Mini-Techmeme

Rest of World: New

GSMA: 4.6B people are now connected to mobile internet, or 57% of the world; mobile subscriber growth fell to 160M in 2024, down from 200M per year in 2015-2021

Ryan Gould / Bloomberg: 45 mins ago

Vista sells a minority stake in IT infrastructure monitoring company LogicMonitor to investors in a deal valuing it at ~$2.4B; LogicMonitor also raised $800M

Ryan Browne / CNBC: 2 hours ago

Belgium-based Odoo, which develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, hit a €5B valuation in a secondary share round led by CapitalG and Sequoia

Victoria Song / The Verge: 2½ hours ago

Samsung Galaxy Watch FE review: looks like the Watch 7 and has similar health features, but has the guts of 2021's Watch 4, poor battery life, and one size only

Meytal Vaizberg / Globes Online: 3½ hours ago

Israeli enterprise data security startup Cyera raised a $300M Series D led by Accel and Sapphire Ventures at a $3B+ valuation, up from $1.4B in April 2024

David Streitfeld / New York Times: 4 hours ago

How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment, telling staff to destroy messages, avoid some words, and copy in lawyers, as it faces US lawsuits

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: 4½ hours ago

As OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google reportedly see diminishing generative AI training returns, a market hype break may be useful, just as with previous innovations

Mia Sato / The Verge: 4½ hours ago

Google tightens its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles that have little to do with the website's focus, after cracking down on “reputation abuse”

Bloomberg: 5 hours ago

SMIC's Shanghai-listed shares are up 120% from a September 2024 low, outperforming Nvidia and TSMC, on an expected boost from China's chip self-reliance push

Richard Milne / Financial Times: 5½ hours ago

Klarna's US IPO listing is another deep blow to Europe, where the absence of a complete single market is pushing EU startups to choose US exchanges for an IPO

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times: 6 hours ago

ProRata, which plans to debut an AI search engine in December, inks licensing deals with DMG and others; sources: DMG bought a stake valuing ProRata at ~$130M

Wired: 6 hours ago

An investigation reveals how phone coordinates collected by US data broker Datastream expose the movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany

Financial Times: 6 hours ago

How AI breakthroughs like diffusion models, visual language models, and liquid neural networks are transforming the way robots learn to move and pick up skills

Sharon Goldman / Fortune: 8 hours ago

How Mark Zuckerberg made Llama a cornerstone of AI ambitions at Meta, whose smartphone-era services and products have been constrained by Apple and Google

Yoshua Bengio / Financial Times: 8 hours ago

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio says models like OpenAI's o1 could accelerate research on AI itself and calls for more urgent AI model regulation to protect the public

Nikkei Asia: 8 hours ago

TechInsights: China's chip self-sufficiency rate rose from ~14% in 2014 to 23% in 2023 and is expected to hit 27% in 2027, as China rushes to boost chip supply

Bloomberg: 8 hours ago

Lisbon-based Tekever, which builds surveillance drones that act as the communication and navigation hub for swarms of smaller drones, raised a €70M Series B

Anna Gross / Financial Times: 9 hours ago

Mark Parsons, who led the axed £800M UK supercomputer project, warns that the UK, which no longer has a machine ranked in the top 50, risks falling behind

Mishaal Rahman / Android Police:

Google ships the first Android 16 developer preview, far ahead of schedule compared to the past decade, hoping to lower fragmentation by giving OEMs more time

Wired:

An investigation reveals how phone coordinates collected by US data broker Datastream expose the movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany

Jay Peters / The Verge:

Sony launches PlayStation Portal cloud streaming in beta, letting PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers in 30 countries stream select PS5 games in 720p or 1080p

Rest of World:

GSMA: 4.6B people are now connected to mobile internet, or 57% of the world; mobile subscriber growth fell to 160M in 2024, down from 200M per year in 2015-2021

David Streitfeld / New York Times:

How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment, telling staff to destroy messages, avoid some words, and copy in lawyers, as it faces US lawsuits

Bloomberg:

Source: Microsoft signs a deal with News Corp's HarperCollins to use nonfiction titles to train an unannounced AI model; HarperCollins says authors can opt out

Mia Sato / The Verge:

Google tightens its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles that have little to do with the website's focus, after cracking down on “reputation abuse”

Joseph Cox / 404 Media:

Leaked documents: Graykey, a phone unlocking tool used by police, can access “partial” data from the iPhone 12 up to the iPhone 16 running iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1

Drew Harwell / Washington Post:

Trump Media now has a $6B+ market cap despite struggling to build a profitable revenue stream; Similarweb says site visits fell 20% MoM to 10M in October 2024

Ryan Browne / CNBC:

Belgium-based Odoo, which develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, hit a €5B valuation in a secondary share round led by CapitalG and Sequoia

Sharon Goldman / Fortune:

How Mark Zuckerberg made Llama a cornerstone of AI ambitions at Meta, whose smartphone-era services and products have been constrained by Apple and Google

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:

Amazon says Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers in the US, the UK, and Canada can now listen to one audiobook per month from Audible for free, to counter Spotify

Meta:

Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few

Tribe AI:

Build AI products that matter

Zoho:

CIO challenge 5: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?

Hamming:

Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy