Techmeme
November 20, 2021, 2:00 PM

Top News

Sean Hollister / The Verge:
The Apple Podcasts app's review score went from 1.8 to 4.6 stars after Apple began prompting users for ratings, confusing some into rating individual podcasts  —  Apple Podcasts rises above bad reviews, but at what cost?  —  You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they're leaving angry reviews.
Kelly Crow / Wall Street Journal:
ConstitutionDAO, which crowdfunded over $40M, loses Sotheby's US Constitution auction to a $43.2M bid from Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin  —  The 53-year-old billionaire paid $43.2 million for the historic document, plans to lend it to Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Investigation shows how Facebook and Google fund misinformation globally by paying millions of dollars in ad revenue to the operators of clickbait pages  —  A month after the fall of the democratic government.  —  In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement …
Matt Burgess / Wired UK:
DuckDuckGo launches App Tracking Protection for Android, a beta feature that blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook  —  The privacy-focused tech company's latest update promises to block invasive data collection across your whole phone.  —  At the end of April …
Dan Ennis / Banking Dive:
Berlin-based neobank N26, which was recently valued at $9B, to exit the US on January 11 after over two years, following its UK departure in April 2020  —  Dive Brief:  — German neobank N26 is shutting down its U.S. operations to focus on expanding in Europe, the company said Thursday.
More: BloombergTweets: @sub8u
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch:
Sao Paulo-based social commerce marketplace Facily raises a $250M Series D at an $850M valuation, bringing its total funding to $366M  —  Facily, a São Paulo-based social commerce marketplace, has quietly raised over $366 million in funding across four different rounds over the last year.
Zoe Schiffer / NBC News:
Internal memo: Apple affirms that employees have the right to discuss working conditions and pay internally and externally  —  Following months of internal controversy about how much workers make at one of the highest valued companies in the world, Apple has announced that employees …
CoinDesk:
Square's TBD division releases a white paper detailing tbDEX, a new decentralized protocol for exchanging digital and other assets  —  Payments giant Square released a white paper on Friday detailing a new decentralized protocol for exchanging digital and other assets known as tbDEX.
Steve Knopper / Billboard:
Profile of Berlin-based Ableton, whose music production software changed the way recordings are produced and how DJs perform by eliminating cumbersome equipment  —  Gerhard Behles and his partners wrote the code that makes modern pop sing — and makes investors drool.  But they're not selling.

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.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Meet Zoho Inventory MCP: Inventory operations that work through conversation  —  Inventory work rarely happens in isolation.A bulk sales order comes in when you least expect it.Suddenly, the warehouse team is rushing to pack and ship.
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

Big Technology Podcast:
Who Wins The AI Superapp Battle?, Apple's Consumer AI Victory, World Cup Automation Mistake
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:
Fable Ban Reversed + Dr. Dana Suskind on Parenting With A.I. + Prediction Market Drama
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.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Blitzy's Brian Elliott: Cursor And Claude Code Are Looking At Your Enterprise Code 'Through A Straw'
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.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
The Nick, Dick and Paul Show:
Re-Release: The Death of Hollywood? W/ Allan Loeb
Nick Bilton, Dick Costolo, and Paul Kedrosky pull back the curtain on AI, startups, and the future rushing toward us, all with healthy dose of irreverence.
Subscribe to The Nick, Dick and Paul Show.
Great Chat:
Maybe Twitter isn't real life
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
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 2:00 PM ET, November 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

Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:
Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal:

Earlier Picks

Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Steven Levy / Wired:
Matthew Gault / VICE: