Tech Meme

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: A UK law mandates new properties in England must be built with gigabit broadband connections; DCMS says gigabit connections are available in 72%+ of households  —  My years-long battle to get gigabit internet installed may soon be over, thanks to new rules introduced by the UK government … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Financial Times: Meta contractor Sama plans to close its east African content moderation hub in March, cutting ~200 staff; Meta will employ 1,500 Sama staff for data labelling  —  Staff at Nairobi office were moderating graphic and harmful material  —  Meta’s east African content moderation hub is shutting … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Adam Conway / XDA Developers: Google releases the Extension SDK for developers to bring new features, like the new Photo Picker API that launched with Android 13, to older Android versions  —  The Extensions SDK is what makes features like Photo Picker possible on older Android versions. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: TSMC reports Q4 revenue up 43% YoY to ~$20.6B, below ~$20.8B analyst estimates, its first miss in two years; TSMC stock dropped 27% in 2022 but is up 8% in 2023  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s fourth-quarter sales missed analysts’ estimates, signaling the global decline … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Microsoft unveils VALL-E, a text-to-speech AI model trained on 60K hours of English speech that can simulate a person’s voice from three seconds of sample audio  —  Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker’s emotional tone and acoustic environment.  —  On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Microsoft acquires Fungible, which makes data processing units for data centers and has raised over $300M; reports from December say the deal is worth ~$190M  —  In December, reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Damir Yalalov / Metaverse Post: VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model can duplicate everyone’s voice in three seconds  —  Since the release of the first text-to-speech (TTS) model, researchers have been looking for ways to improve the way these systems generate speech.  The latest model from Microsoft … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Juro Osawa / The Information: Sources: Douyin e-commerce spending in China grew 76% YoY to ~$208B in 2022; TikTok users in Southeast Asia more than quadrupled their spending to $4.4B in 2022  —  TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is making inroads in e-commerce.  Consumers in China last year spent 1.41 trillion yuan … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Meta plans to stop releasing software updates and drop some social features for the original Quest, which debuted in 2019, but will fix critical bugs until 2024  —  Meta is planning to stop supporting the original Quest VR headset with new software updates, and soon anyone using the older hardware … Lees verder op Tech Meme

VentureBeat: Dallas-based Worlds, whose “digital twins” of industrial companies’ floor operations help boost productivity, raised a $21.2M Series A1 led by Moneta Ventures  —  Worlds Enterprises, a company that builds digital twins of floor operations for industrial companies to let them become … Lees verder op Tech Meme