Techmeme
May 23, 2019, 2:20 PM

Top News

Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Source: Amazon is working on a wearable voice-activated health and wellness device that works with a mobile app and can recognize human emotions  —  - Described as a health product, it would work with a mobile app  — Machines that can understand emotions are a sci-fi staple
Guy Rosen / Facebook:
Facebook releases an update on enforcing its community standards, saying it banned 2.19B fake accounts in Q1 2019, up from 1.2B in Q4 2018  —  Today, we're publishing our third Community Standards Enforcement Report, covering Q4 2018 and Q1 2019.  This report adds a few additional data points:
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Samsung researchers detail a machine learning method that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single image of a person's face  —  Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility …
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
Software maker Panic unveils Playdate, a Game Boy-like device with a hand crank control and 12 bundled games released over time, coming in 2020 for $149  —  Little, yellow, different  —  Panic made its name through high-end Mac software, but more recently, the company moved into gaming …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Instagram says IGTV will now support landscape video, following feedback from creators and users, as the service struggles to gain traction  —  The vertical video experiment is over  —  Instagram is no longer all-in on vertical video.  The company announced today that its longform video offshoot …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub launches Sponsors, a tool that lets users pay their favorite open source contributors; developers can opt in to a “Sponsor me” button on repositories  —  GitHub today launched Sponsors, a new tool that lets you give financial support to open-source developers through recurring monthly payments.
Mark Scott / Politico:
GDPR has helped big tech companies cement their dominance in the data economy while smaller companies have suffered from relatively high compliance costs  —  The region's data protection overhaul was supposed to help citizens.  Instead, it's helped Big Tech.
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
A breakdown of Huawei's supply problems after the US ban, using its latest flagship phone as an example, from hardware to software to building an app ecosystem  —  Huawei's hardware independence is actually pretty good!  The software, though...  President Trump's Huawei ban is in full effect …
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook says it won't pay commissions to employees who sell political ads; source: Zuckerberg decided to keep selling political ads after an internal debate  —  Company leaders considered dropping such ads, which are now viewed as a headache  —  Facebook Inc. said it stopped paying commissions …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
PlanetScale, a database-as-a-service startup based on Vitess, the tech that helped scale YouTube, raises $22M Series A led by a16z  —  PlanetScale's founders invented the technology called Vitess that scaled YouTube and Dropbox.  Now they're selling it to any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible.
Nico Grant / Bloomberg:
Interviews with Marc Benioff and 18 associates and current and former Salesforce employees show his instinctual and sometimes mystifying M&A strategy  —  Marc Benioff's acquisitions have kept the software giant growing at an incredible rate.  He's also made some costly errors.
Dave Lee / BBC:
Leaked memo: ARM has told staff it must suspend business, including all active contracts, support entitlements, and pending engagements, with Huawei  —  UK-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei, according to internal documents obtained by the BBC.
Bloomberg:
Ginny Marvin / Search Engine Land:
Google begins rolling out an updated mobile search design with a black “ad” label and favicons for all organic results  —  The new look brings some branding to the search results, and preps the mobile search for more types of content and actions for users to take right from the search results.

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