Tech News

Some EU-based Instagram users, including football clubs and media companies, are accessing Threads despite Meta not having launched the platform in the region (Bloomberg)

Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub sue NYC, seeking to block new minimum pay standards that increased the hourly wage for gig workers to ~$18 and $20 by 2025 (New York Times)

Alibaba unveils Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI-based image generator initially available to enterprise customers in beta, to rival Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E (Josh Ye/Reuters)

Sources: Apple is planning an appointment-only retail launch of the Vision Pro in the US in early 2024, starting with stores in major areas like NY and LA (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

A profile of Atsuyoshi Koike, the CEO of chip startup Rapidus, which plans to invest ~$35B by 2027 to build 2nm chips in Japan and help the US to counter China (Wall Street Journal)

Uber and Careem face a driver shortage in Saudi Arabia, largely due to laws letting only Saudis work for the companies and mandating that drivers own their cars (Samer Al-Atrush/Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese authorities plan to announce a fine of at least ~$1.1B on Ant Group as soon as July 7, ending the company’s years-long regulatory overhaul (Reuters)

Global public cloud services revenue hit $545.8B in 2022, up 22.9% YoY; SaaS-Applications led with 45%+ of the revenue, then IaaS with 21.2%, and PaaS with 17% (Michael Shirer/IDC)

Sega co-COO Shuji Utsumi says the company is withholding its biggest games from third-party blockchain gaming projects and is shelving its own blockchain games (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg)

Lightning Labs announces tools that let developers create AI agents that leverage GPT function calls to hold, send, and receive bitcoin via Lightning Network (Frederick Munawa/CoinDesk)

Volkswagen plans to start its first US tests of autonomous driving in Austin, beginning with a small fleet of ID. Buzz EVs equipped with VW and Mobileye tech (Kara Carlson/Austin American-Statesman)

Sources: the FBI searched Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell’s home in March 2023, as part of US prosecutors’ probe into claims he hacked a nonprofit he founded (New York Times)