Techmeme
October 20, 2021, 9:45 AM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Source: Facebook is planning to change its company name to reflect its focus on the metaverse as soon as next week at Connect, its annual AR/VR conference  —  Mark Zuckerberg wants to be known for building the metaverse  —  Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect …
More: The Guardian, Insider, Reuters, TNW, Protocol, BBC, The Guardian, MacRumors, PCMag, Game Developer, MarketWatch, CNN, The Economic Times, XDA Developers, BetaNews, New York Post, fossbytes.com, Techaeris, Patently Apple, Memeburn, GameSpot, iPhone in Canada Blog, MUO, phonearena.com, Variety, Gamereactor UK, BGR, Android Central, Fast Company, Android Headlines, The Week, SlashGear, International Business Times, Bloomberg, TechCircle, The National, Telegraph, Forbes, Engadget, Neowin, GeekWire, TechSpot, Pocketnow, India Today, Shacknews, News18, Fortune, Wccftech, Washington Times, Sputnik International, 9to5Mac, CNET, cybernews.com, Boing Boing, Digital Trends, cryptonews.com, Daring Fireball, Benzinga, TechCrunch, HYPEBEAST, OneZero, Protocol, Mashable, Raw Story, AppleInsider, UploadVR, Insider, Reuters, TechRadar, and Gizmodo
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge:
Paul Thurrott / Thurrott:
Brave replaces Google with its own privacy-centric Brave Search as the default search engine in its browser  —  As part of its ongoing push to eliminate Google as much as possible from our daily web experiences, Brave is removing Google Search as its default search engine.
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
District of Columbia AG Karl Racine plans to add Mark Zuckerberg to an ongoing privacy lawsuit, which began in 2018 following the Cambridge Analytica scandal  —  The District of Columbia case, which grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, could expose the chief executive to financial and other penalties.
Naman Ramachandran / Variety:
UK's CMA fines Facebook £50.5M for breaching an order imposed during its ongoing Giphy acquisition investigation, saying Facebook refused to report information  —  Social media giant Facebook has been fined £50.5 million ($69.1 million) for breaching an order imposed …
Michael Wursthorn / Wall Street Journal:
ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF gained nearly 5% in its NYSE debut, with ~$981M in trading volume, making it the second most traded ETF debut ever per FactSet  —  ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF advances nearly 5% following its closely watched launch  —  The first bitcoin-focused exchange-traded fund rose …
Nikkei Asia:
Sources: China's Oppo is developing high-end mobile chips, using TSMC's 3nm tech, for its premium handsets due out in 2023 or 2024  —  China's top handset maker looks to use TSMC's cutting-edge 3-nm tech  —  TAIPEI — China's leading smartphone maker Oppo is developing high-end mobile chips …
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Apple botched the notch on the MacBook Pros by leaving out Face ID; the bezels are smaller but not ultrathin like on Dell and HP rivals  —  All the downsides of the notch, without the Face ID benefits  —  The day that many have been dreading has finally arrived.  Apple has added a notch to its new MacBook Pros.
Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC:
Netflix reports Q3 revenue of $7.48B, up 16% YoY, operating income of $1.76B, up 33% YoY, and 214M paid subs, adding 4.4M YoY and beating estimates of 3.84M  —  - Netflix is set to report earnings after the bell Tuesday.  —  Netflix shares were up more than 2% after-the-bell Tuesday after the company posted third quarter results.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Spotify partners with Shopify to let artists list merch on profiles for $29/month to $299/month, starting in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand  —  Spotify on Wednesday announced a new partnership with ecommerce provider Shopify to let artists list merchandise directly on their profiles …
Keith Zhai / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Jack Ma has left China for the first time since Alibaba came under regulatory pressure last November, traveling to Europe to see friends  —  The Alibaba co-founder's trip to Europe suggests he hasn't been banned from leaving the country by Chinese authorities
Lydia O'Neal / Wall Street Journal:
Flock Freight, which uses AI to help shippers pool goods, raises a $215M Series D at a $1.3B valuation led by Vision Fund 2, bringing total raised to $399M  —  The startup uses AI to pool goods from shippers with less-than-truckload carriers and skip freight hubs.  The new funding round values the company at $1.3 billion

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:
App Spotlight: Clean Contacts Pro for Zoho CRM  —  App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools.  Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …
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

Grit:
The AI Race Has a Leaderboard | Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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.
Hard Fork:
The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
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.
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 9:45 AM ET, October 20, 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

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: