Techmeme
May 15, 2023, 8:05 PM

Top News

Adam Satariano / New York Times:
EU regulators approve Microsoft's $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition after Microsoft made concessions to keep rivals' access to Call of Duty and other games  —  The green light follows objections to the blockbuster deal by American and British regulators on the grounds that it would undercut competition.
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Docs: in an informal Azure investigation, EU regulators ask rivals and clients if Microsoft leveraged its market power and business info to squeeze competitors  —  Microsoft Corp.'s Azure cloud business has been targeted by the European Union's antitrust arm, amid concerns the US software firm …
Jacob Bogage / Washington Post:
Sources: the IRS quietly built a prototype system to let Americans file tax returns digitally and free of charge, with a pilot slated to launch in January 2024  —  The prototype program developed by the federal government could be available for a small group of taxpayers by January
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Google's I/O 2023 suggests that AI is a sustaining innovation for Big Tech; the true fight will be between the major players' centralized models and open source  —  Some things in tech are shocking, but not surprising — think of a CEO of a struggling company losing their job.
Jared Newman / Fast Company:
Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Pozin's Telly opens a waitlist to give away 500K 55-inch 4K HDR TVs, which have a second screen for constantly showing ads, in 2023  —  Would you take a free TV if it constantly ran banner ads beneath everything you watched?  —  That's the proposition for Telly …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
WhatsApp introduces Chat Lock, which lets users put chats in a password- or biometrics-protected folder and hide chats' contents and senders in notifications  —  WhatsApp is getting a new “Chat Lock” feature intended to make it easier to keep conversations more private.
Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Amazon job listings mention an “AI-first initiative to re-architect” search and “reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience”  —  Amazon.com Inc. plans to bring ChatGPT-style product search to its web store, rivaling efforts by Microsoft Corp …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
MoffettNathanson: US pay TV users fell 7% YoY to 75.5M in Q1 2023, with household penetration at 58.5%, the lowest level since 1992; only YouTube TV grew in Q1  —  As streaming video continues its ascendancy, cable, satellite and internet TV providers in the U.S. turned in their worst subscriber losses …
Stefania Palma / Financial Times:
Phoebe Liu / Forbes:
Zip, which sells procurement management software, raised a $100M Series C led by Y Combinator at a $1.5B post-money valuation, taking its total funding to $181M  —  Zip, a San Francisco-based startup that helps businesses manage spending, announced a fresh round of capital today …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.
IDrive:
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.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord's product chief | Peter Sellis
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:05 PM ET, May 15, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Sara Fischer / Axios:
Bloomberg:
Kate King / Wall Street Journal:
LinkedIn: Daniel McCarthy and Amjad AhmadMastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
Tweets: @wsj and @trengriffin