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

Jon Fingas / Engadget: Meta rolls out a Variance Reduction System, its AI ad-targeting tech meant to comply with its DOJ settlement and reduce discrimination in housing ads, in the US  —  Meta is acting on its vow to reduce ad discrimination through technology.  The company is rolling out a Variance Reduction System … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Javier Paz / Forbes: A breakdown of Binance’s known assets, using data from Nansen and others, estimates the exchange has around $50B, including ~$10B in BNB, down 24% from November  —  The outflow of cash from Binance is worse than the CEO Changpeng Zhao indicated last month, and it’s become considerably more severe since then, a Forbes analysis shows. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Rachel Syme / New Yorker: A profile of Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s global head of TV who leads its hyper-aggressive strategy to adapt successful show formats to different parts of the world  —  Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyperaggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.” Lees verder op Tech Meme

Chainalysis: A look at the US government’s crypto-related sanctions strategy, the types of entities sanctioned, and the impact of the sanctions on the crypto crime ecosystem  —  Agencies like the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and its equivalents … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Washington Post: A New York University study finds Russian troll Twitter accounts had a minimal impact on 2016 US election voters; 1% of users accounted for 70% of the exposure  —  Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202!  I caught up on some time hanging out with friends this past weekend.  Friends are cool. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: Southwest Airlines’ recent meltdown exposed an over-reliance on aging crew-assignment software SkySolver, forcing the company to return to manual scheduling  —  The airline industry is long overdue for a tech overhaul that takes full advantage of the cloud and data integration, analysts say Lees verder op Tech Meme

Clive Thompson / MIT Technology Review: A profile of blockchain auditing service CertiK, which inspects smart contracts to help clients like Yuga Labs avoid critical bugs that can lead to lost crypto  —  Programming errors on the blockchain can mean $100 million lost in the blink of an eye.  Ronghui Gu and his company CertiK are trying to help. Lees verder op Tech Meme