Techmeme
February 2, 2019, 3:10 PM

Top News

Peter Kafka / Recode:
Source: Spotify in advanced talks to acquire popular podcast producer Gimlet for $200M+; Gimlet would be Spotify's first purchase of an original content maker  —  Spotify wants to break out of the music streaming business.  Gimlet, the company behind shows like Crimetown and Reply All, can help.
Sara Ashley O'Brien / CNN:
As NYC's driver minimum wage law goes into effect, Uber increases its prices and Lyft sues NYC's Taxi and Limousine Commission and says prices will increase  —  New York (CNN Business)Uber and Lyft customers will have to pay more for their rides as a result of the first-of-its-kind driver minimum wage law in New York City.
Brian Fung / Washington Post:
In day one of arguments, the FCC faced tough questions from a three-judge panel on its definition of broadband and potential issues for public safety agencies  —  The Federal Communications Commission faced sharp questioning from a trio of appellate court judges Friday as the agency sought …
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Court filing: QuadrigaCX founder's widow says the crypto exchange can't access most of coins worth $137M in cold wallets to which only the founder had the keys  —  Troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX owes its customers $190 million and cannot access most of the funds, according to a court filing obtained by CoinDesk.
Bryan Menegus / Gizmodo:
Rekognition's only known law enforcement client does not use “confidence threshold”, undermining Amazon's defense against research showing the software's bias  —  Faced with two independent studies that found its facial recognition software returns inaccurate or biased results …
Daniel Funke / Poynter:
Snopes pulls out of Facebook partnership, says Facebook's closed, manual fact-checking entry system is too labor intensive and fails to benefit the whole web  —  Snopes is no longer debunking misinformation in partnership with Facebook.  In a statement published Friday …
Amy Gesenhues / Marketing Land:
MediaRadar: YouTube 2018 ad revenue rose 11% YoY, as Geico and Samsung accounted for 11.5% of revenue and media and entertainment companies brought in 30%+  —  YouTube ad revenues increased 11 percent year-over-year in 2018, according to MediaRadar.  —  YouTube saw a 51 percent ad renewal …
Meghan Brown / ENGINEERING.com:
DeepSolar Project, using machine learning and 1B+ satellite images, claims it found 1.47M solar installations in the US, much more than commonly cited estimates  —  Solar power installations have been increasing in both the residential and commercial spaces, but it is nearly impossible …
More: SlashGear
Benedict Evans:
With 100M devices sold, Alexa has achieved some level of product-market fit, but Amazon is still looking for Alexa's strategic place within its business  —  Amazon's Alexa has been a huge, impressive and unexpected achievement.  Amazon created a category from scratch and left both the AI leader Google …
Nitasha Tiku / Wired:
Google's internal 2018 employee satisfaction survey: 74% of staffers “positive” that the top exec team can effectively lead in the future, down from 92% in 2017  —  GOOGLE IS A data-obsessed company, but the recent cascade of employee activism can be hard to quantify.

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