Bookmarks (12317)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: ActiveFence, whose tech proactively detects disinformation and other malicious content, raises $100M in a combined Series A and Series B  —  Online abuse, disinformation, fraud and other malicious content is growing and getting more complex to track.  Today, a startup called ActiveFence …

Christine Hall / TechCrunch: Nium, a Singapore-based B2B payments company, raises $200M Series D at a $1B+ valuation led by Riverwood Capital, with Temasek, Visa, and others participating  —  Business-to-business payments platform Nium announced Monday that it raised more than $200 million in Series D funding and saw its valuation rise above $1 billion.

The Cloudflare Blog: Cloudflare announces Project Pangea, an initiative to offer its suite of network services to local underserved communities for free  —  Loading...  Half of the world's population has no access to the Internet, with many more limited to poor, expensive, and unreliable connectivity.

Dieter Bohn / The Verge: Samsung confirms that it won't launch Galaxy Note at its Unpacked event on Aug. 11, says it will launch new Galaxy Z phones and an S Pen designed for foldables  —  The company also promises ‘enhanced durability’  —  Samsung isn't looking to have many surprises at its August 11th Unpacked event.

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: About 1,000 current and former Activision Blizzard employees say the company's response to its recent lawsuit is “insulting”, in a letter to leadership  —  Nearly 1,000 current and former Activision Blizzard Inc. employees have signed a letter calling the company's responses …

Stephen Nellis / Reuters: Intel says its Foundry Services will build chips for Qualcomm and AWS and lays out a roadmap to catch up with TSMC and Samsung by 2025  —  Intel Corp (INTC.O) said on Monday its factories will start building Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) chips and laid out a roadmap to expand its new foundry business …

Janko Roettgers / Protocol: Facebook announces a new Metaverse product group, with plans to hire hundreds of staff, led by Instagram VP Vishal Shah, reporting to VR/AR VP Andrew Bosworth  —  The company plans to hire hundreds of new staffers for the group.  —  Facebook is all in on the Metaverse …

Tom Krazit / Protocol: Google issues a new Enterprise APIs policy, promising that APIs will remain available far into the future, aiming to move past a reputation for killing services  —  Google Cloud issued a promise Monday to current and potential customers that it's safe to build a business around its core technologies …

Rebecca Szkutak / Forbes: Teamflow, which provides 2D virtual offices to promote informal collaboration among remote staff, raises $35M Series B at a $225M valuation led by Coatue  —  In 2019, Flo Crivello was working as the head of product for Uber's JUMP Starter division and found himself completely exhausted, on the verge of tears.

Catalin Cimpanu / The Record: Apple updates iOS, iPadOS, and macOS to address a zero-day flaw that was reportedly actively exploited, making it the 13th zero-day Apple has patched this year  —  Apple has released patches today for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS to address a zero-day vulnerability that the company says has been exploited in the wild.

Nico Grant / Bloomberg: Profile of Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian, an Oracle veteran who oversees 37,000 employees and has focused on improving Google's sales teams  —  Google Cloud employees were baffled when they learned that their next boss would be Thomas Kurian, an executive who struggled …

Reuters: Medallia, which offers customer experience management tools, says PE firm Thoma Bravo will take the company private for $6.4B, after going public in 2019  —  Enterprise software firm Medallia Inc (MDLA.N) said on Monday private equity firm Thoma Bravo would take the company private for $6.4 billion in cash.

Todd Feathers / VICE: A look at ShotSpotter, which uses sensors to “detect gunshots”, as court filings suggest it frequently alters evidence at the request of police departments  —  Prosecutors in Chicago are being forced to withdraw evidence generated by the technology, which led to the police killing …

Bloomberg: The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the 30 biggest Hong Kong-listed tech companies, including Tencent and Alibaba, is down $551B+ since its February peak  —  - Gauge has lost about $551 billion in market value from peak  — Still, ETFs tracking it have recorded rising inflows this year

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Solarisbank raises $224M at a $1.65B valuation to acquire rival banking-as-a-service company Contis and expand its API-based embedded banking tech in Europe  —  Embedded finance — the process by which some of the more complicated, but also commoditized, aspects of financial services are built …

Max Fisher / New York Times: Analysts and US officials say the disinformation-for-hire industry is booming, as influencers get approached by back-alley firms to spread falsehoods  —  Back-alley firms meddle in elections and promote falsehoods on behalf of clients who can claim deniability, escalating our era of unreality.

Noah Smith / Noahpinion: China's tech crackdown has focused on consumer-facing internet companies, perhaps because Xi believes hard tech like chipmaking is more geopolitically important  —  Maybe because what countries think of as a “tech industry” isn't always the same  —  Those who pay attention to business news …

Jing Yang / Wall Street Journal: As China ramps up testing of its digital yuan, its call for help from Ant and Tencent has led to an awkward dynamic, as Alipay and WeChat Pay are likely rivals  —  Jack Ma's Ant has quietly run pilot tests using digital yuan; 'it's even more risky to stay on the sidelines,' says one observer