Techmeme
January 22, 2022, 12:40 AM

Top News

Janko Roettgers / Protocol:
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
A group of 34 QA testers at Activision Blizzard's Raven Software vote to unionize with the CWA, and ask the company to voluntarily recognize their union status  —  Microsoft Corp.'s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. will come with an unexpected and perhaps unwelcome addition: a small group of unionized workers.
Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal:
Twitter will let iOS users of its Blue subscription service use NFTs as hexagon-shaped profile pictures  —  Service will be available to some users of the company's Blue subscriber service  —  Twitter Inc. will start allowing some users to use nonfungible tokens as their profile pictures …
Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Hands-on with a pre-release mid-2018 build of Microsoft's canceled Andromeda OS for dual-screen devices  —  We take a look at Microsoft's canceled Andromeda OS project.  —  Ever wondered what Microsoft's canceled version of Windows for the Surface Duo was going to be like?
Tracy Wang / CoinDesk:
CoinGecko: the cryptocurrency industry's market cap fell to ~$1.8T amidst a selloff; in 24 hours, Bitcoin fell 10%+ to ~$36K and Ethereum fell ~13% to ~$2.6K  —  Cryptocurrencies are getting rekt.  —  Crypto blue-chips bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) breached key $40,000 …
Bloomberg:
A look at ID.me, which will soon be used to verify IRS.gov logins and claims to have uncovered a $400B theft of US pandemic unemployment payments  —  If you were writing a techno-thriller, you'd give your hero a backstory like Blake Hall's.  He's a Harvard MBA, an alumnus …
Mack DeGeurin / Gizmodo:
Karl Evers-Hillstrom / The Hill:
Amazon spent a record $20.3M and Meta a record $20.1M on US federal lobbying in 2021, both up ~7% YoY; Google spent $9.6M, up 27%; Apple spending fell to $6.5M  —  Amazon and Meta, Facebook's parent company, spent record sums on federal lobbying in 2021 as they fought legislation to limit their expansive market power.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Berlin-based Moss, which offers a spend management service with credit cards to SMBs, raises a €75M Series B led by Tiger Global at a €500M valuation  —  Berlin-based startup Moss has announced earlier this week that it has closed a new $86 million Series B funding round (€75 million).
Reuters:
Investigation finds that Binance withheld information from regulators and maintained weak checks on customers even as it publicly welcomed government oversight  —  In public, Binance said it welcomed government oversight.  At the same time, the firm was withholding information from regulators …

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More News

Kim Lyons / The Verge:
Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

New York Times:
Alana Semuels / TIME:
Jeff Cox / CNBC:
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / VICE:
Andrew Asmakov / Decrypt: