Techmeme
February 28, 2019, 12:20 AM

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.
The Seattle Times:
Though Seattle repealed its “head tax”, Amazon says it won't use the 722K sq. ft. in Rainier Square tower it had leased, which would have housed up to 5K staff  —  The lease was one of the biggest in Seattle history — enough space to hold at least 3,500 employees and perhaps up to 5,000.
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.
Roger Cheng / CNET:
Source: Motorola plans to launch its foldable smartphone, likely a revival of the Razr brand, this summer  —  Motorola is jumping into foldable phones.  And it's likely doing it with one of the most iconic names in the business.  —  Motorola, a unit of Chinese consumer electronics giant Lenovo …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Coinhive, an in-browser Monero miner known for cryptojacking, says it will shut down on March 8, citing the crypto crash and a recent Monero hard fork  —  Coinhive wanted to be an alternative to classic banner ads but it became malware after constant abuse.
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 …
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.
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
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.
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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