Techmeme: Sources: ByteDance executives have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth ~50% of the Chinese company's overall value, or above $100B (Wall Street Journal)

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April 25, 2024, 5:40 PM

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Cecilia Kang / New York Times:

The FCC votes 3-2 to reinstate the US' net neutrality rules, expanding government oversight of ISPs and aiming to protect consumer access to the internet — Commissioners voted along party lines to revive the rules that declare broadband as a utility-like service that could be regulated like phones and water.

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Forums: Hacker News, r/VoteDEM, r/popculturechat, and Slashdot

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The Information:

Sources: ByteDance is exploring scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok US, preferably to a non-tech company, and without the recommendation algorithm — ByteDance is internally exploring scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok's U.S. business, preferably to companies outside …

More: Reuters, TechCrunch, The Verge, BBC, Dexerto, Yahoo News, Forbes, iPhone in Canada Blog, iMore, Pocket Gamer.biz, and The Verge

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Reuters:

Sources: ByteDance prefers a TikTok shutdown in the US rather than a sale if legal options fail, deeming TikTok's algorithm as core to overall ByteDance systems — TikTok owner ByteDance would prefer shutting down its loss-making app rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts …

More: The Register, Android Police, The National Pulse, Inc.com, Music Business Worldwide, KnowTechie, CBS News, Associated Press, Fast Company, Business Times, Ars Technica, Android Headlines, and HuffPost

X: @carnage4life, @mgsiegler, and @danprimack

Forums: Hacker News and r/technology

Wall Street Journal:

Sources: ByteDance executives have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth ~50% of the Chinese company's overall value, or above $100B

More: Tubefilter, Reuters, The Tech Basic, Hindustan Times, Semafor, Spyglass, New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg

X: @jchengwsj and @wsjtech

Financial Times:

Interviews with 24+ current and ex-ByteDance staff: the Beijing-based company has tightened its grip on TikTok over the past two years, causing a culture clash

More: The Week and Rap-Up

Bluesky: @cachiporra.bsky.social. X: @daphnehk, @cristinacriddle, and @clothildegouj

Alphabet:

Alphabet Q1: revenue up 15% YoY to $80.5B, net income up 57% to $23.7B, Google Cloud revenue up 28% to $9.6B, and headcount down 5%; GOOG jumps 12%+ after hours — Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024.

More: Financial Times, Neowin, Constellation Research, Forbes, Shacknews, Invezz, and Android Central

Bluesky: @marypcbuk.bsky.social. X: @supbagholder and @munster_gene. LinkedIn: Emil Protalinski. Forums: Hacker News

Akash Sriram / Reuters:

Alphabet announces its first-ever dividend and authorizes the repurchase of up to an additional $70B of its Class A and Class C shares

More: New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Channel NewsAsia, Yahoo Finance, Associated Press, Proactive, and Benzinga

X: @cloud_opinion, @lexnfx, @mikeisaac, @mikeisaac, and @lexnfx

Todd Spangler / Variety:

YouTube's Q1 ad revenue climbs 21% YoY to $8.1B, vs. $7.72B estimated, its highest Q1 total to date

More: The Verge, Shacknews, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and GeekWire. X: @munster_gene

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Microsoft:

Microsoft Q3: revenue up 17% YoY to $61.9B, net income up 20% to $21.9B, Office Commercial revenue up 13%, LinkedIn revenue up 10%; MSFT jumps 4%+ after hours — Microsoft Cloud Strength Fuels Third Quarter Results REDMOND, Wash. — April 25, 2024 — Microsoft Corp. today announced …

More: GeekWire, New York Times, Neowin, and Constellation Research

X: @inafried. LinkedIn: Emil Protalinski

Jordan Novet / CNBC:

Microsoft reports Q4 Intelligent Cloud revenue up 21% YoY to $26.71B, vs. $26.26B est., with Azure and other cloud services revenue up 31% YoY

More: Axios, Bloomberg, Reuters, and TechCircle

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft Q3: Windows OEM revenue up 11% YoY, devices revenue down 17% YoY, overall gaming revenue up 51% YoY, and Xbox content and services revenue up 62% YoY

More: Windows Central, IGN, and XboxEra. X: @tomwarren

Ashley Capoot / CNBC:

Snap reports Q1 revenue up 21% YoY to $1.19B, vs. $1.12B est., DAUs up 10% YoY to 422M, a net loss of $305M, compared to $329M YoY; SNAP is up 20%+ after hours — Snap reported first-quarter results on Thursday that beat analysts' estimates and showed a return to double-digit revenue growth.

More: The Information, Investor's Business Daily, Reuters, Bloomberg, FX Empire, and Snap

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Kif Leswing / CNBC:

Intel reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to $12.72B, vs. $12.78B est., Data Center and AI up 5% to $3B, and Q2 revenue guidance below est.; INTC falls 9%+ after hours — Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, holding the “Gaudi 3” AI chip, speaks during the 54th Annual Meeting of The Semafor 2024 World Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2024.

