Techmeme: Insurance broker Howden: cyberattacks have lost UK businesses ~£44B in revenue in the past five years and 52% of companies have reported at least one attack (Carolyn Cohn/Reuters)

Top News

Sources: Sony is in the early stages of developing a portable console for PS5 games, building on the PlayStation Portal, although its debut is likely years away — - Nintendo's Switch has dominated mobile console space for years — Rival Microsoft is also developing portable gaming prototypes

James Hunt / The Block:

MicroStrategy bought 55,500 bitcoin for ~$5.4B cash at an average price of $97,862 between November 18 and November 24, taking its holdings to ~386,700 bitcoin — - MicroStrategy has purchased another 55,580 BTC for approximately $5.4 billion at an average price of $97,862 per bitcoin.

More: MicroStrategy, Decrypt, DL News, Bloomberg, CoinDesk, Yahoo Finance, Wccftech, The Crypto Times, Watcher Guru, CryptoSlate, The Crypto Basic, Coinpedia Fintech News, CoinGape, Crypto Briefing, and Cointelegraph

X: @saylor. Forums: r/CryptoCurrency, r/wallstreetbetsGER, and r/MSTR

Sarah Kessler / New York Times:

US coding boot camp graduates are facing a tough job market due to AI coding tools and mass layoffs; CompTIA: developer job listings are down 56% since 2019 — Coding boot camps once looked like the golden ticket to an economically secure future. But as that promise fades, what should you do?

More: Forbes and Freddie deBoer

Mastodon: @jgordon@appdot.net. Bluesky: @ryanlcooper.com and @stevefaktor.com

Forums: Slashdot and Slashdot

New York Times:

Sources: Intel, the biggest recipient of CHIPS Act money, could get less than $8B, after its Ohio plant delays; the US announced $8.5B for Intel earlier in 2024 — The Biden administration is reducing its award to the pioneering chip maker to less than $8 billion, from $8.5 billion.

More: CNBC, Computerworld, Proactive, Reuters, Benzinga, The Straits Times, Oregonian, Politico, and Political Wire. Forums: r/hardware

Steven Overly / Politico:

Q&A with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on what happens to the $50B CHIPS program under the Trump administration, the future of AI safety, China, and more

More: Semafor. X: @pstasiatech, @benjaminhaddad, @jmart, and @senatorhagerty

Peter Chapman / Bloomberg:

The EU says Corning offered commitments in a bid to settle an antitrust probe over alleged exclusive Gorilla Glass deals, including waiving exclusive clauses — - EU feared deals for smartphone glass were anti-competitive — US firm could avoid hefty fines if remedies are accepted

More: European Commission, The Verge, TechCrunch, and Reuters

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Tel Aviv-based Appcharge, which helps publishers build websites to sell gaming currencies and other virtual goods, raised $26M at a $100M valuation — As Apple and Google continue to battle with regulators and publishers over whether their app stores are monopolistic, a startup called Appcharge …

More: GamesIndustry.biz and Appcharge

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:

PlayAI, which uses AI to clone voices for $49 or $99 per month and recently rolled out AI agents, raised a $20M seed co-led by 500 Startups and Kindred Ventures — Back in 2016, Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel, an ex-WhatsApp engineer, thought it'd be neat to build a text-to-speech Chrome extension for Medium articles.

More: SiliconANGLE, Tech Funding News, and PlayAI Blog

Gary Marcus / Marcus on AI:

A skeptical look at the new AI scaling “laws”, including post-train duration and “inference time compute”, and why they may fail to predict AI model performance — Scaling laws ain't what they used to be — “If anything we are seeing the emergence of a new scaling law …

Financial Times:

The EU says Bluesky breaches its rules for not disclosing key details about itself, and has asked 27 governments to see “if they can find any trace of Bluesky” — Social media platform that has grown in exodus from Elon Musk's X is accused of not declaring user numbers

More: Reuters. Bluesky: @kylereed.bsky.social, @marypcbuk.bsky.social, @ernie.tedium.co, @emilprotalinski.bsky.social, @faineg.bsky.social, and @martinsfp.bsky.social

Stephen Nellis / Reuters:

Nvidia unveils Fugatto, a new AI model for generating music and audio that can modify voices and make novel sounds, trained on open-source data — Nvidia (NVDA.O) on Monday showed a new artificial intelligence model for generating music and audio that can modify voices and generate novel sounds …

More: Moneycontrol, Engadget, NVIDIA, Digital Trends, and NewsBytes

Aisha S Gani / Bloomberg:

Klarna reports ~$1.85B in Q1 to Q3 2024 revenue, up 23% YoY, pretax loss down 99% YoY to ~$180K, and Q3 net income up 57% YoY to ~$19.7M, as its US IPO nears — - Buy now, pay later firm's revenue up 23% in nine-month period — Klarna has filed for an initial public offering in the US

More: Klarna US

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:

Italian PE firm Bending Spoons plans to take cloud video platform Brightcove private in a $233M deal; Brightcove, founded in 2004, makes monetization tools — Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology …

More: Brightcove Inc.

Wall Street Journal:

Sources: in the past year, Cantor Fitzgerald agreed to invest as much as $600M in Tether for a ~5% stake; Cantor holds most of Tether's $134B in assets — Before becoming Trump's commerce secretary pick, Lutnick deepened Cantor's ties with a stablecoin firm under investigation

More: Yahoo Finance, CCN.com, Inside Bitcoins, CoinDesk, Bitcoin Insider, Coinpedia Fintech News, The Information, Cryptopolitan, Cryptonews, crypto.news, Crypto Briefing, and Cointelegraph

X: @ryanrodenbaugh, @ccatalini, @ccatalini, @ccatalini, @ccatalini, @silvermanjacob, and @waynevaughan. LinkedIn: Ben Foldy

Bloomberg:

Sources: Cantor Fitzgerald plans a $2B+ program to lend USD to clients who put up bitcoin as collateral and is talking with Tether about supporting the program

More: Coinspeaker, crypto.news, Decrypt, Cryptopolitan, CryptoSlate, Benzinga, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, DL News, CryptoGlobe, and Coinpedia Fintech News

Bluesky: @kwerb.bsky.social. X: @alderlaneeggs, @zerohedge, and @_peterryan

Sponsor Posts

TELUS Digital:

Are you ready for the era of agentic AI? — Tech leaders are always talking about what's next, and right now, agentic AI is dominating the discourse. Equip yourself with the info you need in this recorded webinar.

Tribe AI:

State of AI: Adoption, Challenges and Recommendations — Examining the current state of AI, the key challenges organizations face, and practical recommendations for utilizing AI integration alongside other best practices.

Zoho:

Unveiling AI-powered updates in Zoho Sheet — In 2024, we, the Zoho Sheet team, dedicated ourselves to research and development in order to introduce new features that enhance productivity, data management, collaboration, and other functionalities.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:

Big Tech's Tariff Chaos + A.I. 2027 + Llama Drama

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.