☕️ Amazon buys Globalstar for $11.6B to rival Starlink

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In today's Techpresso:

🛰️ Amazon buys Globalstar for $11.6B to rival Starlink

👑 Meta overtakes Google in global ad revenue

🤖 Microsoft is working on OpenClaw-like agent

🔥 OpenAI accuses Anthropic of inflating revenue by $8 billion

🔍 Google Search flags 'back button hijacking' as spam

💻 Microsoft raises Surface PC prices by $500 amid RAM shortage

Plus: 🎁 15 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 6 papers.

🛰️ Amazon buys Globalstar for $11.6B to rival Starlink LINK

Amazon announced a deal to buy satellite company Globalstar for $11.5 billion, paying $90 per share, in a move that strengthens its position against Elon Musk's SpaceX in the satellite internet market.

Amazon recently rebranded its satellite internet service from Project Kuiper to Leo and has launched more than 240 low Earth orbit satellites since last April with partners like United Launch Alliance and SpaceX.

The company first announced plans six years ago to build a constellation of thousands of satellites offering high-speed, low-latency internet to consumers, corporations, and governments through square-shaped terminals.

👑 Meta overtakes Google in global ad revenue LINK

Meta is forecast to pass Google in global ad revenue by the end of 2026, generating US$243 billion compared to Google's US$239.5 billion, according to Emarketer's latest outlook.

Meta's growth rate is expected to hit 24.1% in 2026, nearly double Google's 12%, while Google's share of global digital ad spend has been declining since 2021.

Emarketer analysts credit tools like Advantage+ and AI-generated ads for pulling more ad dollars to Meta, saying advertisers follow performance rather than reacting to legal risks.

🤖 Microsoft is working on OpenClaw-like agent LINK

Microsoft is building an agent with features similar to the open source OpenClaw tool and plans to integrate it into its existing Microsoft 365 Copilot product for enterprise customers.

The company already offers cloud-based agents like Copilot Cowork and Copilot Tasks, but the new project may run locally on a user's computer, much like OpenClaw does.

Microsoft told The Information the agent would be an always-working version of 365 Copilot that completes multistep tasks over long periods, and it may appear at Build in June.

🔥 OpenAI accuses Anthropic of inflating revenue by $8 billion LINK

OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser accused Anthropic in an internal memo of overstating its $30 billion run rate by about $8 billion by booking gross revenue from cloud-partner sales through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Both gross and net accounting methods comply with US GAAP, but OpenAI says its own net reporting of Microsoft sales is closer to public-company standards, a distinction that could matter as both firms prepare for dual IPOs.

Ramp corporate-card data shows Anthropic at 30.6 percent of enterprise AI-paying customers versus OpenAI's 35.2 percent, with a projected crossover within two months, adding pressure behind the timing of Dresser's memo.

🔍 Google Search flags 'back button hijacking' as spam LINK

Google Search has updated its spam policy to treat back button hijacking — where sites prevent users from returning to the previous page — as a violation that can lower a site's ranking.

Pages caught using this deceptive practice will face manual spam actions or automated demotions, with Google noting it has seen a rise of this type of behavior across the web recently.

Site owners have until June 15, 2026, to remove any scripts or advertising platform code responsible for back button hijacking, including third-party libraries that may cause the problem without their knowledge.

💻 Microsoft raises Surface PC prices by $500 amid RAM shortage LINK

Microsoft has increased prices on all Surface PCs by up to $500, with the flagship Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 now costing far more than their original 2024 launch prices.

Sources say the price increases are driven by recent spikes in RAM and component costs, and the Surface Laptop 7 at $1,499 is now $400 more expensive than the new MacBook Air.

Microsoft's upcoming wave of refreshed Surface PCs, expected over spring and summer, will likely maintain or even increase these starting prices if component pricing does not improve soon.

Other news you might like

• Man charged in arson attack on Sam Altman’s house had AI CEO kill list, prosecutors sayLINK

• OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup HiroLINK

• Amazon Leo Shows Off In-Flight Wi-Fi Antenna That Will Take on StarlinkLINK

• Wegovy-maker Novo Nordisk partners with OpenAI to speed drug developmentLINK

• Booking.com confirms hackers accessed customers’ dataLINK

• Microsoft admits Game Pass may have gotten too expensiveLINK

• Small Missouri town ousts half its city council after $6 billion AI data center approvalLINK

• Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone elseLINK

• China has spent 3.6 times more than the US on chipmaking subsidies over the past decadeLINK

• ‘I’m not going to force you’: Duolingo CEO backs off from evaluating employees on their AI usageLINK

• OpenAI's leaked memo says new "Spud" model will make all its products "significantly better"LINK

• This bot only bets ‘No’ on Polymarket, and its creator keeps losing moneyLINK

• How vibe coding app Anything is rebuilding after getting booted from the App Store twiceLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Figma for Agents: enables AI coding assistants to access your Figma design system, ensuring generated code matches your actual brand standards and component specifications.LINK

Softr AI Co-Builder: generates no-code business applications with databases and logic from text descriptions, enabling teams to quickly build internal tools and client portals.LINK

Recall 2.0: a personal knowledge base that connects your saved content, notes, and research with AI models to answer questions grounded in what you actually know.LINK

Ithihāsas: a character explorer for Hindu epics that lets users navigate the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa through people and their relationships instead of linear reading.LINK

CatDoes v4: a no-code app builder with an autonomous AI agent that writes code, installs packages, and fixes errors while running continuously in the cloud.LINK

Cascode: a browser-based tool for designing AWS architectures with drag-and-drop components, fault injection simulation, and one-click infrastructure-as-code export.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Quantum computers with 500 logical qubits can test whether general relativity and quantum mechanics are truly incompatible at the Planck scale, with 1600 qubits needed to account for all computational constraints.LINK

SAM3-I, an enhanced segmentation framework, enables direct segmentation based on complex instructions including attributes, spatial relations, and actions, rather than relying on simple noun phrases like its predecessor SAM3.LINK

The HiFloat4 format maintains training accuracy within 1% of full precision baselines while enabling 4-bit operations on Huawei Ascend NPUs for both dense and mixture-of-experts language models.LINK

Process-driven image generation breaks down creating images into multiple steps involving planning, drafting, reflecting, and refining, where text and visuals guide each other through the process instead of generating everything at once.LINK

A new AI system combines natural language math reasoning with formal verification software to automatically solve and verify an open problem in commutative algebra with essentially no human involvement.LINK

The Aurora supercomputer achieved 1.01 exaflops in standard precision and 11.64 exaflops using mixed precision arithmetic, an 11.5x speedup, through careful system tuning and a new resilience strategy to handle synchronization problems.LINK

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