment company CodeSignal announced a $50 million …
Politico:
Joe Biden announces a new Indo-Pacific security partnership with Australia and the UK to share tech in areas like AI, cybersecurity, and quantum technologies  —  President Joe Biden just announced a new working group with Britain and Australia to share advanced technologies …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Generate Sample Data the Way You Want It Using AI, for Free  —  Finding good sample data is harder than it should be.If you've ever tried to test a dashboard, build a demo, or train a team on an analytics tool, you know the drill.
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Access:
Sam Altman on OpenAI's next model and the AI backlash
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Brian Singerman from GPx
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Training Data:
Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine's Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:35 AM ET, September 16, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Catherine Thorbecke / ABC News:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters:
Ryan Weeks / The Block:
Tom Warren / The Verge: