Edition 100 — yes, 100! — of my email newsletter, Newley’s Notes, went out last week.
To subscribe, simply enter your email address at this link. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s brief, and few people unsubscribe.
Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest issue of Newley’s Notes, a newsletter in which I share my Wall Street Journal stories, other writings, and links about tech and life.
Amazingly, this is the 100th edition of Newley’s Notes. The first one went out on Feb 15, 2015. Time flies! Thanks, as ever, for reading.
❤️ Note: If you like NN, please forward this to a friend or click at the bottom to share on Twitter and Facebook. #SharingIsCaring
đź“ť What I Wrote in The WSJ
— Uber Rival Grab in Talks for Up to $2 Billion from SoftBank, China’s Didi – a scoop with my colleagues Liza Lin and Julie Steinberg. Singapore-based Grab is set to get a new influx of cash, fueling its quest to win Southeast Asia. The story was followed by many outlets.
— China Bike-Sharing Titan Mobike Sets Sights on Washington, D.C. – another exclusive with my colleague Liza Lin.
đź’¬ What I Wrote at Newley.com
- New: Get iOS Alerts for My WSJ Stories – Want to get an iOS alert whenever my new stories go live? Of course you do. Click on the link to find out how. (TL;DR: select the plus sign next to my byline from within the new iOS app.)
📲 5 Must-Reads in Tech
- The untold story of Google’s academic influence. A piece by my colleagues Brody Mullins and Jack Nicas based on public records requests showing ways the search giant finances research papers to “defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance.”
-
Will “beam me up” one day be possible? Scientists in China have for the first time teleported a photon particle from earth to a satellite.
-
U.S. folks: You stoked for the upcoming total solar eclipse? Here a handy map to find out where it’ll be most visible. It happens on Aug. 21.
-
Can Google, Facebook and Amazon be stopped? In a much-discussed WSJ essay, author Jonathan Taplin says powerful U.S. tech giants are remaking the economy and the nature of work, and are now poised to dominate artificial intelligence. Will the government or others do anything about their power?
-
J. M. Coetzee once wrote poems in computer code. The Nobel Prize winning South African novelist was a programmer in the 1960s, and a researcher at King’s College London made the discovery while examining his papers.
đź’« 1 Fun Thing
- A photographer took formal portraits of goats. And the pics are effing amazing. “They’re treated as if they were customers in a small-town photo studio,” said the Langley, Washington-based photographer. (Thanks, Anasuya!)
What’d I miss? Send me links, rants, raves, juicy news scoops and anything else. Thanks for reading, amigos.
Fist bump đź‘Š from New Delhi,
Newley