Former Google staffers and others detail why Google's 2013 effort to build Motorola smartphones in Texas failed, as Trump pushes Apple to make iPhones in the US (Verne Kopytoff/Fortune)
Tech Blog
Published on 2025-07-06
Sources: TikTok plans to launch a new version of its app in the US on September 5, ahead of the Sept. 17 deadline for the US to enforce the divest-or-ban law (The Information)
The GSA says Oracle is giving the US government a 75% discount on its license-based software and a "substantial" discount on its cloud service through November (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
Adalytics finds 9,000+ pirated movies, including summer blockbusters, TV shows, and live sports on YouTube, amassing a collective 250M+ views from July to May (New York Times)
Velvet Sundown, an AI‑created band with ~850,000 monthly Spotify listeners and two recent albums, shows how some listeners are turning to anodyne AI music (Ian Bogost/The Atlantic)
DefiLlama: monthly DeFi fees have risen to $577M from an April low of $366M, with major protocols generating $275M through automated market-making services (The Block)
A profile of Steam developer Valve, which has a flat corporate structure and high profit per head; Ampere: Steam hit 170M MAUs in May, versus 153M a year prior (Louis Ashworth/Financial Times)
How Shein is leveraging its Reliance Retail partnership in its return to India, as fashion now accounts for 27% of India's online sales, up from 16% in 2020 (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)
A look at DeepSeek's impact on the AI model race and market share landscape, roughly 150 days after DeepSeek R1 shook stock markets and the Western AI world (SemiAnalysis)
PitchBook: VC exits through public listings, acquisitions, and buyouts reached $67.7B in Q2 2025, up from $38.5B a year ago and the strongest showing since 2021 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)
