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Techmeme
April 29, 2018, 8:15 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
T-Mobile to buy Sprint for ~$26B in stock; John Legere to run combined company that retains T-Mobile name; Deutsche Telekom to get a 42% stake, SoftBank 27%  —  T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. agreed to combine in a $26.5 billion merger, creating a wireless giant to compete against industry leaders …
David McCabe / Axios:
In a pitch seemingly aligned with Trump admin's rhetoric and aimed at regulators, T-Mobile and Sprint argue merger will help US beat China in 5G, create jobs  —  The CEOs of T-Mobile and Sprint argued on an analyst call that their just-announced merger would create jobs and boost America's position …
Frank X. Shaw / Microsoft on the Issues:
Microsoft explains its role in the conviction of e-waste recycler Eric Lundgren, says he was counterfeiting Windows software in China and importing it to the US  —  In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012 …
Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin / Quartz:
A first-person account of a virtual dating assistant, called a “Closer”, who is a professional writer that impersonates clients on apps like Tinder  —  Every morning I wake up to the same routine.  I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas—a client.
Jessica Nordell / The Atlantic:
How Slack has made its US workforce more diverse than other Silicon Valley companies by forgoing a diversity chief and focusing on hiring efforts from the start  —  Last week, Slack, the company whose popular, plaid-themed messaging app has simplified office communications and introduced custom fox emoji …
Facebook: Cindy Gallop
Mathias Döpfner / Business Insider:
In a Q&A after receiving the Axel Springer award for 2018, Jeff Bezos discusses The Washington Post, Trump admin, privacy concerns, and the early days of Amazon  —  Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, recently sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos …
Will Oremus / Slate:
A history of the Facebook critique “if you're not paying, you're the product” and why it wrongly paints users as powerless pawns incapable of demanding change  —  The history of a dangerous idea.  —  On March 21, at the height of the scandal over Cambridge Analytica's harvesting …
Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
German startup Clark, which offers digital insurance brokerage through an app, raises $29M Series B led by Portag3 Ventures and White Star Capital  —  Clark, one of a plethora of so-called ‘insurtech’ startups offering something akin to a digital insurance brokerage all delivered through …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg says almost 100M people now access the internet via Internet.org, up from 40M in November 2016  —  Facebook is getting the developing world online, even as the developed world criticizes its privacy practices.  Mark Zuckerberg said today on Facebook's Q1 2018 earnings call that …
More: Gizmodo
Alex Cranz / Gizmodo:
A look at AMD's 6-year old bet that paid off in the Zen CPU microarchitecture inside the new Ryzen processors, which could pose a real challenge to Intel  —  There are few gambles in the tech world as big as spending billions to build a new computer processor from scratch.

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