Techmeme
February 26, 2021, 10:40 AM

Top News

Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Twitter announces Super Follow feature to let users charge for tweets, and a Communities feature to let users create and join groups based on specific interests  —  It's also planning a groups feature  —  Twitter announced a pair of big upcoming features today: the ability for users to charge …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:
Facebook is rolling out an opt-in feature, allowing “Hey Facebook” to be used as a wake word for its Portal displays and Oculus Quest platform  —  Available on Portal smart displays and rolling out on Oculus Quest headsets  —  Facebook has introduced a new “Hey Facebook” …
Ryan Mac / BuzzFeed News:
Facebook's Andrew Bosworth told staff that Facebook is considering building facial recognition into future smart glasses products, weighing legal implications  —  Facebook is discussing building facial recognition into its upcoming smart glasses product and has been weighing the legal implications …
Reuters:
ByteDance has agreed to a $92M class action settlement over data privacy claims from some US TikTok users, according to court documents  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - ByteDance has agreed to a $92 million class-action settlement to settle data privacy claims from some U.S. TikTok users …
Katie Deighton / Wall Street Journal:
Apple, Google, and Amazon are training their voice assistants to better understand people with speech disorders such as stutter  —  Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri often can't understand people with dysarthria or a stutter; their creators say that may change
Vignesh Ramachandran / Stanford News:
Study finds video chats fatigue humans due to the intense up-close eye contact, constant self-view in real time, reduced mobility, and increased cognitive load  —  It's not just Zoom.  Popular video chat platforms have design flaws that exhaust the human mind and body.  But there are easy ways to mitigate their effects.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Cision, a media monitoring company that is the parent of PR Newswire, buys online consumer intelligence and social media analytics service Brandwatch for $450M  —  Online consumer intelligence and social media listening platform Brandwatch has been acquired by Cision, best known …
Robinhood:
Robinhood says it has added 6M new crypto customers so far in 2021; Robinhood averaged ~200K new crypto customers a month in 2020  —  Since we launched nearly three years ago, Robinhood Crypto has been central to our efforts to expand access to financial services and democratize finance for all.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Airbnb posts a $3.9B loss in Q4 in first quarterly report since IPO, with revenues of $859M, down 22% YoY, blames much of the loss on charges related to the IPO  —  - Airbnb reported a loss of $3.89 billion in its first earnings report since its IPO late last year.  — However, the company beat expectations for revenue.
Zoe Schiffer / The Verge:
Eleven current and ex-Mailchimp employees say company executives knew about allegations of racism and sexism at the company, some as early as 2014  —  Alejandra Luaces had only worked at Mailchimp for four months when she got a surprising anonymous email.  “Oliver* is in an open marriage …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft confirms it has fixed a five-hour Xbox Live outage which prevented some users from signing in or making purchases  —  Microsoft's gaming network went down worldwide  —  Microsoft's Xbox Live service went down for more than five hours today, preventing users from signing in to the service.
Karissa Bell / Engadget:

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Earlier Picks

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Daniel Van Boom / CNET: