Author: Isabella

When Susan Schaap, 61, travels from her Dutch hometown of Zeewolde to the nearest city of Leylystad, the 30-minute drive takes her through vast tulip fields, interrupted only by wind turbines and sometimes sheep. But if Facebook parent company Meta’s plans are approved, her view would be replaced by the Netherlands’ largest ever data center. Meta’s data center is “too big for a small town like Zeewolde,” says Schaap, who has become one of the project’s most vocal opponents. “There are 200 data centers in the Netherlands already,” she argues, and the move would give huge swathes of farmland to…

Yogita Khatri / The Block: JavaScript-based smart contract service Agoric, which is built on the Cosmos SDK, raises $32M in a private token sale  —  Quick Take  — Agoric, a smart contract platform built on the Cosmos SDK, has raised $32 million in a private token sale.  — Agoric has also launched its mainnet, an AMM, and a native stablecoin.

Michael Wayland / CNBC: Alfa Romeo plans to mint an NFT for each of its new Tonale SUVs to record vehicle data and verify proper maintenance on a blockchain during the car’s life cycle  —  – Alfa Romeo’s new subcompact Tonale SUV will include a NFT and blockchain technology, the company said Tuesday.

Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE: Delivery companies and hundreds of Amazon workers say the company’s Flex and Dolphin apps for logistics and time tracking are down, halting some deliveries  —  There’s a mix of frustration and joy from workers as AWS outages cause chaos with Amazon’s delivery infrastructure during its busy season.

Charles Mandel / BetaKit: HiMama, a Certified B Corp selling daycare software in Canada and the US that improves parental communication, raises a $70M Series B led by Bain Capital  —  HiMama, a childcare centre software solutions provider and Certified B Corp, just got a large baby bonus thanks to a $70 million Series B round …

Mike Colias / Wall Street Journal: Ford partners with GlobalFoundries to develop chips, but offers few concrete details  —  The auto maker and GlobalFoundries agree to develop, potentially produce semiconductors in U.S. under strategic pact  —  Ford Motor Co. is looking to get into the semiconductor business …

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: Microsoft Edge for Linux is now available for all users, supporting multiple distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE  —  It’s ‘Chredge’ time for Linux: Microsoft’s Edge browser is now generally available for a number of Linux distributions.

Mack DeGeurin / Gizmodo: UN report: 2.9B people, or 37% of the world’s population, have never used the internet, while internet users rose from 4.1B in 2019 to 4.9B in 2021  —  But the pandemic has fueled a rapid surge of worldwide internet users.  —  Alerts  —  Nearly two-thirds of the world’s population …

Ronan Shields / Digiday: Outbrain announces a $55M acquisition of Video Intelligence, an ad tech company that matches video with text content, as it aims to differentiate from Taboola  —  Ad tech’s spate of public listings over the last 12 months has helped spur a further round of mergers and acquisitions in the space …

Lee Mathews / Liliputing: The Amazon Appstore and apps downloaded from it are broken on Android 12, despite the new OS version launching over a month ago  —  As much as we’d like it to be, Installing a major operating system update isn’t always the most trouble-free process.  Even if everything does go well with the update itself …