Techmeme
October 31, 2021, 2:55 PM

Top News

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
In 2018, Oculus' Jason Rubin sent a paper to Facebook executives laying the foundation for Meta's ambitions and detailing the need to own the VR market  —  - In 2018, an Oculus executive named Jason Rubin wrote a 50-page document headlined “The Metaverse” that he sent to a Facebook board member and some top execs.
Gene Park / Washington Post:
Meta is just playing catch-up as Roblox, Steam VR, VRChat, and other platforms have already developed metaverse-like experiences  —  In addition to announcing Facebook's rebranding to Meta on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg delivered a number of lofty promises about the metaverse and its features.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Facebook's metaverse is designed to solve several problems: an aging userbase, dependence on Google and Apple, regulatory risk, and reputational damage  —  If his new strategy works — a big if — it could help address several of Facebook's biggest problems.
Ethan Zuckerman / The Atlantic:
Meta's promised metaverse is going to be boring and is meant to distract us from the world that Facebook helped break  —  In a booth at Ted's Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse.  It was November 1994, just as the graphical web …
Wall Street Journal:
Experts say sourcing chips has turned almost into a lottery amid the global chip shortage, as wait times ballooned to 22 weeks in October  —  Nearly a year into the crisis, some customers are finding it is taking months more than expected to get needed parts
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Roblox has been down since about 7PM ET on October 28, with some speculating the outage may be related to a Chipotle promotion, but the company denies a link  —  Roblox is having some major server issues  —  Roblox has been down for more than two days, with the game and its related website offline for millions of players.
Politico:
Industry and government officials say Gaia-X, a project to reduce the EU's cloud dependency on US tech giants, is clogged by infighting and bloated bureaucracy  —  The initiative, meant to boost Europe's cloud services, is failing to fix the problems it was intended to solve.
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Apple's $19 Polishing Cloth has become its most back-ordered new product with shipments delayed until January; source: the company isn't surprised by the demand  —  It's a $19 cloth.  —  OAKLAND, Calif — Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers …
Delia Cai / Vanity Fair:
Q&A with EIC Nilay Patel on The Verge's 10th anniversary, tech media's advance from early breathless gadget reviews, subject-source relationships, and more  —  After a decade covering the Zucks, Googles, and Ubers of the scene, the Verge editor in chief reflects on tech's troublesome relationship with the rest of the world.
Bloomberg:
A look at student activity monitoring software GoGuardian, whose usage in US schools exploded during lockdowns as some say it adds to kids' psychological strain  —  The pandemic caused schools to embrace laptops, tablets, Zoom, and an app called GoGuardian that tracks everything students (and, sometimes, parents) do online.
Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia:
Beijing-based Huice, a SaaS provider that helps e-commerce businesses manage orders and more, raises a $312M Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2  —  Huice, which develops software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to enable smart retail, has raised $312 million in a Series D round led by SoftBank Group Corp's Vision Fund 2.

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Bringing local models and sandboxed tools to Windows and GitHub Copilot  —  GitHub Copilot will soon determine when a task is best handled by on-device AI and when it needs cloud-scale models.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
Zoho Books now supports CT600 & Final Accounts Filing as an add-on in the FREE plan  —  Managing end-of-year filing for limited companies in the UK is often expensive and multi-layered.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Sources:
Qualcomm's CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
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The Upstarts Podcast:
Bringing Back Mammoths And Building Noah's Ark 2.0 | Colossal's Ben Lamm
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
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Great Chat:
The launch industrial complex
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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Big Technology Podcast:
Can AI Keep Growing Exponentially? Let's Ask SemiAnalysis — With Dylan Patel and Jordan Nanos
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Channels with Peter Kafka:
Larry Ellison's Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI's Biggest Gamble
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.
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Training Data:
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
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.
 

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