Techmeme
November 15, 2019, 4:25 PM

Top News

Axios:
Apple says it will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its App Store, after experts attribute a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarettes  —  Amid growing health concerns over e-cigarettes, Apple will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its mobile App Store this morning, Axios has learned.
Washington Post:
Source: NIH and Google planned to launch a dataset of 100K chest X-rays in 2017, scrapped project days before launch, after finding personal info on some images  —  Fumbled project with NIH highlights potential pitfalls of Google's ambitions with sensitive health data
Colin Lecher / The Verge:
Email: Sundar Pichai says Google is scaling back weekly all-hands TGIF meetings to once a month; meetings will focus only “on product and business strategy”  —  CEO announced changes to TGIF meeting in an email  —  Google's weekly town halls, internally known as “TGIF” meetings …
CNBC:
Twitter bans political ads globally, to allow some “cause-based” ads with limited targeting and promotion of issue-related fact-based reporting from news orgs  —  - Twitter laid out the framework for its new policy on political ads, which bans certain advertisers and has stricter rules for issue ads.
Holger Hansen / Reuters:
Germany passed a law on Thursday that could force Apple to open up the iPhone's NFC chip to rival mobile payment platforms in the country  —  BERLIN (Reuters) - Apple said on Friday moves in Germany to force it to open up its Apple Pay mobile payments system to rivals could hurt data protection …
Stephen Nellis / Reuters:
NUVIA, founded by three former Apple chip execs, raises $53M Series A from Dell and others to develop a new CPU for data center servers  —  (Reuters) - Three of Apple Inc's former top semiconductor executives in charge of iPhone chips have founded a startup to design processors for data centers …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Hulu to raise its Hulu + Live TV price by 22%, from $44.99/month to $54.99/month, for all subscribers starting on December 18  —  Hulu is implementing its second price increase in less than a year for its Hulu With Live TV product — with the base package of 60-plus live channels increasing 22%, to $54.99 per month.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
TikTok says it has started allowing some users to add links to their profile bios and send their viewers to shopping sites  —  TikTok is beginning to dabble in social commerce.  The short-form video app said it has started to allow some users to add links to e-commerce sites …
Jason Ronald / Xbox Wire:
Microsoft rolls out its November 2019 Xbox Update with support for Google Assistant in English, improved gamertags, text-based content filters, and more  —  November is here and that means friends, family, food and plenty of gaming in between.  Thanks to your feedback …
CNBC:
Amazon says it has filed a protest of the Pentagon's decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft, claiming “unmistakable bias”, and “errors” in process  —  - Oracle and IBM were removed from the competition earlier this year, and last month Amazon was knocked out.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google says it is now rolling out support for RCS messages in the Android Messages app to all of its users in the US  —  Google today announced that it is now rolling out to all of its users in the U.S. support for Rich Communication Services messages (you can think of it as the next generation of SMS) …
Bloomberg:
Sources: SoftBank Group completed the first close of $2B for the Vision Fund 2 so it can start backing startups; SoftBank initially targeted $108B for this fund  —  - Technology fund's initial close raises about $2 billion  — Outside investors yet to commit to SoftBank's latest fund

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Earlier Picks

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