Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Pickleball is the past—the tech elite is obsessed with padel. • Plus, an Americana-themed batch of Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “The Americans,” “East of Eden,” “High Desert Daydream,” “Lonesome Dove,” USA vs. Belgium, and “The Twilight Zone.” The year’s midpoint is an apt moment for some studied reflection, and I’ve been thinking about how much has changed in the last six... Read more ›
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TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, will offer U.S. employees a chance to sell their shares later this year, an indication that the firm isn’t planning to go public anytime soon, a person familiar with the matter said. ByteDance officials told employees the share sale plan would occur in the fourth quarter. It’s unclear whether the company would buy back the stock itself or line up new investors for the sale. It’s... Read more ›
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When Abhi Yadav, co-founder of the Cambridge-based AI Innovators Community forum, was preparing a June summit for artificial intelligence startups, he reached out to Silicon Valley Bank to see if the lender would support the conference. “They jumped on it,” Yadav said. The event wound up drawing 150 executives. SVB’s director of sales origination, Lisa Puleo, hosted a lightning pitch round for dozens of startups. “It’s not your imagination—we are... Read more ›
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It’s July, which means on the East Coast it’s hot and humid and in San Francisco it’s winter. It also means we’re in a news desert, which partly explains the breathlessness (not to mention brainlessness) of much of the coverage of Threads’ rapid rise to 100 million downloads. Leave aside the fact that it’s easier to get to 100 million downloads quickly when you’re mining an existing user base like... Read more ›
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Earlier this year, we started asking our readers to submit their questions about the creator economy. Today I answer questions on how startups can reach creators, the downside of repurposing posts and how much influencers really make. Read previous Mailbag editions here and here. You can submit more questions through this page on The Information’s Forum, or feel free to email me directly kaya@theinformation.com.What marketing channels are startups using to... Read more ›
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Mark Zuckerberg and his longtime lieutenant, Andrew Bosworth, were at odds. It was mid-2019 and the two men held a series of discussions about Meta Platforms’ plans to build futuristic eyeglasses, part of Zuckerberg’s ambitions to control the hardware underpinnings of the next wave of technology. Bosworth—the imposing 6-foot, 2-inch executive who led Meta’s hardware division—wanted to focus on building augmented reality glasses that would blend digital images with the... Read more ›
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As major Western automakers have struggled to make the transition to electric vehicles, they have stubbornly favored nickel-based batteries, even though they are costlier and subject to more supply chain snarls than the iron-based batteries used by market leaders Tesla and China’s Byd. A primary objection to iron-based batteries has been that they are not economically recyclable, diminishing their value.But over the last year or so, little noticed in the... Read more ›
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Twelve days before last Christmas, Marina Rosa, an artificial intelligence engineer in São Paulo, Brazil, walked into a neighborhood tattoo parlor and laid her left arm on the table. Rosa then asked artist Nadine Guerra to give her a tattoo made up of various elements, including a 1950s-style female cyborg, an abstract squiggle, and four small items that look like stereo speakers. The art was then permanently inked onto Rosa’s... Read more ›
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend.Since we launched our Weekend section in November 2021, we’ve been near-obsessive chroniclers of the generative AI boom. Our very first cover story, written by yours truly, was on Sam Altman and his optimistic vision for OpenAI. We followed that up with reports on how AI image generators would disrupt the design profession, the software that launched a thousand music deepfakes and the e-commerce companies searching... Read more ›
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I knew that this week's conversation on Threads was going to be fun! For better or worse, the Morins and the Lessins have a lot of social media DNA. Dave built a social network Path and helped create the Facebook platform. Sam spent years working on Facebook's social network, wrestling with the balance of public and private content. I am pretty sure we talked about social networking on our very... Read more ›
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It’s a return to a simpler version of a popular social network. An app without fancy bells and whistles. A new iteration of a famously walled garden, one less commercialized, uncluttered (so far) by advertising, and with more palatable ownership. No, I’m not talking about Instagram’s Threads. This week, as Meta Platforms introduced the world to its new Twitter knockoff, I was testing out a beta version of Retro, an... Read more ›
