Tech Meme

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: Lens, a high-performance layer-2 blockchain developed by Avara for consumer apps, raised $31M led by Lightspeed Faction, and plans to launch Lens v3 in Q1 2025  —  Avara, the company behind Aave, Lens and Family, is announcing a $31 million funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Vince Dioquino / Decrypt: El Salvador to scale back its bitcoin efforts under an agreement for a $1.4B IMF loan; bitcoin acceptance will no longer be mandatory for the private sector  —  Under the agreement, El Salvador will make Bitcoin acceptance voluntary for the private sector while restricting public sector involvement. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Vince Dioquino / Decrypt: El Salvador agrees to scale back its bitcoin efforts, including making acceptance of bitcoin voluntary for the private sector, in exchange for a $1.4B IMF loan  —  Under the agreement, El Salvador will make Bitcoin acceptance voluntary for the private sector while restricting public sector involvement. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Deadline: Two Tencent-appointed Epic board directors resigned after the DOJ expressed antitrust concerns; Tencent also gave up its right to appoint future Epic directors  —  Two board members of Epic Games have resigned amid Justice Department concerns over antitrust concerns. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Bloomberg: Sources: neobank Chime confidentially files for a US IPO, aiming to go public in 2025; Chime had a $25B valuation in August 2021  —  – Fintech was last valued at $25 billion in 2021 tech boom  — Chime aims to disrupt banking with digital fee-free offering Lees verder op Tech Meme

Emma Roth / The Verge: Threads rolls out a way to reshare photos and videos without quote posting, but still crediting the original poster; users can turn off the resharing feature  —  Threads is rolling out a new feature that lets you share someone’s photos and videos without including the original post. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Harry McCracken / Fast Company: Flipboard launches Surf, an app for creating custom feeds from Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, RSS, podcasts, and YouTube, in beta for Android, iOS, and iPadOS  —  Fourteen years ago, when the iPad was new and bursting with unfulfilled promise, an app called Flipboard debuted. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Bloomberg: Sources: Amazon delayed RTO dates for some staff in at least seven cities, like Austin, Dallas, and Phoenix, by up to four months, citing a lack of office space  —  – Company is struggling to find space in at least seven cities  — Start dates are being pushed back as much as four months Lees verder op Tech Meme

Paul Alcorn / Tom’s Hardware: Intel announces the first updates to address Arrow Lake’s gaming performance issues, fixing four of the five root causes, and plans a final update for January  —  Time to test.  —  Intel announced that its first wave of updates to address the gaming performance issues plaguing the Arrow Lake processors is now available. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg: Source: Perplexity raised $500M led by Institutional Venture Partners at a $9B valuation earlier in December, up from a $3B valuation in June 2024  —  The company’s valuation has tripled since June. … The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and completed earlier this month … Lees verder op Tech Meme