Techmeme
July 12, 2019, 2:50 AM

Top News

Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Trump says cryptocurrencies including Facebook's Libra are “not money”, need to be regulated, citing their high volatility and facilitation of unlawful behavior  —  Just hours after a “social media summit,” the president's Twitter account posted a thread aimed at, of all things, cryptocurrency.
Tom Simonite / Wired:
Facebook says its AI bot Pluribus, developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon, is the first such bot to beat top pros at six-player No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em  —  The 32-year-old is the only person to have won four World Poker Tour titles and has earned more than $7 million at tournaments.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube unveils new ways for creators to make money, including Super Stickers for chats in livestreams and premieres and paid levels for Channel Memberships  —  YouTube is rolling out more ways for its creators to engage fans and generate revenue, the company announced today the VidCon event in Anaheim, California.
The Keyword:
Google admits one of its language reviewers leaked confidential Dutch audio data and says it is investigating the issue  —  We're focused on building products that work for everyone, and as part of this, we invest significant resources to ensure that our speech technology works for a wide variety of languages, accents and dialects.
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Twitter was down globally for just over an hour yesterday as the White House “social media summit” kicked off  —  When in doubt, ban yourself  —  Twitter appeared to be down for a large number of users across the United States on Thursday.  The company confirmed the issue to The Verge …
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Twitter says it will test a feature to let users hide replies to their tweets starting next week in Canada  —  Twitter users are getting more control over which comments are visible in the conversations they start.  —  The company has been testing and talking about this feature since earlier this year …
The Information:
Sources: Bird lost about $100M in the first quarter, with revenue shrinking to about $15M, and the company told people that it has about $100M in cash left  —  The wintertime was bleak for Bird.  In this year's first quarter, the electric scooter operator lost nearly $100 million …
Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News:
Facebook is starting to show users which marketing and data companies have your data, how an ad was targeted, and how to opt-out  —  The new tool tells you how an ad was targeted and which third-party agency or data broker was used.  It also links to pages to opt out.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
In Q2, IDC estimates global PC shipments grew 4.7% to 64.9M units; Gartner estimates 1.5% growth to 63M units; both say Windows 10 refresh contributed to gain  —  The PC market rebounded slightly in Q2, according to research firms Gartner and IDC.  After six years of quarterly PC shipment declines …
The Daily Beast:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft says its Slack competitor, Teams, now has 13M+ daily active users and 19M+ weekly active users; in a filing in April, Slack said it has 10M DAUs  —  Microsoft's first set of user numbers  —  Microsoft is finally revealing exactly how many people are using its Slack competitor Microsoft Teams.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon says it will spend $700M to retrain 100K, or about a third, of its US employees by 2025, acknowledging the impact of technology and automation on jobs  —  Amazon is embarking on a $700 million effort to retrain its U.S. workforce, in a high-profile acknowledgment of the impact …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Nielsen says it will start surveying podcast listeners about their consumption habits, including genre preferences and how long they listen to shows  —  More data on listeners  —  Nielsen, a company best known for tracking TV shows' popularity, is getting into the podcast data collection business.

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