Techmeme
November 20, 2019, 7:55 PM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
PayPal to acquire Honey, a comparison shopping and rewards platform that has 17M MAUs, for ~$4B  —  PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash.
New York Times:
Google has hired IRI Consultants, an anti-union consulting company, signaling the feud between some activist employees and management has escalated  —  After nearly two years of unrest, the company appears to be cracking down on employee activism.  —  Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm …
Scott Spencer / The Keyword:
Google announces new political ad rules, limits microtargeting to age, gender, and general location categories, will start enforcing them in UK within a week  —  We're proud that people around the world use Google to find relevant information about elections and that candidates use Google …
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple says it has begun construction of its $1B Austin, Texas campus, opening in 2022, as Trump tours the nearby Mac Pro production plant  —  Apple has announced that it has begun construction of its new Austin, Texas, campus, on the day that President Trump is due to tour the Mac Pro production line a short distance away.
Nathaniel Popper / New York Times:
On-demand transcription service Rev faces backlash from its contractors after cutting their take to 30 cents for each dollar spent on some jobs, from 45 cents  —  Rev was just a small start-up offering online transcriptions.  Now it's the latest symbol of a gig-economy company whose workers are fed up.
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find bugs in Google and Samsung camera apps from before July 2019 that could record video, take pictures, and extract GPS data without permission  —  A new vulnerability has been found in the Camera apps for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Android devices that could allow …
Joel Marcey / Facebook Developers:
Facebook makes Visual Studio Code its default internal development environment, partners with Microsoft on tools to let devs do remote development at scale  —  History  —  Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code.  There is no mandated development environment.  Some developers use vim.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google launches Google Earth tools that let users create and present virtual tours, with attached text, images, and videos, for specific places  —  It's like a homemade guided tour  —  Today, Google is adding new tools to Google Earth on the web that let you build your own tour of a place right on top of the Google Earth map.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple launches Apple Music for Business, letting businesses play music in retail locations with Apple providing human-curated playlists and recommendations  —  Apple Music is now partnering with businesses to play music at retail stores.  In a partnership with PlayNetwork …
Jake Bright / TechCrunch:
After converting to a for-profit status, Samasource raises $14.8M Series A for its AI data annotation service used by companies like Google and Walmart  —  AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures.
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Gravitational raises $25M Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins, to help developers with cloud deployment using Kubernetes  —  As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds.  Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.
Jane Zhang / South China Morning Post:
A profile of Baidu Bake, an encyclopedia with 16 times more Chinese entries than Wikipedia, written by 6.9M+ users comprising about 340 core contributors  —  Transition from hard format encyclopaedias to open-source encyclopaedias has raised some quality-of-information issues though …
Angelica Mari / ZDNet:
WhatsApp says it has banned more than 400,000 accounts between August 15 and October 28, 2018, during Brazil's general election  —  The information was submitted by the messaging app as part of ongoing investigations into the spread of fake news.  —  Messaging app WhatsApp reported banning …
More: Engadget
Bloomberg:
Alibaba has raised ~$11.2B in its Hong Kong share sale, after pricing 500M new shares at HK$176, in one of the largest equity offerings this year  —  - Company priced 500 million new shares at HK$176 each  — Alibaba's share sale is among the world's largest this year
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Starburst, which is seeking to modernize data analytics with the open source Presto distributed query engine, raises $22M led by Index Ventures  —  Starburst, the company that's looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised …
More: Business WireThanks:@andreesa

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Zoho:
Zoho Directory 2024: Enabling Access and Empowering Security  —  Hey there!  👋 As 2024 comes to a close, we're excited to highlight the latest updates in Zoho Directory.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots  —  How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 12/27 - A New "Definition" Of AGI
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:55 PM ET, November 20, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Brad Templeton / Forbes:
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Jordan Novet / CNBC: