Techmeme
December 1, 2020, 12:45 PM

Top News

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Amazon launches EC2 Mac instances, bringing Intel-based Mac minis to its cloud for $1.083 per hour billed by the second  —  AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud.  These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview.
Shara Tibken / CNET:
Reuters:
Sources: Samsung may discontinue Galaxy Note next year, reflecting the sharp drop in demand for high-end smartphones due to the pandemic  —  SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd may discontinue its premium Galaxy Note phone next year, sources with knowledge of the matter said …
BBC:
Facebook's Oversight Board takes up first cases for review, all involving decisions to remove user content, says users have submitted 20K cases since Oct. 2020  —  Facebook's Oversight Board has chosen its first batch of cases to review.  —  All involve decisions originally made by the platform to remove user content.
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Libra Association is rebranding to Diem, distancing itself from the initial Facebook-led vision debuted last year, ahead of its expected 2021 stablecoin launch  —  The Libra Association put together by Facebook last year is rebranding in further efforts to distance itself from the original Facebook-led vision rolled out last year.
CNBC:
Amazon says 2020's holiday shopping season has been its biggest ever, with independent sellers reaching $4.8B+ in worldwide sales over the weekend, up 60% YoY  —  - Amazon has announced that this year's holiday shopping season has been the biggest in its history.
Jim Waterson / The Guardian:
Facebook to launch Facebook News in the UK in Jan. 2021, says it will pay publishers for news not already on its platform; most big UK publishers have signed up  —  Facebook is to pay mainstream UK news outlets millions of pounds a year to license their articles, as the social network faces …
Eric Geller / Politico:
SCOTUS worries about CFAA's sweeping nature, with Justice Gorsuch saying that the US government's view of the law risks “making a federal criminal of us all”  —  The Supreme Court on Monday indicated serious reservations about the ambiguity and scope of the nation's only major cybercrime law …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Flock Freight, an AI-driven marketplace helping shippers and SMBs find freight truckers, raises $113.5M Series C led by Softbank, after a $50M Series B in Feb.  —  Flock Freight today closed a $113.5 million round to accelerate developments of its algorithmic pooling technology for truckload shipping and logistics.
More: TechCrunch
Jeff Grubb / VentureBeat:
Report: in the past six months 79% of US consumers played a video game, with time spent playing games up 26% YoY, and user spending up 33% YoY  —  We know that time and money spent on video games is surging due to the pandemic.  Now, industry-tracking firm The NPD Group is providing detail on where that growth is coming from.
More: NPD Group and GameSpot
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Databand, a developer of AI-based observability software for data pipelines, raises $14.5M Series A led by Accel. bringing its total raised to ~$18.5M  —  DevOps continues to get a lot of attention as a wave of companies develop more sophisticated tools to help developers manage increasingly complex architectures and workloads.
More: FinSMEs and Geektime
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
AWS unveils its new custom ML training chip Trainium with support for TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet, coming 2021; AWS claims it outperforms rival cloud chips  —  At its annual re:Invent developer conference, AWS today announced the launch of AWS Trainium, the company's next-gen custom chip dedicated …
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Alphabet's DeepMind says it has solved the key “protein folding problem”, cutting the job down from months to hours, which could speed up drug discovery  —  Researchers at DeepMind say they have solved “the protein folding problem,” a task that has bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years.

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 12:45 PM ET, December 1, 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

Wall Street Journal:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Ana Swanson / New York Times:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Surojit Chatterjee / The Coinbase Blog:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Tim Hardwick / MacRumors: