Techmeme
March 2, 2020, 5:20 PM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Waymo raises $2.25B from Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, parent-company Alphabet, and others to scale up its autonomous vehicles operations  —  Waymo, the autonomous vehicles division of Google parent company Alphabet, just got a massive capital infusion from a coterie of investors.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
AT&T TV launches across the US after rolling out in over a dozen markets last year, with prices that start at $49.99/month but go up dramatically after a year  —  AT&T's next big TV play has a problem: pricing  —  AT&T TV is launching nationwide today after initially rolling out to over a dozen markets last year.
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Behind Facebook's rewrite of Messenger, going live today, that has shrunk the iOS app's size from 130MB to 30MB and its codebase from 1.7M to 360K lines of code  —  To make its iPhone messaging app run better—especially on older phones—Facebook rewrote it from the ground up.  The new version is going live now.
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Verge survey of 1,123 US adults: 72% said Facebook has too much power; 51% said Google and YouTube should be split up into separate companies  —  Ahead of the election year, we polled Americans about which big tech companies they trust with their personal information …
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Sources: Airbnb's long-planned IPO, previously scheduled for March or April, has been derailed by the coronavirus fallout and could be pushed back to 2021  —  - Startup was targeting first half to kick off the process  — Shares of rivals dive as travel bookings canceled globally
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Frank McShan / MacRumors:
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Report: Apple and its suppliers are among the 83 big companies benefitting from China's abusive labor transfer programs for Uyghur Muslims and other minorities  —  A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank has named Apple among 83 other major companies benefiting …
Bloomberg:
Robinhood says it has been experiencing a “system-wide outage” today that it is affecting “all functionalities” on the platform  —  - Issue has been identified and fix is under way, company says  — Some customers of online broker couldn't access their accounts
Financial Times:
Analysis: one-third of donations from employees at big tech firms went to Sens. Warren and Sanders, despite a lack of enthusiasm from tech executives  —  Progressive Democratic candidates receive most cash from tech workers ahead of Super Tuesday  —  Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
US sanctions two Chinese nationals for allegedly laundering cryptocurrency for North Korea's Lazarus Group, which has hacked two crypto exchanges since 2018  —  Two Chinese men laundered funds from two hacked cryptocurrency exchanges.  —  The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions today …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO after over half a decade; Pekka Lundmark, outgoing President and CEO of energy firm Fortum appointed as President and CEO  —  Rajeev Suri, the chief executive of Nokia, is stepping down from his leadership role after overseeing the Finnish networking giant for more than 10 years.
Jack Nicas / New York Times:
Study: YouTube has reduced recommendations of some conspiracy theories like flat earth and QAnon but has let others flourish for topics like climate change  —  A new study examines YouTube's efforts to limit the spread of conspiracy theories on its site, from videos claiming the end times are near to those questioning climate change.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Spotify is making a big push for artists and record labels to pay to promote their music in its app, complicating talks over long-term music rights  —  - Music service needs ad revenue source to reach profitability  — The three major record labels are balking at Spotify's plans

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Earlier Picks

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