Techmeme
February 8, 2021, 1:35 AM

Top News

Charles Fitzgerald / Platformonomics:
Analysis: in 2020, Amazon's capital expenditure grew 69% YoY to $54B, Microsoft's grew 14% YoY to $20.6B, and Google's declined over 5% YoY to $22.3B  —  It is time for our annual bulletin to CAPEX obsessives (previous updates from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 as well as earlier installments).
Wall Street Journal:
Thomas Brewster / Forbes:
Review: in 200+ charging docs filed in relation to the Capitol siege, 73 reference Facebook, 24 reference YouTube, 20 mention Instagram, and 8 mention Parler  —  Just after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer admitted the company's ability to enforce its own rules was “never perfect.”
New York Times:
Julia Chan / Sensor Tower Blog:
Sensor Tower data on top apps worldwide: Telegram led with 63M downloads in Jan. 2021, as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger downloads fell from Dec. 2020  —  Telegram was the most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide for January 2021 with more than 63 million installs, 3.8 times its downloads in January 2020.
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Study of 130+ facial recognition data sets compiled over 43 years: driven by ML's data needs, researchers gradually abandoned asking for people's consent  —  The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy.  —  hide
Reuters:
China issues new anti-monopoly rules putting more pressure on its local tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com  —  BEIJING (Reuters) - China's market regulator released new anti-monopoly guidelines on Sunday that target internet platforms, tightening existing restrictions faced by the country's tech giants.
Michael Vizard / VentureBeat:
Vendia, which offers a serverless SaaS product to share data and associated code across multicloud environments, raises $15.5M Series A led by Canvas Ventures  —  Vendia revealed it has raised $15.5 million to advance development of a Vendia Share service that enables IT teams to share data and code …
Julian Chokkattu / Wired:
A look at Metalenz, which aims to replace multiple lens elements in smartphone cameras with a single lens system that utilizes optical metasurfaces technology  —  The optics in your smartphone have been pretty much the same for more than a decade.  That's about to change.
Carolina Milanesi / Fast Company:
Interview with Samsung VP Jaeyeon Jung on the new Galaxy SmartTag and how it fits into the SmartThings ecosystem, which as of December had 66M active users  —  While the Apple world waits patiently for an “AirTags” announcement, Samsung is already shipping its remote location device, the Galaxy SmartTag.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Myanmar's new military government orders local telecom operators and ISPs to block Twitter and Instagram, days after imposing a similar blackout on Facebook  —  Updated at 1.46AM PT February 6: Telenor says Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) has directed all mobile operators …
Jon Fingas / Engadget:

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Earlier Picks

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