More: Oregonian, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Constellation Research, Benzinga, TipRanks Financial, Intel, Shacknews, and Yahoo Finance. X: @markhachman

Jennifer Maas / Variety:

Roku reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $882M, vs. $848.62M est., a net loss of $50.9M, compared to $193.6M YoY, and 81.6M active accounts, up 1.6M from Q4 2023 — Roku reported its first-quarter 2024 earnings Thursday, revealing the company reached 81.6 million active accounts …

More: Investor's Business Daily, Reuters, Deadline, Roku, and Cord Cutters News

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Ben Glickman / Wall Street Journal:

The US awards Micron up to $6.1B under the CHIPS Act, to back an up to $125B investment to build a megafab in New York and a fab in Idaho over the next 20 years — Micron Technology MU -.60%decrease; red down pointing triangle is receiving up to $6.1 billion from the federal government …

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X: @micronpolicy, @mackhawk, and @microntech

CNBC:

Cloud data management startup Rubrik closes up 16% at $37 per share in its NYSE debut, after raising $752M at a $5.6B valuation — Bipul Sinha, CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder of Rubrik Inc., the Microsoft backed cybersecurity software startup, rings the opening bell during his company's IPO …

More: Fortune, Crunchbase News, WebProNews, TechCrunch, Reuters, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, CRN, and The Information

X: @katie_roof, @alexrkonrad, @baincapvc, @bipulsinha, @lamonicabuzz, @mayank_408, @ravi_lsvp, and @tanayj

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:

A look at AI video startup Synthesia, whose avatars are more human-like and expressive than predecessors, raising concerns over the consequences of realistic AI — I'm stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? — This makes it sound like I'm dying, but it's the opposite.

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X: @synthesiaio, @pbotteri, @alexvoica, @alexvoica, @rubenhssd, @alexvoica, @alexvoica, @shakeelhashim, @sashamtl, and @melissahei. LinkedIn: Charlotte Jee

Forums: r/artificial, r/singularity, and r/tech

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Stripe will let customers accept crypto payments, starting with USDC on Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon, the first time it has taken crypto payments since 2018 — Stripe, the fintech giant, continues to inch its way back into the cryptocurrency market. On Thursday the company announced …

More: Bloomberg, The Information, Business Post, DL News, CoinDesk, The Block, Cointelegraph, Blockworks, CoinGape, Bitcoin Insider, crypto.news, CryptoGlobe, and Crypto Briefing

X: @collision and @carnage4life

Forums: r/CryptoCurrency and Slashdot

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Sources: Microsoft is prioritizing security over new features to win back consumer trust, as it scrambles to respond to new attacks from Russia-linked hackers — The world's largest tech company has a security problem. A series of high-profile security incidents have rocked Microsoft …

More: Benzinga, WinBuzzer, Neowin, and Directions on Microsoft

Mastodon: @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social. X: @tomwarren, @thurrott, and @loudmog. LinkedIn: Tom Bridge

Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia:

TSMC unveils A16, chip manufacturing tech featuring nanosheet transistors with “backside power rails” meant for producing its ultra-advanced 1.6nm chips by 2026 — Taiwan chip titan aims to secure leading position and capture AI demand — TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co …

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X: @krewell, @benbajarin, @ryansmithat, @dnystedt, and @trendforce. Forums: r/wallstreetbets

Scott Farquhar / Work Life:

Atlassian's co-CEO Scott Farquhar plans to step down on August 31, 2024, after 23 years at the company; he will remain a board member and a special advisor — Sharing a note I sent to our Atlassian employees earlier today — It's with a full but heavy heart that I share with you all today …

More: Benzinga and Bloomberg

X: @vhmth, @jesuisjuju, @harrystebbings, and @scottfarkas. LinkedIn: Scott Farquhar

Karissa Bell / Engadget:

On Meta's Q1 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads now has more than 150M MAUs, up from more than 130M in February 2024 — Mark Zuckerberg has speculated it could be Meta's next billion-user app. — Meta's Threads app now has more than 150 million monthly users, an increase of about 20 million new users since February.

More: Meta, PYMNTS.com, Thurrott, TechCrunch, Digital Music News, Mashable, Nairametrics, TweakTown, ZDNet, Gizchina, Android Headlines, Neowin, NewsBytes, Benzinga, The Verge, Business Insider, CNBC, and CNBC

Threads: @alexheath and @wongmjane

Alex Heath / The Verge:

Mark Zuckerberg says “tens of millions of people” have “tried” Meta AI but making money from generative AI in Meta's apps is likely going to take several years

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Threads: @alexheath and @kurtwag8. Bluesky: @marygillis.bsky.social

X: @munster_gene, @netcapgirl, @stockmarketnerd, @lamonicabuzz, and @mikeisaac

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From Mediagazer

Washington Post:

Internal email: 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi told staffers Bari Weiss pulled the CECOT segment after the Trump administration refused an interview

Ali Watkins / New York Times:

Channel 4 says Jimmy Kimmel will share a message on Christmas Day as part of its Alternative Christmas Message show, emphasizing the importance of free speech

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:

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Bloomberg:

In a subpoena, Elon Musk asked Helen Toner to hand over documents about her departure from OpenAI's board and how OpenAI decides when a technology achieves AGI

Bluesky: @marypcbuk.bsky.social. X: @rachelmetz

Toby Sterling / Reuters:

As ASML shareholders approve Christophe Fouquet as CEO, he faces a tricky balancing act to guide ASML, Europe's largest tech firm, through the US-China chip war

Meir Orbach / CTech:

Nagomi Security, which has developed a proactive security and threat exposure management platform, emerges from stealth with a $23M Series A and a $7M seed

More: SiliconANGLE, BankInfoSecurity.com, Nagomi Security, and FinTech Global. LinkedIn: Sarit Firon

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:

Threads expands Hidden Words to let users filter out words, phrases, and emoji; Threads is also testing a way to mute notifications and controls for quote posts

More: The Verge, Neowin, Social Media Today, Engadget, Hypebeast, and Lifewire

Threads: @mosseri, @carnage4life, @mergesort, @dimitrymakphoto, @mattnavarra, and @jbillinson. Mastodon: @shoq@mastodon.social

Thomas Brewster / Forbes:

Sublime, which monitors emails of companies and political campaigns to spot AI-generated phishing attacks, raised a $20M Series A, taking total funding to $30M

More: Sublime Security and VC News Daily

Threads: @crumbler. LinkedIn: Thomas Brewster, John Tuckner, and Trevor Hawthorn

Leo Schwartz / Fortune:

Movement Labs, which is building Movement L2, a layer-2 Ethereum blockchain based on the Move programming language, raised a $38M Series A led by Polychain

More: Movement Labs, FinSMEs, VC News Daily, VentureBeat, CoinDesk, NFTgators, Cointelegraph, and The Block

LinkedIn: Rushi Manche. Forums: r/ethtrader

The Information:

Sources: a Huawei-led consortium, backed by Chinese government funding, aims to compete with Nvidia by making high-bandwidth memory chips, used in GPUs, by 2026

More: The Decoder, Reuters, Benzinga, and South China Morning Post

Abner Li / 9to5Google:

Google Meet rolls out an update to let users seamlessly transfer calls between devices without hanging up via its Android, iOS, and web apps

More: Google Workspace Updates, ZDNet, The Verge, Jay is games, Windows Report, OSnews, Android Headlines, Mashable, TechRadar, The Hindu, Thurrott, MySmartPrice, and Android Police

X: @googleworkspace and @demetripanici

Earlier Picks

Andy Chalk / PC Gamer:

Garry's Mod is removing “all Nintendo related stuff” from its Steam Workshop, covering “20 years of uploads”, after receiving a takedown request from Nintendo

Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:

Lenovo survey of 750 CIOs: 96% expect increased AI investment in the next 12 months and 42% don't expect to show return on AI investments for the next two years

More: CIO.com, Lenovo StoryHub, and Cryptopolitan

New York Times:

A look at Saudi Arabia's spending blitz to become an AI superpower, which has put the kingdom in the middle of an escalating global competition over AI

LinkedIn: Monis Rahman

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

Filing: Swiggy, which has a ~45.8% share of the Indian food delivery market, secures shareholder approval for a potential $1.25B IPO, slated for later in 2024

More: The Economic Times, The Economic Times, Tech in Asia, Reuters, Inc42 Media, Business Today, Business Standard, Moneycontrol, and Entrackr

Financial Times:

K Krithivasan, the CEO of Indian IT giant TCS, says there will be “minimal” need for call centers in as soon as one year, due to AI chatbots taking on the work

More: Hindustan Times. X: @ft, @christopherkay, and @johnreedwrites

Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat:

Snowflake launches Arctic, an LLM optimized for enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, under an Apache 2.0 license

More: Snowflake, Unite.AI, MSPoweruser, TechRadar, ITPro, Barron's Online, ZDNet, InfoWorld, TechCrunch, and SiliconANGLE

X: @haozhangml, @jeffra45, @vivek7ue, @yahoofinance, @ramaswmysridhar, @thom_wolf, @aurickq, @unixterminal, @omarsar0, @snowflakedb, @deliprao, and @vivek7ue

LinkedIn: Craig Collier, Kaitlyn Hopkins, and Mike Biebel. Forums: r/snowflake

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:

Reddit says its Dynamic Product Ads, which use “shopping signals” to automatically show relevant ads to users, are entering public beta globally

More: ZDNet, Reuters, Android Central, Forbes, and Search Engine Land

Mastodon: @dangillmor@mastodon.social. Forums: r/artificial and Ars OpenForum

See also Mediagazer

Bob Van Voris / Bloomberg:

US prosecutors charge two founders of Samourai Wallet, saying the crypto mixing service facilitated more than $100M in “money laundering and sanctions evasion”