Techmeme: A look at BlackPlanet, a social network for African Americans that went live in 1999, had ~15M users in 2008, and arguably laid the foundation for Black Twitter (Hannah Giorgis/The Atlantic)

Top News

Global smartphone shipments grew 7.8% YoY to 289.4M in Q1 2024; iPhone fell 9.6% YoY, more than all top brands, Xiaomi grew 33.8% YoY, and Samsung retook first — Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker , global smartphone shipments increased 7.8% year over year to 289.4 million units in the first quarter of 2024 (1Q24).

Financial Times:

The US awards Samsung up to $6.4B in CHIPS Act funding and says the company plans to make 2nm chips at its Taylor, Texas plant by 2026, two years ahead of TSMC — South Korean group set to outdo rival TSMC with cutting-edge 2nm chip production in US by 2026 as part of $40bn investment

Bloomberg:

OpenAI opens a Tokyo office, releases a Japanese language GPT-4 model, and taps former President of AWS Japan Tadao Nagasaki to woo enterprises in the country — OpenAI named the former president of Amazon Web Services's Japan arm to spearhead its push to woo enterprise clients in the world's fourth-largest economy.

More: OpenAI, TechCrunch, The Information, Silicon Republic, Financial Express, Maginative, Agence France-Presse, Cybernews.com, The Verge, CNBC, MSPoweruser, and Reuters

X: @openai, @allgarbled, @borismpower, and @dyett

Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica:

An interview with Framework CEO Nirav Patel on ongoing firmware and software issues with its repairable laptops, the planned fixes, Intel and AMD, and more — New features, security updates, and Linux support are all on a long to-do list. — Since Framework showed off its first prototypes …

Forums: Hacker News, r/hardware, and Ars OpenForum

Nilay Patel / The Verge:

Q&A with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston on adding AI tools, evolving beyond file syncing, rejecting Steve Jobs' buyout offer, online storage, remote working, and more — Leaders can't ‘keep mashing the go back to 2019 button.’ — Today, I'm talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

Alex Koller / CNBC:

Adobe releases Acrobat AI Assistant to summarize documents and answer questions about them for $4.99/month, an “early access” rate, and a mobile version in beta — Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 20, 2024.

More: Inc.com, PCMag, and Adobe

Stephen Nellis / Reuters:

Adobe says it is in the early stages of developing a way to let Premiere Pro users tap AI models from OpenAI, Runway, and Pika Labs to generate and use video

More: AppleInsider, ZDNet, The Verge, Engadget, Adobe Press Releases, TechRadar, WinBuzzer, and Tom's Guide

Bloomberg:

As Microsoft begins its most ambitious security overhaul in two decades, critics question if Microsoft has sufficient incentive to make deep and lasting changes — Company has embarked on biggest security reboot in two decades, but critics question whether it has wherewithal to complete the job.

More: Wired and Dark Reading

X: @kimzetter and @ericgeller

Meta:

Meta plans to temporarily shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29 to comply with an interim order prohibiting data sharing between Threads and Instagram — To comply with an interim order of the Rekabet Kurumu/Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), we will shut down Threads in Türkiye from Monday 29 April.

More: TechCrunch, Neowin, The Verge, Bloomberg, MSPoweruser, Balkan Insight, Turkish Minute, Reuters, and Daily Sabah

Tony Romm / Washington Post:

AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon quietly lobby to weaken a $42.5B program to improve US internet access, aiming to block new rules on poor customers' bills — As Washington readies the largest burst of broadband funding in U.S. history, AT&T, Verizon and their allies are lobbying hard against lower prices for consumers

More: Houston Chronicle. Mastodon: @jeffjarvis@mastodon.social. X: @tonyromm, @tonyromm, and @tonyromm. Forums: Slashdot

David Pan / Bloomberg:

Bitcoin's next halving, set for around April 20, will cut miners' validating transactions to 450 from 900 now, costing the industry ~$10B in annual revenue — - Cryptocurrency's update will slash new supply in late April — Competition for favorable electric rates growing from AI firms

More: The Block, The Crypto Times, Cointelegraph, Cryptonews, Coinspeaker, crypto.news, CoinGape, and New York Post

Echo Wang / Reuters:

Source: cloud data management startup Rubrik plans to sell 23M shares priced between $28 and $31 each, raising up to $713M and reaching a $5.4B valuation — Cybersecurity software firm Rubrik, which counts Microsoft (MSFT.O) among its prominent investors, is aiming to raise as much as $713 million …

More: Enterprise Technology Research, Blocks and Files, and Bloomberg

Alexandra Sternlicht / Fortune:

Sources detail how China-based ByteDance and US TikTok operations remain intertwined, with some US staff effectively reporting to ByteDance, data sharing, more — In January, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced an intense grilling by skeptical U.S. lawmakers about his company's ties to Beijing and its alleged risk to national security.

More: South China Morning Post

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