Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Reykjavik-based Pearl Abyss’ CCP Games raised $40M in financing led by a16z to launch a triple-A blockchain game set in the Eve Online universe — CCP Games has raised $40 million in funding to make a new triple-A blockchain game set in the Eve Online universe.
Read MoreAdi Robertson / The Verge: Ahead of a US House hearing on 3/23, TikTok posts a video, with 2M+ views, of its CEO rallying users to defend the app against a US ban, saying it may harm SMBs — TikTok is rolling out a charm offensive ahead of Thursday’s congressional hearing, putting CEO Shou Zi
Read MoreAlexandra S. Levine / Forbes: An internal TikTok tool can access some personal data of Indian users who used the app before India’s 2020 ban; an employee jokingly called the tool “NSA-To-Go” — India’s 150 million users were forced to stop using the Chinese-owned app in 2020.
Read MoreTake a good look — this may only be available “for a limited period.” | Image: DPReview.com Amazon will be shutting down DPReview, the trusted and comprehensive camera reviews website, as part of the 18,000 job cuts it announced in January. According to an announcement posted on the site, the DPReview team will continue publishing
Read MoreDespite the increasing popularity of various electric vehicles, the limits of battery technology continue to be a bottleneck in their day-to-day use. They don’t behave well in extreme temperatures, they can wear out quickly, and, perhaps most obviously, charging them is often burdensome. Larger batteries take longer to charge, and this can take a lot
Read MoreThe Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against Ripple over the XRP token will establish a critical precedent.
Read MoreKyle Orland / Ars Technica: Roblox rolls out AI tools, including Code Assist to let creators use simple text prompts to create usable code and Material Generator for in-game 2D surfaces — New initiative aims to take game development past “the hands of the skilled few.” — SAN FRANCISCO—At the Game Developers Conference Monday …
Read MoreLast week, we learned — from Bloomberg — that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing’s AI chatbot and ChatGPT. Don’t have access to all that capital or space for all that
Read MoreDevindra Hardawar / Engadget: Nvidia announces DGX Cloud, offering its AI supercomputers to companies looking to scale up their AI needs, starting at $36,999 per month for a single node — When NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang waxed poetic about artificial intelligence in the past, it mostly felt like marketing bluster …
Read MoreIllustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok is rolling out a charm offensive ahead of Thursday’s congressional hearing, putting CEO Shou Zi Chew in users’ feeds to warn them about a looming ban. Chew posted a minute-long video to the ByteDance subsidiary’s official TikTok account, rallying users to defend the app. Chew’s video outlines
Read MorePaul Alcorn / Tom’s Hardware: NVIDIA unveils cuLitho, a software library for computational lithography that TSMC and Synopsys have integrated into their tools and manufacturing processes — Faster masks, less power. — Nvidia announced its new cuLitho software library for speeding up a critical process in the semiconductor manufacturing workflow.
Read MoreBlake Schmidt / Bloomberg: Grammarly appoints Global Head of Product Rahul Roy-Chowdhury as its CEO, starting on May 1, replacing Brad Hoover, who will stay on as a board member — Grammarly, the creator of a popular writing assistant, is replacing its chief executive officer and launching a new artificial intelligence tool …
Read MoreImage: Ford Ford’s third-ever all-electric vehicle is a Europe-only crossover SUV with one of the automaker’s most popular nameplates. The Explorer EV will also be the first in a wave of new plug-in vehicles for the automaker’s overseas lineup, as it works toward an electric-only portfolio in Europe by 2030. The Explorer EV may carry
Read MoreIllustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge With new tools like Guest Star and improvements to existing monetization programs, Twitch believes it’s the best place for creators right now. Continue reading…
Read MoreGoogle is stressing that Bard is an experiment rather than a finished product. | Image: Google Today, Google is opening up limited access to Bard, its ChatGPT rival, a major step in the company’s attempt to reclaim what many see as lost ground in a new race to deploy AI. Bard will be initially available
Read MorePhoto illustration: Alex Parkin / The Verge This special episode dives deep into Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023 because Taylor Swift fans were so upset
Read MoreBard looks like a search engine, though Google says it isn’t one. | Image: Google “Bard is a complement to search.” That’s how Google describes the relationship between Bard, the new chatbot entering into beta testing today, and its monolithic search engine. The way the company sees it, Bard is less a tool for finding
Read MoreThe right shelter can make a big difference in how comfortable you are outdoors. Here are the ones we’ve tested and love.
Read MoreHow do you take your music these days? For those in Camp Tangible, it seems our ranks are certainly growing, and in the analog direction. For the first time since 1987, vinyl record sales have outperformed CD sales in the US, according to a new report. The CD, which saved us all from the cassette,
Read MoreJames Vincent / The Verge: Hands-on with Google’s Bard, available via waitlist in the US and UK: quick and fluid, more constrained than Bing, three responses/query, disclaimers, and more — Today, Google is opening up limited access to Bard, its ChatGPT rival, a major step in the company’s attempt to reclaim …
Read MoreIllustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge A former security policy manager at Meta had her phone wiretapped and hacked by Greece’s national intelligence agency, according to a report from The New York Times. Artemis Seaford, who worked for Meta while partly living in Greece, was reportedly surveilled with the help of spyware called Predator.
Read MoreMary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: eToro secures $250M at a $3.5B valuation via an Advanced Investment Agreement signed in 2021, after scrapping its SPAC plans in 2022 amid slowing growth — After calling off its plans to go public via a SPAC at a $10.4 billion valuation in 2022, trading platform eToro has secured $250
Read MoreCurrent Oracle Java SE licensees are not required to move to the company’s controversial new Java subscription plan, which charges based on the number of employees rather than the number of actual Java users. Their current Java SE licenses and related support offerings will continue as usual. While the new per-employee licensing, called the Java
Read MoreThe tech job market is in a perpetual state of flux. One day, there’s news of talent shortages; the next, rampant layoffs. But one thing remains constant: there will always be a need for skilled tech workers. Whether the market is booming or a recession looms, positions for highly skilled tech professionals can sit unfilled
Read MoreKarl Bode / Techdirt: Instead of myopically fixating on TikTok, the US should pass a real privacy law to regulate data brokers, who offer anyone info on US citizens, including China — from the you’re-not-actually-fixing-the- problem dept — We’ve noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a
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