Twitter blocks links to rival Threads, while CEO downplays reports of traffic decline
Recently hired Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is pushing back at reports that Twitter traffic is tanking as a result of the July 5th launch of a new competitor, Instagram Threads. But the company does seem to be concerned about the potential threat posed by Meta’s rival, now topping 100 million
Read moreThe era of tech layoffs is evolving in an interesting way
The era of tech layoffs is not yet past, but it is losing some of its intensity and changing into a unique trend. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. It isn’t surprising to see Microsoft cutting
Read morePrompt engineering startup Vellum.ai raises $5M as demand for generative AI services scales
This morning, Vellum.ai said it had closed a $5 million seed round. The company declined to share who its lead investor was for the round apart from noting that it was a multi-stage firm, but it did tell TechCrunch that Rebel Fund, Eastlink Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator and several
Read moreIndia deals a 28% tax blow to online gaming firms
India unveiled a significant tax increase on turnovers of online gaming companies on Tuesday evening in a major blow to the fast-growing industry that was quick to label the move as “catastrophic” and “unconstitutional.” The Goods and Services Tax Council, which comprises top federal and state finance ministers, said it
Read moreMicrosoft’s Activision Blizzard merger can’t be blocked by FTC, judge rules
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard earned a big win in court today, as a federal judge ruled that the Federal Trade Commission cannot block the $68.7 billion merger. The FTC sued Microsoft in December in an attempt to stop its acquisition of the gaming giant, which owns massive franchises like World
Read moreNothing’s Phone (2) is up for preorder, starting at $599
Nothing was founded on a simple premise: phones are boring. This wasn’t always the case, of course. There was a time before the smartphone became a commodity when the tech world waited with bated breath for the latest device from Apple and Samsung. Ultimately, however, these companies painted themselves into
Read moreRussian transliteration hack
I mentioned in the previous post that I had been poking around in HTML entities and noticed symbols for Fourier transforms and such. I also noticed HTML entities for Cyrillic letters. These entities have the form & + transliteration + cy;. For example, the Cyrillic letter П is based on
Read moreCan banks push Bitcoin to clean up its act?
Rows of Bitcoin mining machines at a facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9th, 2021. | Photo by Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images It’s time for banks and asset managers to start pushing Bitcoin to clean up its pollution, Greenpeace argues in a new report. The environmental organization
Read moreSymbols for transforms
I was looking through HTML entities and ran across ℱ. I searched for all entities ending in trf; and also found ℳ, ℒ, and ℨ. Apparently “trf” stands “transform” and these symbols are intended to be used to represent the Fourier transform, Mellin transform, Laplace transform, and z-transform. You would
Read moreJirav, a startup developing financial planning software for businesses, raises $20M
After years of working for startups including Limeade and Zephyr Health, Martin Zych came to realize that companies were lacking an automated, cloud-based way to run their books and prop up their financial models. Most were stuck with legacy tools with siloed, clunky architectures that made it impossible — or
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