Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Pickleball is the pastâthe tech elite is obsessed with padel. ⹠Plus, an Americana-themed batch of Recommendationsâour weekly pop culture picks: âThe Americans,â âEast of Eden,â âHigh Desert Daydream,â âLonesome Dove,â USA vs. Belgium, and âThe Twilight Zone.â The yearâs midpoint is an apt moment for some studied reflection, and Iâve been thinking about how much has changed in the last six... Read more âș
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When Appleâs next iPhone goes on sale in September, its upgraded core processor will be more powerful than that of any rival smartphone. Thatâs possible because of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes all of Appleâs custom chips. TSMC is using a new process to make smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips, which it refers to as 3 nanometer, for Apple roughly a year before it makes them for anyone... Read more âș
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Like many others, I dream of having my own personal artificial intelligence-powered assistant to answer texts Iâve been avoiding or land that impossible-to-get reservation at a restaurant blowing up on TikTok. So like seemingly everyone else in AI-land, I was excited when a young startup, HyperWrite, publicly launched an AI-powered assistant last week, promising to help with tasks that take multiple steps, such as booking airline flights or purchasing clothes... Read more âș
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In 2019, Sean Parkâa co-founder of Anthemis Groupâwas on the road 200 nights a year, traveling to Boston, London and other tech hot spots to meet with startups. Even after Covid-19 curtailed travel, Park, who is also the firmâs chief investment officer, was swamped with Zoom meetings with entrepreneurs he was thinking about backing. How times have changed. Now Park estimates heâs on the road at most 20 nights a... Read more âș
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In 2000, Toyota introduced the hybrid Prius in the U.S. Sales started slowlyâAmericans bought just 5,600 of the novel cars that first year and 15,600 the next, a tiny fraction of the Japanese companyâs sales. Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who at the time was just about to set up his own battery startup, remembers fellow professors sneering at the Prius as unnecessary. What was... Read more âș
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Ten years ago, almost to the day, my husband Sam took a video of me curled up in bed, convinced I had food poisoning. I was so nauseous, I felt like I couldnât move. It turned out it was just nerves. I had just told my parents I was going to leave a plum reporting job at The Wall Street Journal to start something new. It was the moment my... Read more âș
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend.Culturally, itâs been a very Barbie-Taylor-Tom (Cruise) summer. A season of mega-popular, mega-lucrative, four-quadrant entertainments that have returned us, however briefly, to the pre-internet days of the monoculture. So imagine my surprise when the online discourse shifted abruptly this week to the very niche topic of LK-99, the supposedly miraculous superconductive material created by physicists in South Korea. Julia writes more about the phenomenon in our... Read more âș
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M&A has finally picked upâonly itâs not the kind of dealmaking investors want. The Information was the first to report on two deals this weekâthe fire sale of storage company Clutter and the impending sale of troubled internet underwear company Parade. You know who gets screwed the most on these kinds of deals? Itâs not the founders. Itâs not the preferred shareholders, who get their money back first. Itâs the... Read more âș
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I was recently talking to a potential leadership coach and asked a fewâI guess pointedâquestions. âThatâs why you are a journalist,â she remarked. âYou are so skeptical.â I suppose I am. But this week, after taping More or Less, I momentarily wanted to join the optimistic camp. Sometimes you just have to root for the cool tech stuff, right? Hope you enjoy this episode which hits everything from Barbie and... Read more âș
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SoftBank sued former IRL CEO Abraham Shafi and five siblings and cousins for allegedly misleading the investor about the messaging appâs growth, prompting the Japanese conglomerate to buy $150 million worth of shares in the company in 2021 at the height of a pandemic-fueled consumer internet boom. SoftBank said Shafi and his family members defrauded investors by lying about the companyâs millions of users, which were actually bots. The lawsuit... Read more âș
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It might have been a moment lost in translation, or perhaps a willful reinterpretation, but when I asked CristĂłbal Valenzuela who in the tech world inspires him most, he named a Chilean poet. âNicanor Parra came up with this idea of âanti-poetry,ââ explained Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway, a generative AI video startup. âHe thought about the whole canon of literature in a way that no one else had... Read more âș
