Techmeme
February 27, 2019, 9:00 PM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
FTC settles with Musical.ly, now TikTok, for $5.7M, over the app's violation of US child privacy laws; TikTok's app updates with a new UX for users under 13  —  A significant FTC ruling issued today will see video app TikTok fined $5.7 million for violating U.S. children's privacy laws …
Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle:
In a letter to the CA government, Apple confirms that 190 employees, including 124 engineers, will be laid off from its self-driving car division on April 16  —  Apple will lay off 190 employees in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale in its self-driving car division, the company said.
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic:
Crowdtangle data: a small number of Facebook Pages created 46% of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccines, with 20% generated by seven anti-vax Pages  —  Squelching vaccine misinformation might be easier than the platform makes it seem.  —  Look up vaccinations on Facebook …
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud report: Azure adoption grew from 45% to 52%, reaching 85% of AWS adoption, up from 70% last year  —  The RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera highlights how enterprises are spending more on cloud computing, but are getting concerned about optimizing their spending.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Review of Shadow Ghost, a $140 streaming game console made by French startup Blade, which runs a $35/month cloud gaming service that now has ~65,000 subscribers  —  French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost.
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Square reports Q4 adjusted revenue of $464M, up 64% YoY, 15M Cash App MAUs in Dec. 2018, up from 7M YoY, issues weak Q1 guidance; stock down 6%+ after hours  —  - Payment company Square reported fourth-quarter results that beat analysts' expectations for earnings and revenue on Wednesday.
Eugene Wei / Remains of the Day:
An in-depth analysis of social media platforms through the lens of social capital theory and why we should think of them as “Status as a Service” businesses  —  Editor's Note 1: I have no editor.  —  Editor's Note 2: I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one.
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Study of VC-backed deals over the last five years finds that 77.1% of VC-backed founders were white, 1% were black, and 9.2% of startup founders were female  —  Maybe the VC community is tired of hearing about it; certainly, there are plenty of people who are tired of dealing with it.
The Keyword:
Google and DeepMind are using AI to predict the power output of wind farms 36 hours ahead of actual generation, boosting economic value of wind energy by ~20%  —  Carbon-free technologies like renewable energy help combat climate change, but many of them have not reached their full potential.
Ian Allison / CoinDesk:
Nivaura, which aims to use blockchains to automate the lifecycle for the issuance of financial instruments, raises $20M led by the London Stock Exchange  —  Capital markets blockchain startup Nivaura has raised a total of $20 million with the closing of its second seed extension round led by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
BlackBerry sues Twitter for allegedly infringing six messaging patents; BlackBerry sued Facebook and Snap in 2018, also alleging messaging patent infringement  —  (Reuters) - BlackBerry Ltd on Wednesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit accusing Twitter Inc of illegally using technology …
More: TechCrunch
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Sendoso, which sends customized gifts to current and prospective clients at scale for a monthly fee, raises $10.7M Series A led by David Sacks' Craft Ventures  —  In today's noisy, fast-paced world, finding a way to let clients and potential customers know that they are top of mind can be a major challenge for companies.

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More News

Manish Singh / VentureBeat:
Katyanna Quach / The Register:

Earlier Picks

Federal Trade Commission:
Gus Garcia-Roberts / USA Today:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Hadas Gold / CNN:
Shannon Liao / The Verge:
The Guardian: