~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Kenya-based Wasoko and Egypt-based MaxAB, two of Africa's largest B2B e-commerce platforms, merge in an all-stock deal; the companies raised over $240M combined  —  Two of Africa's largest B2B e-commerce platforms, Wasoko and MaxAB, have finally completed the continent's much-talked-about merger, TechCrunch has learned.

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: How call centers in the Philippines' vast outsourcing industry are adopting AI tools to assist human operators, in an effort to stay competitive  —  The experiences of staff in the Philippines' outsourcing industry are a preview of the challenges and choices coming soon to white-collar workers around the globe.

Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk: MakerDAO rebrands as Sky and debuts a new USDS stablecoin, but the token draws backlash after users noticed it allows the issuer to remotely freeze the asset  —  MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen said the feature won't be live when the USDS token goes live and the old DAI token will remain in circulation unchanged.

Kali Hays / Fortune: Source: last year, Meta abandoned plans to build its own custom chips for its AR glasses, instead opting to rely on third-party chipmakers like Qualcomm  —  Mark Zuckerberg's vision of AR smart glasses no longer includes custom chips  —  Ambitious efforts inside Meta to build its own custom chips …

Peter Kafka / Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg's letter to Jim Jordan gave Republicans just enough to claim a political win, without getting Meta in more trouble amid its FTC antitrust suit  —  - Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta, one of the world's most valuable tech companies.  — Why did he just send Congress a letter admitting that Meta has screwed up?

Joanna Nelius / The Verge: Google rolls out a Google Meet AI feature that automatically takes notes during meetings conducted in spoken English, available to select Workspace customers  —  Google Meet's newest AI-powered feature, “take notes for me,” has started rolling out today to Google Workspace customers …

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: Self-driving truck company TuSimple, which delisted from Nasdaq in January, reaches a $189M settlement of a suit alleging fraud by overstating safety and more  —  TuSimple (TSPH.PK) reached a $189 million settlement of a lawsuit accusing the self-driving truck technology company …

Rachel Kaser / VentureBeat: Web3 esports startup Gameplay Galaxy, focused on developing upcoming game Trial Xtreme Freedom, raised a $24M seed co-led by Blockchain Capital and Merit Circle  —  Gameplay Galaxy announced today that it has raised $24 million in total for its seed round of funding, following …

Taylor Soper / GeekWire: Seattle-based startup Supio, which uses AI to help lawyers analyze documents, raised a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures  —  Supio, a Seattle startup founded in 2021 by longtime friends and former Microsoft engineers, raised a $25 million Series A investment to supercharge …

Bloomberg: Former staff of video games payments company Xsolla say in lawsuits that CEO Aleksandr Agapitov leans heavily on company revenue for his new, flashier lifestyle  —  Aleksandr “Shurick” Agapitov spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure his company's name - Xsolla …

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: The crypto industry, heavily reliant on Telegram, has been Pavel Durov's loudest defender after his arrest; the Telegram-linked TON coin has a $13.7B market cap  —  When the messaging app's founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested, he received a flood of support from a multitrillion-dollar industry that relies on it.

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: How some Chinese AI companies use brokers to access GPUs despite US sanctions, sometimes using cryptocurrency smart contracts to anonymously process orders  —  SINGAPORE—Chinese artificial-intelligence developers have found a way to use the most advanced American chips without bringing them to China.

Financial Times: Chinese tech giants splurge on AI infrastructure, doubling their 2024 capex; Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu had a combined capex of ~$7B in H1 2024, up 50%+ YoY  —  Alibaba reports artificial intelligence servers running at full capacity, while ByteDance buys limited-power Nvidia chips in bulk

Lara Jakes / New York Times: How Ukraine is working with private firms to test AI and other tech in drones to find land mines, save lives, and allow military forces to advance more quickly  —  Ukraine is a beta test for embedding artificial intelligence and other new technologies in drones and robots to find deadly land mines …

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: A look at voice bots from Indian startups Sarvam AI, CoRover, and Gnani.ai; Samsung-backed Gnani now handles millions of voice conversations daily for companies  —  India's startups are betting AI voice products can reach more of the country than text-based chatbots

Allison Johnson / The Verge: A deeper look at Google's shockingly good Reimagine feature for Pixel 9, which lets users add things to photos via prompts and lacks strong guardrails  —  Google is the latest phone company this year to announce AI photo editing tools, following Samsung's somewhat troubling …

Matthew Green / A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: A look at Telegram's claims that it's a “secure messenger” despite lacking default end-to-end encrypted messages and any E2E encrypted option for group chats  —  This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn't spend time on questions like the above.

Bloomberg: Telegram says its CEO Pavel Durov has “nothing to hide” and that the messaging app “abides by EU laws”, including the Digital Services Act  —  - Company says it isn't responsible for abuse on messaging app  — Billionaire co-founded taken into custody at a Paris airport

Grant Stoner / IGN: How prominent games accessibility advocate Susan Banks, who worked with studios and raised awareness for accessibility in games, may never have existed at all  —  In 2019, the games accessibility community mourned the death of Susan Banks.  Now, evidence suggests she may have never existed to begin with.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: A look at Apple's robotics efforts; sources: Meta will unveil prototype “Orion” AR glasses, a cheaper Quest, and new AI features for Ray-Ban Meta at Connect  —  Also: Meta nears the launch of a cheaper Quest; Apple tries a new Vision Pro sales tactic; and the App Store chief is leaving as part of a reorganization.

New York Times: An excerpt from the book Character Limit details the chaotic revamp of Twitter Blue, including Elon Musk's haphazard planning and Esther Crawford's involvement  —  By Nov. 9, 2022, anxiety was high among the Twitter employees gathered at the company's San Francisco headquarters.

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: The problem with Xbox's new vision isn't that it's moving away from console-exclusive games, but that its release strategy is confusing and inconsistent  —  Hi everyone.  Today we're trying to figure out just what the heck Xbox is doing, but first...  - Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was really into Dreamcast

New York Times: Some San Francisco city officials say they're not lamenting X's departure from the city, as X bears little resemblance to the company that SF welcomed in 2012  —  The company, founded in the city as Twitter, is moving its headquarters to Texas as a shadow of its former self.

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Threads says it is testing ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours with a limited number of users, but doesn't say if the experiment is region-specific  —  Automatically disappearing posts on social networks could be handy for users who have a habit of deleting their posts through third-party tools …