Techmeme
July 12, 2022, 5:00 PM

Top News

Jeremy Hill / Bloomberg:
Liquidators say they can't find Three Arrows Capital founders Kyle Davies and Zhu Su, and seek to subpoena them to prevent the dissipation of the fund's assets  —  The founders of bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital haven't been cooperating in the firm's liquidation process …
Wired:
Employees say “Twitter is a shit show internally”, fed up by weak leadership and a lack of management support amid targeted harassment from outside the company  —  Days after the deal to buy Twitter fell apart, fed-up employees say they are being kept in the dark.
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
James Vincent / The Verge:
In Germany, South Korea, and other countries, BMW starts selling subscriptions or charging one-time fees to unlock heated seats, engine sound options, and more  —  The auto industry is racing towards a future full of microtransactions  —  BMW is now selling subscriptions for heated seats …
J. Clara Chan / The Hollywood Reporter:
Spotify acquires Heardle, describing the music trivia game inspired by Wordle as a “tool for musical discovery”, and plans to keep it as a standalone site  —  The game, which challenges users to identify a song based on short audio clips, will remain free to play for users.
Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Medium founder Evan Williams says he is stepping down as CEO, to be replaced by Tony Stubblebine, and plans to start a new holding company and research lab  —  Mr. Williams, the company's founder and a co-founder of Twitter and Blogger, said in a post that he planned to start a new holding company and research lab.
Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk:
Animoca Brands announces a $75.32M raise at a $5.9B valuation, the second tranche of its $360M round in January 2022 that valued the NFT company at $5.5B  —  The infusion is the second tranche of January's funding round, which nabbed almost $360 million and valued the investment company at $5.5 billion.
Gareth Vipers / Wall Street Journal:
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Filing: Amazon and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are developing “personalized” cancer vaccines and have launched an FDA-approved clinical trial  —  - Amazon is working with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to develop cancer vaccines, according to a filing.
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
BigScience, an effort by 1K+ AI researchers and NLP startup Hugging Face, releases BLOOM, an open-access multilingual language model bigger than GPT-3, for free  —  A group of over 1,000 AI researchers has created a multilingual large language model bigger than GPT-3—and they're giving it out for free.
Michael Kan / PCMag:
Sylvia Varnham O'Regan / The Information:
In an internal post, Meta Vice President of Remote Presence and Engineering Maher Saba instructed managers to identify and “move to exit” poor performers  —  Meta Platforms' Vice President of Remote Presence and Engineering Maher Saba has instructed managers to identify and …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Pakistan-based Airlift, which delivers goods in 30 minutes, is shutting down after failing to raise more funding; Airlift raised an $85M Series B in August 2021  —  Airlift, Pakistan's top startup, is shutting down, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, following its inability to raise fresh capital.
Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg:
Sources: China decided to rein in Tencent after two scandals, including a WeChat project to use data science to predict new Politburo standing committee members  —  Imagine for a second life before smartphones.  Simple tasks—ordering takeout, staying in touch—become frustratingly difficult, never mind dealing with emergencies.

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More News

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Earlier Picks

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Reuters:
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Dean Seal / Wall Street Journal:
Malcolm Owen / AppleInsider: