Techmeme
May 3, 2022, 5:10 PM

Top News

Joseph Cox / VICE:
Investigation: for $160+, SafeGraph sells a week's worth of data on visitors of 600+ Planned Parenthood locations, including where they came from and went after  —  It costs just over $160 to get a week's worth of data on where people who visited Planned Parenthood came from, and where they went afterwards.
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Internal documents: the CDC bought the location data of millions of phones in the US to analyze compliance with COVID-19 rules, especially in the Navajo Nation  —  Newly released documents showed the CDC planned to use phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes too.
New York Times:
Interviews with 30+ people detail Elon Musk's insular circle of ~10 confidants who mostly agree with him and help him execute on his impulses  —  To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the world's richest man acts on impulse and the belief that he is absolutely right.
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
By accepting Elon Musk's bid, Twitter's management and board of directors showed they care more about shareholders than Twitter as a company or as a product  —  I'm sorry but more Twitter  —  You can tell a simple story about Elon Musk's pending acquisition of Twitter Inc. that goes like this.
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
In a filing, Twitter says Elon Musk's bid could make it difficult to attract and retain key talent, keep employees focused, and make changes to its business  —  Twitter Inc.'s $44 billion deal to be acquired by Elon Musk means it risks losing advertisers and employees, who may be concerned about the company's uncertain future.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Twitter tests a Twitter Circle feature for sharing tweets with up to 150 people, rather than publicly, similar to Instagram's Close Friends sharing option  —  Twitter today announced that it is testing a new Twitter Circle feature, which is designed to allow people to share their tweets with a smaller crowd.
Wall Street Journal:
The SEC plans to add 20 investigators and litigators to its Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, created in September 2017 to investigate fraud, taking it to 50 staff  —  Agency to add 20 staffers to help tighten scrutiny of unregulated $1.7 trillion cryptocurrency market
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
Meta's AI lab creates Open Pretrained Transformer, a language model trained with 175B parameters to match GPT-3's size, and gives it to researchers for free  —  Meta's AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI's pioneering neural network GPT-3.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify debuts Spotify Island on Roblox, the first music streaming brand on the service; artists and fans can go on quests, unlock content, and buy merchandise  —  Spotify announced today it will become the first music streaming brand to have an official presence within Roblox, with the launch of …
Financial Times:
Sources: the UK has shelved plans to empower the CMA's digital markets unit, announced in 2020, hampering the regulator's ability to set rules and impose fines  —  Government not expected to include legislation to beef up CMA's digital markets unit in Queen's Speech
Shuli Ren / Bloomberg:
After cracking down on its technology giants, China leans on Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan's distribution networks to fill grocery deliveries during lockdowns  —  The regulatory crackdown on Big Tech that started in China in late 2020 sent stocks reeling.  Over the past year …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Graphite, an open-source command line interface and code review dashboard, raises a $20M Series A led by a16z to grow its team of six to 15+ by the end of 2022  —  Graphite's founders came from Facebook, Airbnb and Square, three companies where they had access to sophisticated code review tools.
More: Neo News
Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg:
Lyft reports Q1 revenue of $875.6M, up 44% YoY, vs $844.5M est., and a net loss of $196.9M, but misses on 17.8M active riders, vs 18M expected; stock down 20%+  —  Lyft Inc. reported revenue that beat analysts' estimates, fueled by resilient demand for ride-hailing even as the omicron variant curbed travel earlier this year.
More: TechCrunch, Reuters, and Lyft
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Toronto-based Valence, which helps managers track team performance using continuous reviews, raises a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners  —  Valence, a growing teamwork platform, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners.

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Earlier Picks

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