Techmeme
August 29, 2018, 11:00 PM

Top News

Will Oremus / Slate:
Twitter confirms that it ran a limited test for a feature that recommended accounts to unfollow that users rarely engage with  —  A well-established feature of Twitter is “Who to Follow.”  Drawing on data about what accounts you follow and interact with, Twitter's software automatically recommends …
Robert Mitchell / Variety:
Facebook announces the international rollout of Facebook Watch, which first launched in the US a year ago this month, starting on Thursday  —  Facebook has announced the international rollout of Facebook Watch, its video destination for episodic content, which first launched in the U.S. a year ago this month.
BuzzFeed News:
Trump tweets video claiming Google didn't promote his State of the Union address on its homepage; Google says it did, confirmed by screenshot posted on Reddit  —  “Google promoted president Obama's State of the Union on its homepage.  When President Trump took office, Google stopped," a video shared by Trump falsely claimed.
William Denniss / Google Cloud Blog:
Google to hand over operational control of the Kubernetes project to its community and donates $9M in Google Cloud credits to Cloud Native Computing Foundation  —  Kubernetes, the container orchestrator created and open-sourced here at Google, has experienced incredible development and adoption since it was introduced in 2014.
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google redesigns Wear OS with a Google Assistant feed, one-swipe access to Fit, and revamped notifications  —  And adding a Google Assistant feed  —  If you have a newer Wear OS watch, sometime in the coming month, you'll get a software update that will change what happens when you swipe on your watchface.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Sonos says it will open its developer program to all partners on September 6, opening the door to audio notifications and more  —  The company is opening its developer program to all in September  —  Alongside the announcement of its brand new Sonos Amp today, Sonos has also revealed an expansion of its developer program.
Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
DFINITY, a blockchain-based cloud computing project that aims to rival services like AWS, raises another $102M in a token presale from a16z, Polychain, others  —  An ambitious blockchain project called Dfinity wants to reinvent computing by replacing large platforms like Amazon Web Services …
Jason Del Rey / Recode:
A look at the recent $100M+ acquisitions of direct-to-consumer startups, including MVMT and Native, that raised little to no venture capital  —  A new breed of entrepreneurs is creating huge consumer brands — like MVMT and Tuft & Needle — without venture capital, and laughing all the way to the bank.
Catalin Cimpanu / BleepingComputer:
Reports: data of 130M guests at Chinese company Huazhu Hotels, including booking and personal info like phone numbers and email addresses, sold on the dark web  —  A hacker is selling the personal details of over 130 million hotel guests for 8 Bitcoin ($56,000) on a Chinese Dark Web forum.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Skagen unveils a minimalist Wear OS-based Falster 2 smartwatch with a heart-rate sensor, GPS, and NFC, available September 12 and priced from $275  —  Skagen's Falster has been one of the darlings among Wear OS smartwatches thanks to its posh yet minimalist look, but it was hard to recommend …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Senate Intelligence Committee confirms Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg will testify in a Sept. 5 open hearing; Larry Page was also invited but hasn't responded  —  Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg will testify in an open hearing …
John Follain / Bloomberg:
How China is seeking to create a “Greater Bay Area” to compete with Silicon Valley by building a $15B bridge linking Hong Kong, Macau, and Southern China  —  The completion of one of the world's longest bridges stands as the biggest monument to China's success in reuniting its colonial-era concessions.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Dell unveils its fall line-up of Alexa-ready Inspiron, XPS, and Vostro laptops and 2-in-1s, updated with 8th Gen Intel Core processors  —  Dell revealed its new line-up of laptops, 2-in-1 laptop-tablet hybrids, and monitors with the latest components from Intel.

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:
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 11:00 PM ET, August 29, 2018.

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

Earlier Picks

Ars Technica:
Sarah Jeong / The Verge: