Techmeme
January 25, 2020, 8:30 PM

Top News

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Report: Samsung's upcoming foldable smartphone, possibly called Galaxy Z Flip, to use “Ultra Thin Glass” with a Dynamic AMOLED display underneath  —  Samsung is preparing to launch its second foldable smartphone next month, and if you can believe it, more leaks are coming out for the device.
Danny Crichton / TechCrunch:
Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource, an SF-based machine learning training data company with a large workforce in East Africa, dies at 37  —  The startup community has lost another moral leader today.  —  Leila Janah, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO and founder …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann launches Byte, a Vine-like short-form video app, on iOS and Android, aims to start its partner program to pay creators “soon”  —  Two years after Vine's co-founder Dom Hofmann announced he was building a successor to the short-form video app, today Byte makes its debut on iOS and Android.
Bruce Schneier / New York Times:
Laws that ban facial recognition miss the larger point: we need laws on all tech used for identification and to decide how much of our data should be surveilled  —  The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.
The California Sunday Magazine:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
YouTube gains exclusive streaming rights to Activision Blizzard's big esports events like Overwatch League, which was a Twitch exclusive for the past two years  —  As part of a multiyear partnership between the game publisher and Google  —  Video game publisher Activision Blizzard has entered …
BBC:
London police announce they will use live facial recognition cameras within a month for five to six hours at a time with bespoke lists of suspects each time  —  The Metropolitan Police has announced it will use live facial recognition cameras operationally for the first time on London streets.
Anshika Jain / Counterpoint Research:
India's smartphone market surpassed the US, becoming the second-largest smartphone market globally, reaching 158M shipments in 2019, up 7% YoY  —  - realme (255%), Vivo (76%), Asus (67%) and OnePlus (29%) were the fastest-growing smartphone brands on an annual basis.
Samuel Gibbs / The Guardian:
Fossil Gen 5 review: best Wear OS watch yet with clever notification handling, good battery life, but hardware UX is unpredictable and phone can disconnect  —  A day's battery, solid performance and watch-first design makes Wear OS a much more attractive option
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Google is backtracking on desktop search redesign which made it hard to distinguish ads from organic results, will experiment with favicon placements  —  The company says it will experiment with favicon placement  —  Google is backtracking on a controversial search engine redesign …

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