- Google unveils classroom and accessibility ChromeOS features, including rolling out a tool to let users control a device with their head and facial expressions (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
- All the things Nintendo didn’t tell us about the Switch 2
- U.S. and Norway sign technology safeguards agreement for launches from Andøya
- Lindus Health raises $55M to ‘fix the broken clinical trial industry’
- TikTokers offered $5,000 to join Facebook and Instagram
- Memo: ByteDance asks Chinese staff in Singapore to pay tax to China or risk losing their ability to cash out on stock options, as China steps up tax enforcement (Financial Times)
- Crypto exchange Deribit reports total trading volume, including options, futures, and more, rose 95% YoY to $1.19T in 2024; options volume rose 99% YoY to $743B (Omkar Godbole/CoinDesk)
- A Texas District Court rules against Tornado Cash sanctions, ordering a previous decision to be reversed; the US sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022 (Danny Park/The Block)
- Hubble tension is now in our cosmic backyard, sending cosmology into crisis
- UK CMA Chair Marcus Bokkerink plans to leave the antitrust agency, after pressure from UK ministers; the CMA appoints ex-Amazon exec Doug Gurr as interim chair (Financial Times)
- Google hit with $12.6M fine in Indonesia for monopolistic practices in payment system
- Hindustan Unilever acquires Peak XV-backed Minimalist for over $340M
- Save nearly $75 on these all-purpose Celestron Nature DX ED 8×42
- UK appoints ex-Amazon executive Doug Gurr as interim chair of antitrust body
- In 2024, Cloudflare's autonomous DDoS defense systems blocked 21.3M DDoS attacks, up 53% YoY, and 420 DDoS attacks in Q4 2024 exceeded 1 Tbps, up 1,885% QoQ (The Cloudflare Blog)
- What does Trump's executive order mean for TikTok and who might buy it?
- Eager to attract investments, politicians in Brazil, India, and other non-Western nations with nascent AI regulations have warmly welcomed major AI companies (Rest of World)
- Why some astronomers are excited about the search for alien life
- Indian fintech Jar turns cash flow positive
- Vertice raises $50M for its AI-powered SaaS spend platform
- Days before TikTok briefly went dark, Instagram and Facebook made design tweaks, released new features, and ran ads promoting its apps as TikTok alternatives (Louise Matsakis/Wired)
- Quant trading firm XTX, managing $250B+ in daily trades, plans to invest €1B+ on five data centers in Finland to support its growing use of machine learning (Bloomberg)
- Some crypto executives fear investor backlash over $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins; CoinMarketCap reports most $TRUMP trading is concentrated on Asian exchanges (Financial Times)
- Truecaller rolls out real-time caller ID to its ~750K iOS subscribers, who account for 40% of its revenue; Truecaller has 2.6M+ paying subscribers in total (TechCrunch)
- Microsoft to buy 3.5M carbon credits, estimated to be worth about $200M, from Re.green over 25 years to restore parts of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic forests (Kenza Bryan/Financial Times)
- The Trump administration removed all advisory committee members within the DHS, including those in CISA and CSRB, which was investigating Salt Typhoon (Becky Bracken/Dark Reading)
- Sources: Google is investing over $1B more in Anthropic, which is also nearing a further $2B funding round from Lightspeed and other VCs at a ~$60B valuation (Financial Times)
- Truecaller brings real-time caller ID to iPhone users
- DealStreetAsia: Southeast Asian startups raised $4.56B in 2024, down 42% YoY and falling to a fifth of a 2021 peak, as the number of deals fell 10% YoY to 633 (Tsubasa Suruga/Nikkei Asia)
- US tech giants announce AI plan worth up to $500bn
- An internal probe into SoftBank-backed eFishery, one of Indonesia's most prominent startups, finds the agritech company allegedly faked most of its 2024 sales (Bloomberg)
- Documents: Google gave Israel access to its latest AI tools from the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, directly assisting the Defense Ministry and the IDF (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)
- Filing: OpenAI spent $1.76M on lobbying in 2024, up from 2023's $260K, with focus on the AI Advancement and Reliability Act and the Future of AI Innovation Act (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)
- Sources: a deep philosophical rift over how DOGE should operate helped spur Vivek Ramaswamy's exit, with Donald Trump's Jan. 20 EO embodying Elon Musk's vision (Washington Post)
- Can DNA-nanoparticle motors get up to speed with motor proteins?
- Dolphins use a 'fat taste' system to get their mother's milk
- Sources: ByteDance plans to spend ~$5.5B to acquire AI chips in China in 2025, double the amount spent in 2024, with ~60% going to Chinese suppliers like Huawei (Financial Times)
- Render, which offers developers cloud services for building, deploying, and running apps and websites, raised an $80M Series C led by Georgian (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
- Trump pardons Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht
- Netflix to raise prices as new subscribers soar
- MrBeast is reportedly now among those trying to buy TikTok
- Finland signs Artemis Accords
- StackBlitz, which offers an AI tool to create websites using text prompts, says it's finalizing raising $83.5M at a $700M valuation, following a $22M Series A (Bloomberg)
- Trump grants a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency world who was serving a life sentence (New York Times)
- OpenAI ups its lobbying efforts nearly seven-fold
- Highnote, which offers businesses a card-issuing software, raised a $90M Series B led by Adams Street Partners, a source says at a $750M+ valuation (Stephen Pastis/Forbes)
- Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg sanctioned by judge for allegedly deleting emails
- Survey of 3,000+ game devs: 11% were laid off in the past year, 58% back unionization, 30% say generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, more (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
- Trump says he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok US as part of a joint venture that would give the US government 50% ownership (Bloomberg)
- Microsoft says it has a new deal with OpenAI that gives Microsoft “right of first refusal”, meaning it's no longer OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Ideas realized
