Techmeme
July 3, 2024, 6:20 PM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has 175M+ MAUs, up from 150M in April, ahead of its one-year anniversary on July 5; source: Meta may turn on ads in Threads in 2025  —  A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.  —  Now, the rival to Elon Musk's X has reached …
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Q&A with Adam Mosseri on Threads' first year, not leaning into political content, driving engagement, focusing on real-time content, the fediverse, and more  —  A year ago this week, Meta introduced Threads to the world.  —  The text-based social network, which launched as a kind …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Twilio says threat actors identified the phone numbers of users of its 2FA app Authy; last week, hackers claimed to have stolen 33M phone numbers from Twilio  —  Last week, a hacker claimed to have stolen 33 million phone numbers from U.S. messaging giant Twilio.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon plans to discontinue Astro for Business, its robot security guard for SMBs announced in November 2023, on September 25 to focus on its Astro home robot  —  Astro is leaving its job to spend more time with family.  —  Amazon informed customers and employees Wednesday morning that it plans …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
OpenAI updates its ChatGPT macOS app to encrypt locally stored conversations, after a user discovered that the app was storing chats in plain text  —  Until Friday, OpenAI's recently launched ChatGPT macOS app had a potentially worrying security issue: it wasn't hard to find your chats stored …
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg:
UK-listed Keywords Studios, which provides game development, audio, and art services to Epic and others, agrees to private equity firm EQT's ~£2.1B takeover bid  —  - Investors get £24.50 per share in cash in private equity deal  — Keywords works for titles including Fortnite, Call of Duty
Rocky Swift / Reuters:
Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, after scrapping over 1,000 regulations governing their use  —  Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone …
Financial Times:
Sources: later in July, the EU will suggest scrapping the €150 threshold below which goods are exempt from customs duties, targeting Temu, AliExpress, and Shein  —  European Commission plans to scrap €150 threshold below which goods are exempt from customs duties
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Noplace, a new social media app with colorful, customizable profiles and text-based updates targeting Gen Z, reaches number one on the iOS App Store in the US  —  Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace has surged to the top of the App Store as it launched out of invite-only mode Wednesday.
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Proton launches Docs in Proton Drive, a privacy-focused alternative to Google Docs, after acquiring secure note-taking app Standard Notes in April 2024  —  Proton, the Swiss-based pro-privacy productivity app maker, has a new feather in its cap after bringing document creation …
Emma Farge / Reuters:
WIPO: between 2014 and 2023, 54K generative AI patents were filed, 25% of which were filed in 2023; China leads with 38K+ patents, followed by the US with 6,276  —  China is far ahead of other countries in generative AI inventions like chatbots, filing six times more patents than its closest rival …
Julia Love / Bloomberg:
Alphabet winds down agriculture startup Mineral, which became an independent subsidiary in 2023, and licenses some of its tech to berry producer Driscoll's  —  The company no longer has a place for all of its moonshot startups  —  Alphabet Inc. is licensing some technology …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Koo, an Indian rival to X that had raised $60M+ from Tiger Global, Accel, and others, shuts down after last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed  —  The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk's X, is ceasing operations …
Rand Fishkin / SparkToro:
Datos: 58.5% of Google searches in the US and 59.7% in the EU result in no clicks; for 1,000 searches, 360 clicks go to the open web in the US and 374 in the EU  —  Over the past decade, I've done several reports with multiple clickstream panels analyzing Google search behavior at scale.

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