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Lina Khan was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee one morning in mid-July to discuss a favorite Republican topic of the moment: the 34-year-old chairâs supposed mishandling of the Federal Trade Commission and its $430 million budget. Seated at the sprawling witness table next to a bevy of Deer Park water bottlesâa sign of the long day she was about to endureâKhan was eager to discuss something seemingly more pedestrian:... Read more âș
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Welcome back!This week, to help readers follow the shifting playing field of enterprise software, we published The Informationâs Enterprise Tech Power List. For this second edition of the list, we identified 10 of the most powerful executives, 10 emerging executives and 13 investors who exert the most influence over the enterprise software industry. Our list includes people with strong track records, as well as less-well-known names who have been building... Read more âș
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Turntide Technologies, a maker of electric motor systems backed by Bill Gatesâfounded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, was one of the more than 300 private companies that passed the $1 billion valuation threshold last year, putting it firmly into unicorn status. Itâs not worth close to that anymore. The Sunnyvale, Calif., firm is nearing a deal for new capital that would likely slash its valuation by more than 80%, according to corporate... Read more âș
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Apple services to the rescue! The part of Appleâs business that includes the App Store and various subscription services was the star of the show in the companyâs fiscal third quarter, which ended July 1. Itâs a star the company badly needed, too. Total revenue at Apple dropped for the third consecutive quarter, shrinking 1% year over year. At the crux of the issue: iPhone, Mac and iPad sales shrank... Read more âș
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What is going on this week? In two separate instances, creators on membership site Patreon and Facebook-owner Meta Platforms report theyâve had issues with payments. These snafus highlight the precarious nature of creatorsâ income, particularly when multiple companies are involved in payouts.Letâs start with Patreon. The San Francisco startup on Thursday said it had identified an issue affecting creators who used payments company Payoneer, and it temporarily paused payouts from... Read more âș
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Welcome back! Hopin, one of the most iconic startups of the pandemic era, said this week it sold its virtual event and webinar hosting business to RingCentral, and that its founder and CEO, Johnny Boufarhat, is stepping down. The sale marks a pitiful finale for the once-heralded startup.Similar to Clubhouse, the chat app valued at $4 billion in 2021, Hopin had reached a unicorn valuation in record time before fetching... Read more âș
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Gen Zâfounded underwear startup Parade, a size- and gender-inclusive brand that built an avid fan base on Instagram and was valued at nearly $200 million last year, is nearing a deal to be acquired, according to three people familiar with the talks. The company recently held talks with lingerie manufacturer Ariela & Associates International, one of the people said, which makes products for companies including Fruit of the Loom, as... Read more âș
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Itâs a question on the mind of every artificial intelligence startup founder and developer: Can I trust my large-language model?This deceptively simple inquiry has become more difficult to answer, as recent research shows OpenAIâs GPT-4 and other LLMs can improve in some ways over time but also get worse too.For startups using these models, it can be especially difficult to evaluate their performance because OpenAI and other providers of models... Read more âș
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As the crypto investing boom was reaching a fever pitch in 2021, crypto payment startup MoonPayâknown for its flashy celebrity endorsementsâwas barreling toward a blockbuster fundraising. Investors including Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management invested $555 million at a whopping $3.4 billion valuation in a deal that allowed CEO Ivan Soto-Wright and his inner circle to cash out $150 million of their own stock. But things played out very differently... Read more âș
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Shipping companies have urged international maritime regulators to create safety rules for transporting electric vehicles after a spate of fires aboard freighters carrying EVs, including one last week near the Netherlands that killed a crew member and injured seven others. In the latest accident, the 650-foot Fremantle Highway caught fire July 26 en route from Bremerhaven, Germany, to Singapore with 3,783 vehicles aboard, including 498 EVs. It took until Sunday... Read more âș
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07.07.2026 10:43
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