Author: uzair

Kate Irwin / Decrypt:DeFi-focused startup Common raises $20M from Spark Capital, Polychain, Jump, Wintermute, and others for Commonwealth, its community management platform for DAOsCommon’s investors include BitDAO, Spark Capital, and Jump.Common’s new funds will go toward the further development Click here to read full news..

Amazon’s massive cloud-computing unit is aggressively recruiting U.S. government officials as it pushes to make itself essential to branches such as the military and the intelligence community, POLITICO reported Friday. From the report: Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That’s a small portion of AWS’ tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security,…

Sean Burch / The Wrap:Triller CEO now says the company never inflated user numbers and that Triller should even be valued at over $10B based on claims made in a Billboard reportCEO Mike Lu said the company has never padded its user count, one day after Billboard said the app had half the 50 million users it claimed Click here to read full news..

Taylor Lorenz / New York Times:A look at Fuck You Pay Me, a Glassdoor-like service where creators can review brands they have worked with and share ad ratesFed up with the imbalance between online influencers and brands, Lindsey Lee Lugrin and Isha Mehra created a platform to change that. Click here to read full news..

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:Everlaw, which offers ML-powered ediscovery tools for legal teams, raises a $202M Series D led by TPG Growth at a $2B+ valuationEverlaw, a cloud-native legal technology platform specializing in electronic discovery (ediscovery), has raised $202 million in a series D round of funding Click here to read full news..

Social media may be bad for our health, argues long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher in the New York Times:In March of 2018, I interviewed Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, at the top of the company’s San Francisco tower. He offered up an astonishing metaphor when I asked him for his take on the impact of social media companies. “Facebook is the new cigarettes,” Benioff said. “It’s addictive. It’s not good for you.” As it did with cigarette companies, “the government needs to step in,” he added.” The government needs to really regulate what’s happening.” At the time, I…

In late March, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) readmitted its founder Richard M. Stallman (RMS) to its board, catching everyone by surprise. Now, weeks later, RMS “offers a defensive non-apology apology for the words and actions that led to his resignation from the FSF,” writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols via ZDNet. Slashdot reader destinyland shares an excerpt of his statement from the Free Software Foundation’s official website: Looking back over his life starting as a teenager, Stallman writes: “I realized that I didn’t understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people…

Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:Goldbelly, an online marketplace enabling restaurants and chefs to sell and ship their dishes across the US, raises $100M Series C, says it now has 850 partnersGoldbelly, an e-commerce platform for restaurant food, boomed during the pandemic. Will the trend stick Click here to read full news..

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:OpenAI introduces two new GPT-3 models: CLIP, which classifies images into categories from arbitrary text, and DALLE, which can generate images from textOpenAI has extended GPT-3 with two new models that combine NLP with image recognition to give its AI a better understanding of everyday concepts. Click here to read full news..

Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:Texas asks SCOTUS to keep the state’s social media law in effect; AG Ken Paxton argues that social media platforms should be regulated as common carriersTexas attorney general Ken Paxton argues social media platforms are the ‘twenty-first century descendants of telegraph and telephone companies Click here to read full news..