Techmeme
January 30, 2021, 2:40 PM

Top News

Under the Hood:
Robinhood explains why it placed restrictions on certain securities over the past week, says its clearinghouse-mandated deposit for equities increased tenfold  —  With the extraordinary market activity this week, and the temporary restrictions we put in place on certain securities …
John Herrman / New York Times:
Reddit's uncommon qualities as a community platform, inspiring nihilism and humor, may explain why r/WallStreetBets' growth feels reminiscent of r/The_Donald  —  Reddit communities grow powerful in plain sight.  Why do they keep taking the world by surprise?
Jesse Westbrook / Bloomberg:
SEC says it “will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors” in trading certain securities  —  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, making its most specific comments about the recent mania in the stock market …
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
New York Times:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Wall Street Journal:
Corbin Davenport / Android Police:
Google pulls federated chat app Element from the Play Store citing abusive content, despite it only being a client for Matrix servers  —  Element is a popular client for the federated chat protocol Matrix, and we highlighted it in our roundup of the best open-source alternatives to Google Hangouts last year …
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Canalys: smartphone shipments in China fell 4% YoY to 84M in Q4 2020 and shipments for 2020 fell 11% YoY to 330M, as iPhone's share jumped from 15% to 18% YoY  —  The impact of United States government sanctions on Huawei is continuing to hurt the company and dampen overall smartphone shipments in China …
Wall Street Journal:
Experts say Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature will damage Facebook's core business; the feature will limit Facebook's data collection from 85K+ iOS apps  —  New feature on iPhones will limit Facebook's ability to collect data from apps and prove that ads work
Adam Satariano / New York Times:
Graphika: Huawei officials retweeted messages from fake accounts on Twitter to spread a pro-5G influence campaign in Belgium; Huawei is investigating the claim  —  A covert online push to sway telecommunications policy in favor of the Chinese company may presage a new twist in social manipulation.
Lara O'Reilly / Business Insider:
Verizon Media says it is planning personalized features for Yahoo Mail, and around 500K users watched NFL streams in the Yahoo Mail app in tests in Q4 2020  —  - Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan tells Insider the unit is preparing a “mega” product launch in the coming weeks.
Prachir Singh / Counterpoint Research:
Research: smartphone shipments in India fell 4% YoY to ~150M in 2020 and H2 2020 saw 100M+ shipments; among the top 5 brands, realme grew the most at 22% YoY  —  - The Indian smartphone market registered a modest 4% decline in the pandemic-hit year.  — The market crossed 100 million units …
Bloomberg:
Current and former staff say much of Amazon's struggles in gaming rest with the leadership of its gaming division, which reportedly has a budget of $500M/year  —  Mike Frazzini had never made a video game when he helped start Amazon Game Studios.  Eight years later, he has released two duds …

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Chloe Sorvino / Forbes:
Theodore Schleifer / Vox:
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Earlier Picks

Reuters:
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