Techmeme
December 23, 2021, 2:25 PM

Top News

Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Marc Andreessen blocked Jack Dorsey on Twitter following his tweets critical of a16z and Web3; Dorsey then tweeted “I'm officially banned from web3”  —  The venture capitalist blocked the former Twitter CEO, and Dorsey said he's now ‘banned from Web3’
Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:
Priya Anand / Bloomberg:
Internal docs show Amazon is struggling to retain Alexa device users; in some years between 2018-2021, 15%-25% of new users were no longer active after one week  —  Each holiday season since 2015, Amazon.com Inc. has counted on selling a lot of its Alexa voice-controlled smart speakers.
Karen Weise / New York Times:
Amazon reaches a nationwide settlement with the NLRB to let its warehouse employees more easily organize, likely affecting over 1M current and former workers  —  The agreement's national scope and its concessions to organizing go further than any previous settlement that the e-commerce giant has made.
Bloomberg:
Intel apologizes, following a backlash in China, for telling Chinese suppliers to avoid Xinjiang labor, saying it only did so to “ensure compliance” with US law  —  - Brand ambassador Wang Junkai cuts ties with the U.S. chipmaker  — Intel asked suppliers not to use labor, products from Xinjiang
James Vincent / The Verge:
Huawei debuts P50 Pocket, a clamshell-style folding device with a circular 1" outer display and 6.9" inner display, available now in China starting at ~$1,400  —  The phone launches in China today, but won't be coming to the US  —  Huawei has officially announced the P50 Pocket …
Brad Stone / Bloomberg:
How Tobi Lütke led Shopify to become an e-commerce giant, helping ~2M merchants run stores as its market cap rose from $46B in early 2020 to $177B today  —  Tobi Lütke transformed the Canadian upstart into an e-commerce giant by being the anti-Bezos.  How long can the formula keep working?
Reuters:
Tencent plans to issue nearly all its JD.com shares, worth $16.37B, to shareholders as a dividend, reducing its stake from 17% to about 2.3%  —  Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent (0700.HK) will hand a $16.4 billion JD.com (9618.HK) stake as a dividend to its shareholders …
Ryan Mac / New York Times:
In a note to employees, Andrew Bosworth envisions Meta offering “deep compatibility with the blockchain” and working “with entrepreneurs in the web3 space”  —  Meta, Facebook's parent company, is aiming for “deep compatibility” with blockchain technology …
Yogita Khatri / The Block:
Research: decentralized exchanges reported $1T+ in 2021 trading volumes as of December 23, up 858% from $115B in 2020; monthly volume peaked in May at $162.8B  —  Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) reported more than $1 trillion in trading volumes in the year 2021, according to The Block Research.
FinSMEs:
China-based TandemAI, which uses AI to speed up the design and optimization of drug candidates, raises $25M in seed and pre-Series A funding  —  TandemAI, a Suzhou, and Shangai, China-based provider of a computational platform to accelerate the design and optimization of drug candidates, raised $25m in Seed and pre-Series A financing.
Jon Caramanica / New York Times:
A look at attempts by TikTok's biggest stars to expand onto other platforms, including Charli D'Amelio's Hulu docuseries, often with mixed results  —  This year, the app's biggest stars — Charli and Dixie D'Amelio, Noah Beck, Addison Rae and others — leapt from the phone screen to other platforms …

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Pranav Balakrishnan / The Economic Times:
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