April, which personalizes and autofills tax filings by using AI to analyze tax code, raised a $30M Series A led by Treasury, bringing its total funding to $40M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Meta says it is rolling out NFT support on Facebook, allowing select US creators to display NFTs on their profiles, after adding the feature to Instagram in May (TechCrunch)

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Docs: Coinbase is selling features of its intelligence-gathering tool Coinbase Tracer to ICE, letting ICE track crypto transactions including bitcoin and ether (Sam Biddle/The Intercept)

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Google sign-up a 'fast track to surveillance', consumer groups say Ten European consumer organisations join forces to launch complaints to privacy and data regulators June 30, 2022 at 05:28AM

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Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, lays off 8% of its staff, around 85 to 90 people, and cancels four projects; Niantic was valued at $9B in November 2021 (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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Elliptic: North Korea-backed hacking group Lazarus might be behind Harmony's $100M altcoin theft; the hack bore similarities to the $600M Ronin bridge attack (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg)

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EU lawmakers finalize anti-money laundering rules for crypto, requiring verified customer identity for transfers between regulated digital wallet providers (Jack Schickler/CoinDesk)

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New biometrics laws urgently needed, review finds The Ryder Review finds existing laws are fragmented and have failed to keep up with technology. June 29, 2022 at 05:47AM

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CoinFLEX CEO Mark Lamb says crypto investor Roger Ver owes CoinFLEX $47M in USDC, after Ver denied "some rumors" he defaulted on a debt to a counterparty (Michael Bellusci/CoinDesk)

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Google announces Google Public Sector, a new division aiming to bring Google Cloud tech to US educational institutions and federal, state, and local governments (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Sony launches InZone, a brand of gaming devices aimed at PC gamers but with tight PS5 integration, starting with 4K and 1080p 27" monitors and three headsets (Shannon Liao/Washington Post)

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Meta tests Discord-like changes in Facebook Groups, adding a channels list in a left-aligned sidebar that can include audio rooms, text chats, and feeds (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann is stepping down and transitioning to executive chairman, to be replaced by Google's president of commerce Bill Ready (Sarah E. Needleman/Wall Street Journal)

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A deep dive on Truth Social's struggles, as the social network flails in its efforts to build a competitive platform while alienating tech talent and partners (Reuters)

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T-Mobile launched App Insights, letting marketers target its wireless customers based on apps they have installed and engagement patterns; users can opt out (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

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Sam Bankman-Fried says there are no active talks for FTX to acquire Robinhood; Robinhood says no acquisition can go through without the founders' approval (Jacquelyn Melinek/TechCrunch)

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Google says Hangouts will shut down in November as it begins prompting mobile Hangouts users to move to Chat (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Analysis of Stardust period tracking app, the top free app on the US App Store on June 25, shows it shares users' phone numbers with analytics company Mixpanel (TechCrunch)

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Data centers, typically located in suburbs and rural zones, are increasingly being built in urban areas to further reduce internet lag for locals (Michael Waters/MIT Technology Review)

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Strapi, known for its open-source headless CMS, raises a $31M Series B led by CRV and says it plans to launch its Strapi Cloud service in 2023 (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Dublin-based &Open, which helps brands send both physical and digital gifts at scale, raised a $26M Series A led by Molten Ventures (Vishal Singh/Silicon Canals)

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SSD benchmarks show the 256GB 13" MacBook Pro with M2 has ~50% slower read and ~30% slower write speeds than the previous gen 256GB MacBook Pro with M1 (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

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Hundreds of documents detail the software bought by China to sift through its vast troves of surveillance data to "predict" who will become troublemakers (New York Times)

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In the wake of SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, tech companies give "no comment" in response to questions about users' data that can be used in prosecutions (Brian Kahn/Protocol)

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A look at Amazon's fight with China-based sellers of generic items trying to game its algorithm to develop Marketplace brands and get the "Amazon's Choice" tag (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

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India's central bank ban on loading non-bank prepaid payment instruments using credit lines has created panic among Indian fintech startups (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

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UK online grocer Ocado, which licenses its automated warehouse tech to other brands, raised £578M in a share sale and secured a £300M loan facility from banks (Oscar Hornstein/UKTN)

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Leaked investor call: BlockFi backer Morgan Creek Digital aims to raise $250M to counter FTX's BlockFi bailout, since it could wipe out BlockFi shareholders (Tracy Wang/CoinDesk)

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Detroit-based Autobooks, a payment and accounting service for small businesses, raised a $50M Series C led by Macquarie, bringing its total funding to ~$98M (Julie Muhn/Finovate)

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Michael Saylor, whose company MicroStrategy holds bitcoin now worth ~$2.7B, says bitcoin "is still at an early stage in its development and poorly understood" (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

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As Apple is expected to announce a headset in January and Meta slows VR investment, a look at opportunities for the VR supply chain and competing headset makers (Ming-Chi Kuo/Medium)

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US judge rules that Pinterest must face a suit by digital marketing strategist Christine Martinez, who says she co-created Pinterest but was never compensated (Chris Dolmetsch/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Goldman Sachs is looking to raise $2B from investors to buy up distressed assets from troubled crypto lender Celsius in the event of a bankruptcy (Tracy Wang/CoinDesk)

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After SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, Apple, Meta, Google, and other tech companies announce or reaffirm policies supporting staff seeking abortion services (Mark Sullivan/Fast Company)

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How TikTok is cashing in on its exploding popularity; source: TikTok plans to grow its e-commerce gross merchandise volume to $2B in 2022 and $23B in 2023 (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

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Crypto trading platform Bitpanda, which has 1,000+ staff per LinkedIn and raised $263M at a $4.1B valuation in 2021, says it is cutting its headcount to ~730 (Finextra)

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Tapcheck, an earned wage access service that connects with payroll systems of employers like McDonald's to calculate employee earnings, raised a $20M Series A (FinSMEs)

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OSOM, founded by ex-Essential employees, scraps its OV1 phone and partners with Solana for Saga, a $1,000 Web3-focused Android phone, to be launched in Q1 2023 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool, in preview as part of AWS IDE Toolkit, supporting Java, JavaScript, and Python (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

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China issues new rules for live streamers, including requiring them to have relevant qualifications to discuss some topics, such as law, finance, and medicine (Tracy Qu/South China Morning Post)

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Cryptoys, which is building blockchain-based kids toys in partnership with Dapper Labs, raised a $23M Series A led by a16z, after a $7.5M seed in October 2021 (Lucas Matney/TechCrunch)

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Yelp closes its New York, Chicago, and Washington DC offices as its CEO doubles down on remote work and calls hybrid work policies "the hell of half measures" (Danielle Abril/Washington Post)

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Sources: the EU is planning a "phase 2" antitrust investigation into Broadcom's $69B VMware acquisition, which could take over one year and derail the deal (Financial Times)

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Facebook Pay officially rebrands to Meta Pay; Zuckerberg says Meta is working on an interoperable "wallet for the metaverse" that will have "proof of ownership" (Mitchell Clark/The Verge)

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Deno, a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly built using the Rust programming language and the V8 JavaScript engine, raised a $21M Series A (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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Brave's search engine grew nearly 5,000% from 8.1M queries in June 2021 to 411.7M in May 2022, and launches Goggles, which lets users customize results, in beta (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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eBay says it acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin, which has facilitated $7.8M in digital collectible trade volume since its 2018 launch, for an undisclosed sum (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk)

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Sources: Comcast and Google are top contenders to help Netflix develop an ad-supported tier, and Netflix has also held talks with Roku (Wall Street Journal)

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Microsoft details how it curbs Russian propaganda, largely about the war in Ukraine and vaccines; US traffic to such stories rose 80%+ in the war's first weeks (Brad Smith/Microsoft On the Issues)

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Microsoft report details Russian cyber attacks across 40+ countries since the war in Ukraine began, with a 29% success rate and NATO governments prioritized (Zach Schonfeld/The Hill)

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