Techmeme
August 14, 2020, 9:25 PM

Top News

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook launches paid online events in 20 countries with waived fees during COVID-19, says Apple is hurting SMBs by refusing to waive its 30% cut on iOS  —  Facebook Inc. joined a growing list of developers to publicly criticize Apple Inc. over its revenue-sharing policy for in-app purchases …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
By weaponizing Fortnite and with Apple as its primary target, Epic Games is well positioned to lead the fight for a change in app store policies  —  Epic Games executed its most ambitious Fortnite live event yesterday, leading both Apple and Google to remove one of the world's most popular games from their app stores.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Austen Goslin / Polygon:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Bloomberg:
VC firm Initialized raises $230M for its fifth fund and says the fund was “heavily oversubscribed” despite the departure of co-founder Alexis Ohanian  —  - Existing portfolio includes unicorns Instacart, Coinbase, Ro  — Fifth fund “heavily oversubscribed” despite co-founder exit
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook didn't apply hate speech rules to at least four flagged individuals and groups in India, showing a pattern of favoritism to Modi's party  —  Company executive in vital market opposed move to ban controversial politician; some employees allege favoritism to ruling party
BuzzFeed News:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Sources: Google is planning to eventually replace Duo with Meet, after placing its consumer communication services under G Suite head Javier Soltero  —  With classic Hangouts on the way out, Google today has two video calling apps.  However, that is one too many for the company …
New York Times:
Internal docs show TikTok classified more than a third of its 49M US DAUs in July as 14 years old or younger, raising concerns about safeguards for preteens  —  Three current and former employees expressed concerns about the Chinese-owned app's safeguards for preteen children.
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Ubisoft fires Ashraf Ismail, the creative director of its newest Assassin's Creed game, following an investigation into misconduct allegations  —  Ubisoft Entertainment SA has dismissed the creative director of the newest Assassin's Creed game, the latest result of a MeToo reckoning …
Richard Waters / Financial Times:
Ripple, sitting on $16B in XRP, says it plans to expand beyond its original cross-border payments system by becoming the “Amazon of payments”  —  The start-up is still trying to find compelling uses for the blockchain technology underpinning its XRP currency
Katyanna Quach / The Register:
Mozilla confirms a deal to keep Google as the default search provider in Firefox; source says the deal is worth $400M to $450M a year between now and 2023  —  $2.5m-a-year CEO set to take a pay cut, so that's all right, then  —  Mozilla has renewed its lucrative nine-figure deal with Google …

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:
Introducing AI Forms: Create optimized forms with AI in Zoho Forms  —  The future of form creation isn't coming, it's here.  Forget everything you thought you knew about building online forms.
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:
Mon. 12/23 - The Revenge Of Google Glass?
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 9:25 PM ET, August 14, 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

Tom Simonite / Wired:

Earlier Picks

Eva Xiao / Wall Street Journal:
Aaron Mak / Slate:
Gannon Burgett / Digital Photography Review:
Shannon Vavra / CyberScoop: