Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Twitter has partnered with Dailyhunt to bring Moments to the Indian news app to showcase curated tweets pertaining to news and other events in India — Five years after its launch, Twitter Moments is growing beyond the American social networking platform. — On Monday, Twitter …

Washington Post:
Tech giants are bracing for tougher regulation under Biden's administration, as Democrats' calls for regulation have become more urgent after Capitol attacks — The Democratic Party's calls for regulation have grown more urgent in the days since Biden won the presidency …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
UK-based Bloom & Wild, an online florist that delivers flowers sourced directly from growers, raises $102M Series D led by General Catalyst for expansion in EU — Bloom & Wild, a London-based startup that takes an updated and online approach to the very traditional business of ordering …

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
proSapient, a research service helping customers gather insights from experts via interviews and surveys, raises $10M Series A led by Smedvig Capital — For several years there has been talk about how to leverage ‘experts’ online. How do you ‘suck their brains’ for information in an efficient manner …


Bloomberg:
Sources: as German car trading service Auto1 plans its IPO, Sequoia and Lone Pine will each buy ~€50M in shares from existing investors and put €50M+ in its IPO — - Lone Pine also purchases stock from early backer DN Capital — Both funds want to buy more shares in Auto1's planned IPO

Los Angeles Times:
Amateur digital sleuths have joined massive crowdsourcing efforts on social media to track violent Capitol rioters, passing the evidence to authorities — The digital sleuths take to their computers in the moments when they can peel away from their real-world responsibilities — jobs …

Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal:
Social media algorithms amplify the reach of incendiary, misinformation-filled conspiracy theories, and users have no control over them — What you see in your feeds isn't up to you. What's at stake is no longer just missing a birthday. It's your sanity—and world peace.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
All-in-one HR service Personio raises $125M Series D at a $1.7B post-money valuation co-led by Index Ventures and Meritech — With the last year changing how (and where) many of us work, organizations have started to rethink how well they manage their employees, and what tools they use to do that.

Wall Street Journal:
AT&T, Verizon, and other bidders have spent a record $80.9B during the 5G spectrum auction, expected to lead to a wave of borrowing for the indebted sector — AT&T, Verizon expected to turn to bond markets and banks to finance bids in record-setting FCC airwaves auction

Anshuman Daga / Reuters:
Sources: Southeast Asian ride-hailing and food delivery giant Grab is considering an IPO in the US this year that could raise at least $2B — SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Southeast Asian ride-hailing and food delivery giant Grab is exploring a listing in the United States this year …

Sebastian Sinclair / CoinDesk:
Maps.me, an offline mobile map for travelers, raises $50M in a funding round led by Alameda Research, aims to launch “yield earning” DeFi tools inside the app — The funding will go toward the launch of a multi-currency wallet on Maps.me, enabling decentralized finance (DeFi) features for 140 million users.

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Tencent-backed Hike, once India's answer to WhatsApp and valued at $1.4B in 2016, says it is shutting down its messaging app Sticker Chat — India's answer to WhatsApp has completely moved on from messaging. — Hike Messenger, backed by Tencent, Tiger Global and SoftBank and valued …

Sohee Kim / Bloomberg:
Samsung Electronics heir Jay Y. Lee was sentenced to 30 months in prison over bribery charges; Lee still faces a second prosecution related to succession — - Lee sentenced to two and a half years in jail after court case — Samsung succession scandal has rocked South Korea for years
Benedict Evans:
Social platforms are neither communication services nor publishers, and society will have to evolve new norms to regulate speech on them — Facebook has close to 2bn users, posting over 100bn things each day. The global SMS system, at its peak, had 20-25bn messages a day.

Will Knight / Wired:
A Harvard medical student used OpenAI's GPT-2 to submit comments on Idaho's Medicaid draft proposal; volunteers couldn't tell them apart from those by humans — A Harvard medical student submitted auto-generated comments to Medicaid; volunteers couldn't distinguish them from those penned by humans.
We thought we lost a lot on 9-11, but it's nothing compared to what we're losing now.
NYT front page on 9/12/2001.
There's a weird feeling in the world right now. Tomorrow is a national holiday, and Wednesday is Inauguration Day. No matter what, things will change radically in the US in the next few days.
I got an answer to a question I asked yesterday, about who 20K+ troops in DC will report to, until Biden is sworn in. By law they report to the commander-in-chief, President Trump. Just a fact. If Trump orders them to assassinate everyone at the inauguration, it's not all that different from what Trump told the mob to do on January 6. So unfortunately it is in the realm of possibility.
It all hinges on who the troops are loyal to. Turns out the military thought of that, and pre-screened the soldiers assigned to this job to weed out white supremacists. I kid you not. They know how to do that? I guess it would be naive for them not to.
I have a nightmareish vision of Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981. If you haven't seen it, watch the video. You've never seen anything like it, even in a movie or TV show. As they say, this is why you want to have programmers around, we think about these things. 💥
I read last night that the Pentagon turned Trump down for a great military send-off on Wednesday morning. Interesting, are they allowed to do that? No one seems to be questioning it.
Anyway, if it goes smoothly and the Bidens end up running the government on Thursday, and recinding Trump's orders, the tension goes down a lot. We still have to deal with Trump, and Republicans, but really if they could just STFU our real business is with the virus.
All the usual mottos apply, Let's Have Fun, Still diggin, and It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.