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One Saturday morning earlier this year, Noam Shazeer, CEO of Character.AI and one of the world’s foremost machine-learning researchers, looked out his window to see a stranger perched on a folding chair outside his home in Palo Alto, Calif. The man had come to Shazeer’s quiet residential street to deliver a message that had been gaining steam among devoted users of Character.AI. He had scrawled their plea on a whiteboard... Read more ›
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Welcome back! If you squint, you can see the lineup for tech initial public offerings starting to shuffle together, after a year and a half of dawdling. There’s Arm, the SoftBank-backed chip designer that expects to list on the Nasdaq sometime after Labor Day. The fall could also bring debuts for Klaviyo, a marketing-tech firm backed by blue-chip venture capital firms, and Oddity, maker of TikTok-famous beauty brands. Maybe even... Read more ›
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Sequoia Capital’s Chinese and Indian arms are accelerating efforts to ensure that investors around the world back their funds after the Silicon Valley venture firm completes a landmark split from its Asian affiliates, ending a nearly two-decade partnership. Sequoia Capital China, led by star dealmaker Neil Shen, is planning to host a three-day meeting in Shanghai this November with global investors backing its existing funds, according to two people with... Read more ›
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By now we have all read myriad analyses of Threads, Instagram’s new Twitter killer. You’ve probably seen that Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over the app, alleging that the company stole “trade secrets.” Hmm, I wonder how the lawsuit will affect the big MMA fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk?While there are a lot of angles to analyze, I can’t stop thinking about what the early traction of... Read more ›
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OpenSea, the non-fungible token marketplace that rocketed to a $13.3 billion valuation at the peak of the crypto boom, is looking for a new senior policy and government affairs executive after Loni Mahanta, the policy executive it hired from Zillow, quietly left the company after just over a year. In her first interview since her exit in late April, Mahanta declined to speak on the specifics of her departure, but... Read more ›
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Our recently updated Creator Economy Database features four companies founded by some of the largest online creators, all of whom either raised funds or expanded their products to brick-and-mortar stores in the June quarter. Today we’re taking a closer look at what they’re up to. The pack includes YouTuber Emma Chamberlain’s coffee company, Chamberlain Coffee, which raised $7 million in a round led by Blazar Capital and United Talent Agency... Read more ›
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If you’re like me, you’ve signed up for a minimum of three apps trying to compete with Twitter this year. First it was Mastodon, then Bluesky, and now comes Threads, the Instagram sibling app that launched yesterday and raked in an impressive 30 million sign-ups by this morning.It will be incredibly difficult for a tiny startup like Bluesky, which has roughly a dozen employees at this point, to compete with... Read more ›
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Google has big ambitions to develop its own chips for its Pixel phones. So far, however, things haven’t gone according to plan. The search giant has delayed by at least one year the release of its first fully customized chip, which would act as the brains for its Pixel line of smartphones, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. Google had originally planned to release the chip,... Read more ›
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Chinese restrictions on the export of two key materials for the high-tech and defense industries could be a harbinger of problems for Western makers of electric vehicles. China’s Commerce Ministry on Monday said it would require permits for the export of gallium and germanium beginning next month. The timing of the announcement, just ahead of U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s arrival today in Beijing, underscored the chilly nature of U.S.-China... Read more ›
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If there’s a tech billionaire the news media hates more than Mark Zuckerberg, it's Elon Musk. That's why you're seeing an unusual deluge of positive coverage for Meta Platforms' Twitter rival app, Threads, which formally launched a short time ago. The positivity won’t last, to be sure. Before too long—give it a week—someone in the media will discover that Meta is collecting user data on Threads (shocking!) for advertising purposes,... Read more ›
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07.07.2026 19:13
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