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Jaspreet Singh / Reuters: CrowdStrike reports Q2 revenue up 32% YoY to $963.9M, vs. $958.6M est., and cuts its FY 2025 revenue and profit forecasts, after last month's Windows outage  —  CrowdStrike (CRWD.O) cut its annual revenue forecast on Wednesday, in a sign that demand for its cybersecurity products could have taken …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: HP reports Q3 revenue up 2.4% YoY to $13.5B, vs. $13.4B est., Printing revenue down 3% to $4.14B, and increases its share repurchase authorization to $10B  —  - Printer declines expected through end of year, CEO says  — Company reports that business PC sales gained momentum

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Nvidia reports Q2 revenue up 122% YoY to $30B, vs. $28.7B est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est., and says it approved an additional $50B in share buybacks  —  Nvidia reported earnings after the bell that beat Wall Street expectations for earnings and guidance, and provided stronger-than-expected guidance for the current quarter.

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: Salesforce reports Q2 revenue up 8% YoY to $9.33B, vs. $9.23B est., net income of $1.43B, compared to $1.27B a year ago, and says CFO Amy Weaver will step down  —  Salesforce reported better than-expected second-quarter results but revenue growth was up 8%.  CFO Amy Weaver will also step down.

Gaspard Sebag / Bloomberg: Pavel Durov is charged in France for complicity in the spread of CSAM and other crimes on Telegram; prosecutors set a €5M bail and ban him from leaving France  —  - Prosecutors set €5 million bail, ban Durov from leaving France  — Telegram says CEO has ‘nothing to hide’ and seeks resolution

The Guardian: Venezuelan journalists are using AI avatars to host daily newscasts without putting themselves at risk, amid President Nicolás Maduro's media crackdown  —  Journalists are using artificial intelligence avatars to combat Maduro's media crackdown since disputed election

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Emmanuel Macron invited Pavel Durov to move Telegram to Paris in 2018; in 2017, a joint operation between French and UAE spies hacked Durov's iPhone  —  Pavel Durov had lunch with the French president six years ago.  His phone was hacked the previous year by French and U.A.E. spies.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is laying off ~100 people in its services group in a rare move, impacting Apple Books, News, and other teams, as part of a shift in priorities  —  Apple Inc. took the rare step of cutting about 100 jobs in its services group, part of a shift in priorities for the critical division …

Kevin Collier / NBC News: Three child safety advocacy groups from the US, UK, and Canada say their outreach to Telegram to flag CSAM on the platform has largely been ignored  —  Telegram's CEO was arrested in relation to an investigation into an unnamed person involving claims of “complicity” in distributing child sexual abuse material.

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Kenya-based Wasoko and Egypt-based MaxAB, two of Africa's largest B2B e-commerce platforms, merge in an all-stock deal; the companies raised over $240M combined  —  Two of Africa's largest B2B e-commerce platforms, Wasoko and MaxAB, have finally completed the continent's much-talked-about merger, TechCrunch has learned.

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: How call centers in the Philippines' vast outsourcing industry are adopting AI tools to assist human operators, in an effort to stay competitive  —  The experiences of staff in the Philippines' outsourcing industry are a preview of the challenges and choices coming soon to white-collar workers around the globe.

Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk: MakerDAO rebrands as Sky and debuts a new USDS stablecoin, but the token draws backlash after users noticed it allows the issuer to remotely freeze the asset  —  MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen said the feature won't be live when the USDS token goes live and the old DAI token will remain in circulation unchanged.

Kali Hays / Fortune: Source: last year, Meta abandoned plans to build its own custom chips for its AR glasses, instead opting to rely on third-party chipmakers like Qualcomm  —  Mark Zuckerberg's vision of AR smart glasses no longer includes custom chips  —  Ambitious efforts inside Meta to build its own custom chips …

Peter Kafka / Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg's letter to Jim Jordan gave Republicans just enough to claim a political win, without getting Meta in more trouble amid its FTC antitrust suit  —  - Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta, one of the world's most valuable tech companies.  — Why did he just send Congress a letter admitting that Meta has screwed up?

Joanna Nelius / The Verge: Google rolls out a Google Meet AI feature that automatically takes notes during meetings conducted in spoken English, available to select Workspace customers  —  Google Meet's newest AI-powered feature, “take notes for me,” has started rolling out today to Google Workspace customers …

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: Self-driving truck company TuSimple, which delisted from Nasdaq in January, reaches a $189M settlement of a suit alleging fraud by overstating safety and more  —  TuSimple (TSPH.PK) reached a $189 million settlement of a lawsuit accusing the self-driving truck technology company …

Rachel Kaser / VentureBeat: Web3 esports startup Gameplay Galaxy, focused on developing upcoming game Trial Xtreme Freedom, raised a $24M seed co-led by Blockchain Capital and Merit Circle  —  Gameplay Galaxy announced today that it has raised $24 million in total for its seed round of funding, following …

Taylor Soper / GeekWire: Seattle-based startup Supio, which uses AI to help lawyers analyze documents, raised a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures  —  Supio, a Seattle startup founded in 2021 by longtime friends and former Microsoft engineers, raised a $25 million Series A investment to supercharge …

Bloomberg: Former staff of video games payments company Xsolla say in lawsuits that CEO Aleksandr Agapitov leans heavily on company revenue for his new, flashier lifestyle  —  Aleksandr “Shurick” Agapitov spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure his company's name - Xsolla …

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: The crypto industry, heavily reliant on Telegram, has been Pavel Durov's loudest defender after his arrest; the Telegram-linked TON coin has a $13.7B market cap  —  When the messaging app's founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested, he received a flood of support from a multitrillion-dollar industry that relies on it.

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: How some Chinese AI companies use brokers to access GPUs despite US sanctions, sometimes using cryptocurrency smart contracts to anonymously process orders  —  SINGAPORE—Chinese artificial-intelligence developers have found a way to use the most advanced American chips without bringing them to China.

Financial Times: Chinese tech giants splurge on AI infrastructure, doubling their 2024 capex; Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu had a combined capex of ~$7B in H1 2024, up 50%+ YoY  —  Alibaba reports artificial intelligence servers running at full capacity, while ByteDance buys limited-power Nvidia chips in bulk

Lara Jakes / New York Times: How Ukraine is working with private firms to test AI and other tech in drones to find land mines, save lives, and allow military forces to advance more quickly  —  Ukraine is a beta test for embedding artificial intelligence and other new technologies in drones and robots to find deadly land mines …

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: A look at voice bots from Indian startups Sarvam AI, CoRover, and Gnani.ai; Samsung-backed Gnani now handles millions of voice conversations daily for companies  —  India's startups are betting AI voice products can reach more of the country than text-based chatbots