| Microsoft: |
Microsoft plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7B in cash, or $95/share, closing in FY 2023; Bobby Kotick will remain as CEO, reporting to Phil Spencer — Legendary games, immersive interactive entertainment and publishing expertise accelerate growth in Microsoft's Gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud.| Tom Warren / The Verge: |
Microsoft says Xbox Game Pass has 25M subscribers, up from 18M in January 2021 — Microsoft's all-you-can-eat catalog of games is getting bigger, and now it's adding Activision Blizzard — Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass service now has 25 million subscribers.| Andrew Asmakov / Decrypt: |
Crypto.com halted withdrawals and requires users to re-sign-in and reset 2FA; research shows Crypto.com lost 4,600+ ETH, worth $15M+, during a suspected hack — The crypto exchange has reportedly lost at least $15 million in Ethereum, and security experts believe the true losses could be much higher.| Ashley Rodriguez / Insider: |
Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya says the “ugly truth” is “nobody cares about what's happening” to Uyghurs in China, himself included — - Chamath Palihapitiya said “nobody cares about what's happening” to Uyghur Muslims in China.| Jeffrey Knockel / The Citizen Lab: |
China's MY2022 Olympics app, mandatory for attendees to report travel and health data, has serious encryption flaws and contains censorship keyword lists — Key Findings — MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw … | Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg: |
Animoca Brands, an NFT and metaverse service, raises $359M led by Liberty City at a $5B valuation, up from $2.2B in October 2021 — Soros Fund Management and the Winklevoss twins' venture capital firm are among investors in a funding round that's more than doubled the valuation of Animoca Brands Corp. … | Hannah Murphy / Financial Times: |
Analysis: Meta has filed dozens of patents to monetize its metaverse, including a virtual store with sponsored items, eye and face tracking in headsets, more — Meta hopes to use tiny human expressions to create virtual world of personalised ads — Pupil movements, body poses and nose scrunching … | Lucy Harley-Mckeown / The Block: |
The UK government will increase scrutiny of crypto ads, bringing the marketing in line with other financial promotions, citing risk to buyers — Quick Take — HM Treasury said it would ramp up scrutiny of crypto advertising in the UK. — The move will bring crypto marketing within … | Cho Mu-Hyun / ZDNet: |
Samsung unveils its 4nm Exynos 2200 SoC with an Xclipse GPU using AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, offering hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading — The processor packs Samsung's own Xclipse GPU based on AMD RDNA 2 architecture that the South Korean company says will offer … | Omkar Godbole / CoinDesk: |
Binance conducted its first Binance Coin (BNB) auto-burn last quarter, removing over 1.6M BNB tokens worth $750M from circulation — Cryptocurrency exchange Binance implemented its first-ever binance token (BNB) auto-burn program last quarter, removing over 1.6 million BNB tokens worth $750 million from circulation.| Financial Times: |
An in-depth look at Sony's ambition to become the world's most fully integrated entertainment company across movie blockbusters, music catalogs, and PlayStation — The Japanese corporation is on the cusp of full integration but critics say it needs to be wary of distractions like electric vehicles| Alexandra Alper / Reuters: |
Sources: the US government is reviewing Alibaba's cloud business to determine potential national security risks, including how it stores US clients' data — The Biden administration is reviewing e-commerce giant Alibaba's cloud business to determine whether it poses a risk to U.S. national security … | Ryan Browne / CNBC: |
Istanbul-based mobile game developer Dream Games, which makes Royal Match, raises $255M led by Index Ventures at a $2.75B valuation, up from $1B in June 2021 — - Istanbul-based mobile game developer Dream Games has raised $255 million in a new round of funding, the company told CNBC.| Arjun Kharpal / CNBC: |
Shopify partners with JD.com to help US merchants sell goods in China; merchants can set up shops in 3-4 weeks, well below the current 12-month process — - Shopify has partnered with e-commerce giant JD.com to help U.S. merchants sell their goods in China.| Anita Ramaswamy / TechCrunch: |
Pinwheel, which offers APIs to fintechs for payroll, income, and other data, raises a $50M Series B at a $500M valuation, following a $20M Series A in June 2021 — Six months after its $20 million Series A, payroll connectivity platform Pinwheel just announced that it has nabbed another $50 million … | Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post: |
The Tech Oversight Project, mainly funded by Pierre Omidyar and Chris Hughes' organizations, launches Tuesday to push for Big Tech antitrust regulation — Organizations with ties to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are the primary funders of the Tech Oversight Project
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.
Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.
Simplifying benefits management in Zoho People — Let's consider a new hire on their first day of orientation. They receive a brief introduction to the benefits plans, and almost immediately, questions start to surface …
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.
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| Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg: |
| Eric Benjamin Seufert / Mobile Dev Memo: |
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| Max Seddon / Financial Times: |