Techmeme
April 15, 2020, 8:10 AM

Top News

Miles Kruppa / Financial Times:
Sources: Airbnb raises another $1B in debt from investors including Apollo Global and Silver Lake, after raising a similar $1B funding round last week  —  New debt finance deal comes a week after an equal-sized funding round to help weather crisis  —  Airbnb is raising $1bn of senior debt …
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon will cut commission rates for its affiliate program starting April 21; amount of drop dependent on category, rates for grocery products dropping 5% to 1%  —  - Amazon on Tuesday told members of its affiliates program that it will cut commission rates beginning April 21.
Jay Greene / Washington Post:
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
Washington AG Bob Ferguson sues Facebook, saying the company violated its commitment to not sell political ads in the state  —  Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a new lawsuit against Facebook claiming the social network continues to violate state laws governing political ad disclosures.
Ryne Hager / Android Police:
Nest will temporarily reduce the recording quality of its security cameras by default to reduce bandwidth impact amid COVID-19, users can easily revert change  —  Google is temporarily dropping Nest camera recording quality and bandwidth over the next few days in an attempt to reduce strain on ISPs and the internet in general.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube launches Video Builder, a simple, free DIY tool to help SMBs create short videos  —  YouTube today is launching a new tool aimed at small businesses who need a simple, low-cost way to create videos, but may not have the creative experience or technical know-how required to do so.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
OnePlus 8 review: has great battery life and solid performance with a 90Hz display, but camera could be better and it lacks wireless charging and an IP rating  —  The traditional strengths, plus the traditional omissions  —  Video by Alix Diaconis and Vjeran Pavic
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Nat Friedman / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub announces private repositories with unlimited collaborators are now free and reduces the price of the existing paid Team plan from $9 to $4 per month  —  All of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.  🎉  —  Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub …
CNBC:
Apple launches a tool that shows how well people are social distancing, using anonymized data from Apple Maps, similar to efforts from Google  —  - Apple on Tuesday launched a new tool that shows how well people are following social distancing guidelines.  — It gathers anonymous data …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
The coronavirus crisis underscores the power and dominance of big tech companies, and that novel legislative approaches are required to regulate them  —  Apple and Google, who last Friday jointly |  announced new capabilities for contact tracing coronavirus carriers at scale …
Andy Patrizio / Ars Technica:
Folding@Home, a ~20 year-old distributed computing project aiding scientific research, has seen a surge in users, breaking an exaFLOP of compute amid COVID-19  —  Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche.  Then came COVID-19.  —  Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department …
More: 9to5Mac
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Facebook debuts Kit, an Apple Watch app, for one-tap communication with close friends via audio recording, emoji, location sharing, scribble, more  —  Facebook's internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch.
Kanishka Singh / Reuters:
Self-driving car startup Zoox agrees to settle lawsuit with Tesla over misappropriation of trade secrets, requiring it to pay an undisclosed amount  —  (Reuters) - Zoox Inc said on Tuesday it had settled a lawsuit with Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) after admitting that some new hires from the electric carmaker …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Indian logistics SaaS startup FarEye raises $25M Series D led by Microsoft's M12, bringing its total raised to $40M  —  More than 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally use an Indian logistics startup's service to work out the optimum way before they ship items to their customers.

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:
The crossroads of AI and SaaS  —  Enabling businesses of all sizes to build products in-house and disqualifying SaaS tools that are not AI-powered.  In a span of just two years, AI has made a name for itself as the key driver for innovation.
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. 12/20 - Gemini Flash Thinking
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 8:10 AM ET, April 15, 2020.

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

Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Paresh Dave / Reuters:
TechCrunch: