Techmeme
January 5, 2019, 12:05 PM

Top News

Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Amazon SVP Dave Limp talks about company's strategy for Alexa, says 100M+ devices with Alexa on board have been sold to date  —  More than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold.  That's the all-too-rare actual number that Amazon's SVP of devices and services, Dave Limp, revealed to me earlier this week.
Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic:
A machine-learning model in Flint that once helped predict lead pipe locations with 70% accuracy was abandoned due to political decisions to excavate everywhere  —  A machine-learning model showed promising results, but city officials and their engineering contractor abandoned it.
Owen Churchill / South China Morning Post:
LinkedIn restores Chinese access to the profile of US-based activist Zhou Fengsuo after blocking it a day earlier, says the profile was blocked in error  —  - Zhou, a student leader during the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, says he thinks media attention led to the change
Julie Steinberg / Wall Street Journal:
Chinese startups raised $69.4B in 2018, up 63% YoY as per CB Insights, but VCs have gotten more conservative after Chinese IPOs like Tencent Music disappointed  —  Thousands of private Chinese tech companies raised a record $69.4 billion in equity in 2018, but the volume of stock sales has dropped off sharply of late
Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire:
SEC filing: smart home camera maker Wyze Labs has raised $20M  —  Wyze Labs, the Kirkland, Wash.-based makers of a low-cost, smart home security camera, has raised $20 million in new funding according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
More: SEC and Wyze
Bloomberg:
Hackers dump private info of Angela Merkel and hundreds of other German politicians including email addresses, phone numbers, and personal chat transcripts  —  - Leak includes emails, chat transcripts, photos, phone numbers  — Hack is ‘elaborate’ social-engineering attack, IT expert says
Randy Nelson / Sensor Tower Blog:
Research: Nintendo revenues from mobile apps reached $348M in 2018, up 15% YoY, with the game Fire Emblem Heroes accounting for ~66% of 2018 sales  —  Nintendo's mobile ambitions saw the publisher reach a new record of nearly $117 million in worldwide player spending across the App Store …

Sponsor Posts

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.
Zoho:
CIO challenge 6: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?  —  Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series!  After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/15 - Crypto Ascendant
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 12:05 PM ET, January 5, 2019.

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

Wall Street Journal:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Sijia Jiang / Reuters: