Techmeme: Slides shown to Chinese sellers: Amazon plans to add a Temu-like section featuring cheap items that ship directly from warehouses in China to overseas consumers (The Information)

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft plans to launch its Xbox TV app on Amazon's Fire TV Sticks in July in 25+ countries, letting Game Pass Ultimate subscribers access Xbox Cloud Gaming — Microsoft is launching its Xbox TV app on Amazon's Fire TV Sticks in July. The Xbox app will provide access to Xbox Cloud Gaming …

Jay Peters / The Verge:

Google adds support for 110 new languages in Translate, up from 133 languages, in its largest expansion ever, aided by the company's PaLM 2 AI language model — Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday.

More: The Keyword, Android Police, PCMag, ZDNet, Financial Express, Engadget, Google AI, Maginative, iClarified, Android Authority, TalkAndroid.com, Mashable, Wccftech, TechCrunch, KnowTechie, Neowin, CNET, Android Headlines, PhoneArena, 9to5Google, NewsBytes, and Thurrott

Forums: r/HongKong and r/Cantonese

Sarah Wynn / The Block:

Coinbase files two lawsuits against the US SEC and the FDIC for not complying with FOIA requests; one of the FOIA requests is about how the SEC views ether — - Coinbase, which retained consultant firm History Associates Inc. to file the FOIA requests, took aim at the SEC and FDIC …

More: Fox Business, Decrypt, CoinDesk, Blockworks, Coinspeaker, The Crypto Times, The Crypto Basic, Milk Road, Cryptopolitan, Bitcoin Insider, CryptoSlate, Coinpedia Fintech News, CoinGape, Cointelegraph, and Crypto Briefing

LinkedIn: David Brill. Forums: r/ethtrader

Abner Li / 9to5Google:

Google announces faster Google Sheets calculations in Chrome and Edge browsers on desktop, doubling speeds for running formulas, creating pivot tables, and more — Google is touting significant speed improvements when performing calculations in Sheets on desktop Chrome and Edge.

More: web.dev, Google Workspace Blog, ZDNet, KnowTechie, TechRadar, Google Workspace Updates, WinBuzzer, XDA Developers, Neowin, and Android Police

X: @googleworkspace. LinkedIn: Michael Avrukin

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Progress Software discloses a critical vulnerability in MOVEit's SFTP module; hackers exploited a similar flaw in MOVEit in 2023 to breach almost 1,800 networks — A similar flaw last year left 1,800 networks breached. Will the latest one be as potent? — A critical vulnerability …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:

Orby AI, which is building generative AI agents to automate business workflows, raised a $30M Series A, sources say at a post-money valuation of $100M+ — AI “agents” are generative AI models that can perform actions autonomously, like copying info from an email and pasting it into a spreadsheet …

More: SiliconANGLE

Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:

Google says Gemma 2 will be available to researchers and developers through Vertex AI starting next month, including with a new 9B-parameter model — Google says Gemma 2, its open lightweight model series, will be available to researchers and developers through Vertex AI starting next month.

More: The Keyword, ZDNet, 9to5Google, Analytics India Magazine, MarkTechPost, The Decoder, and YourStory

Katie Roof / Bloomberg:

Clay, which develops AI tools focused on sales and marketing for businesses, raised $46M at a $500M valuation, bringing its total funding to $66M — Company was valued at $500 million in its latest funding round. — An artificial intelligence startup focused on sales and marketing …

LinkedIn: Puneet Sabharwal, Jessica Pelaez, and Varun Anand

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:

Character.AI now lets users talk to AI characters over calls in multiple languages, including English and Chinese, says 3M users made 20M+ calls during testing — a16z-backed Character.AI said today that it is now allowing users to talk to AI characters over calls.

More: Reuters

Ina Fried / Axios:

Google Cloud announces deals, including with Moody's, Thomson Reuters, and ZoomInfo, to “ground” responses from its enterprise AI chatbots in real-world facts — - Now, Google is offering an additional option: using third-party data to help ground AI results.

Karissa Bell / Engadget:

Meta's Oversight Board issued 53 decisions in 2023 and says Meta has fully or partially implemented 75 out of 266 recommendations from January 2021 to May 2024 — The board says it wants to weigh in on “demoted content” on Facebook and Instagram. — The Oversight Board has published …

More: Oversight Board and Oversight Board

Threads: @oversightboard. X: @oversightboard, @oversightboard, @oversightboard, @oversightboard, and @oversightboard

The Information:

As tech companies grapple with the limited availability of Nvidia chips globally, Chinese companies like Alibaba face a tougher situation due to US restrictions — U.S. rules curbing the export of artificial intelligence chips to China are beginning to squeeze the country's AI industry.

Gene Park / Washington Post:

An interview with Netflix's VP of external games, Leanne Loombe, on its push into gaming, focusing on narrative games without ads or in-app purchases, and more — I told my dentist that I was interviewing someone at Netflix later, and she got really excited. “Ooo, what about? Which show?”

More: Variety, Mobilegamer.biz, and Game Developer

X: @genepark and @wildspeculation. LinkedIn: Rebecca Tatlock-Marijan

See also Mediagazer

Aoyon Ashraf / CoinDesk:

Arkham: a wallet tagged to the US government moved ~3,940 BTC, worth ~$240M and originally seized from a Silk Road narcotics vendor, to a Coinbase Prime address — About 4k bitcoin had been seized from narcotics trafficker Banmeet Singh at his January 2024 trial.

More: Bitcoin Insider, CryptoPotato, ZyCrypto, CryptoSlate, Decrypt, Milk Road, CoinGape, The Crypto Times, and CoinJournal

X: @arkhamintel. LinkedIn: Kelvin Low

Ceylan Yeğinsu / New York Times:

Testing ChatGPT, Vacay, and Mindtrip to plan a Norway trip shows none were perfect, but the chatbots streamlined travel decisions and complemented one another — Can artificial intelligence devise a bucket-list vacation that checks all the boxes: culture, nature, hotels and transportation?

LinkedIn: Hege Vibeke Barnes

Julie Weed / New York Times:

How landlords are using AI tools to communicate with tenants, track the use of common areas, monitor energy use, aid construction management, and more — Artificial intelligence is doing everything from helping landlords communicate with tenants to managing energy use.

More: KnowTechie. Bluesky: @designbyadrian.bsky.social. LinkedIn: Rukevbe

Katie Mettler / Washington Post:

The US DOJ indicts a Russian national, who remains at large, for his alleged involvement in the WhisperGate malware attack on Ukrainian systems in January 2022 — A federal grand jury indicted Russian national Amin Stigal this week on allegations that he conspired with the Russian military …

Bloomberg:

OpenAI's move to cut off API access to Chinese developers sets the stage for a Chinese industry shakeup and will accentuate the divide between China and the US — - Local AI services from Baidu to 01.AI tout discount offers — The abrupt move sets the stage for a Chinese industry shakeup

More: PCMag, The Information, Rest of World, South China Morning Post, MEDIANAMA, Gizmochina, DeviceSecurity.io, Benzinga, TechNode, Pandaily, and Reuters

X: @bernardleong, @bernardleong, @bernardleong, and @newley

John Reed / Financial Times:

The chair of the India Cellular and Electronics Association says thousands of Chinese engineers and technicians are struggling to obtain Indian work visas — Modi's ambitions to create a manufacturing power come up against souring diplomatic relations with Beijing

More: Skift and New York Times

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

PortSwigger, the startup behind the Burp Suite of security testing tools founded by security expert “Daf”, raised $112M, its first outside investment — Sometimes the most successful startup ideas come from people building tools to solve their own needs.

More: EU-Startups. X: @ingridlunden

Paul Gillin / SiliconANGLE:

Netherlands-based Innatera Nanosystems, which unveiled an energy-efficient AI chip for sensor-edge applications in January, raised a $21M Series A — Netherlands-based microprocessor maker Innatera Nanosystems B.V. said it closed an oversubscribed $21 million Series A funding round …

More: FinSMEs

Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE:

KarmaCheck, which uses AI to do background checks and was founded by LinkedIn's Eric Ly in 2019, raised a $45M Series B, bringing its total funding to ~$60M — Background checks, credentialing and compliance software company KarmaCheck Inc. today announced that it has raised $45 million …

More: Reuters

Joanna Chiu / Rest of World:

Citizen Lab: Microsoft censors its Bing translation service more extensively in China than its competitors, like Baidu Translate and Tencent Machine Translation — New Citizen Lab study comes as U.S. lawmakers scrutinize Microsoft's willingness to comply with demands from Beijing.

More: WinBuzzer

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Odaseva, which provides data protection services for large Salesforce customers, raised a $54M Series C, bringing its total funding to $90M — Cloud services continue to be a weak point for enterprises when it comes to security, so companies providing effective solutions to address this continue …

More: FinTech Global and Odaseva. LinkedIn: Ginny Riemer Lobel

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