Techmeme
September 25, 2019, 6:55 PM

Top News

Dami Lee / The Verge:
Amazon announces high-end Echo Studio, available for pre-order today for $200, with five speaker drivers and 3D audio support  —  It supports 3D audio from Dolby Atmos  —  Amazon announced its first high-end smart speaker at its annual hardware event today, called the Echo Studio.
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Amazon unveils Echo Buds, $129.99 Alexa-enabled wireless earbuds that track steps, with claimed battery life of five hours and 20 hours with the charging case  —  Preorders start today, with shipping in time for the holidays  —  Amazon just announced its first foray into the headphone space …
Khari Johnson / VentureBeat:
Amazon announces a new line of Alexa-enabled wearables equipped with mics and speakers, including the $180 Echo Frames eye glasses and $130 Echo Loop ring  —  Amazon is rolling out a new line of wearables that work with Alexa today including the Echo Frames eyeglasses and the Echo Loop smart ring.
Molly Price / CNET:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook unveils Horizon, a VR massive multiplayer world coming in 2020, and will shut down existing VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms on Oct. 25  —  Facebook today announced a virtual reality sandbox game where you can build your own environments and games, socialize with friends, and more.
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat:
Oculus Quest will be updated in Nov. to be able to wire up directly to PCs, like the Rift, and in 2020 will get support for hand tracking, no controllers needed  —  Just before the annual VR/AR conference Oculus Connect 6, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a teaser video hinting …
Scott Stein / CNET:
Interview with Mark Zuckerberg on cracking social in VR, updates to the Quest headset, and how the future of Oculus' AR ambitions are grounded in its VR efforts  —  I'm led down a staircase by a small team of Facebook communications people, into a high-ceilinged, wide-open office …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
FTC sues Match Group, alleging Match.com connected daters with accounts known to be fake to get them to subscribe, leading to 499,691 new subscriptions  —  The FTC says more than 400,000 people subscribed because of these fraud messages  —  Match.com may have connected non-paying daters …
Greg Bensinger / Washington Post:
Interviews with 20 people show Uber's 80-strong Special Investigations Unit, which deals with severe incidents, often puts Uber's interests ahead of riders'  —  Investigators say drivers get three “strikes” for bad behavior — and may just end up driving for Lyft.
Laura Kayali / Politico:
Google refuses to pay publishers in France, first to apply EU's copyright law, will only show headlines and thumbnails, unless publisher asks to add previews  —  The announcement pours cold water on publishers' hopes of getting more money from Google after an EU reform of online copyright law.
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
eBay announces CEO Devin Wenig is leaving the company and appoints CFO Scott Schenkel as interim CEO  —  Online commerce giant eBay has announced that CEO, president, and company director Devin Wenig is leaving the company, with former chief financial officer (CFO) Scott Schenkel stepping in to the hotseat on an interim basis.
Google AI Blog:
Google has released a dataset of ~3,000 deepfake videos to help researchers develop deepfake detection techniques  —  Deep learning has given rise to technologies that would have been thought impossible only a handful of years ago.  Modern generative models are one example of these …
Wall Street Journal:
SoftBank-backed real estate tech startup Compass loses its COO, after departures of CFO, CTO, CMO, HR head, general counsel, and head of product over 18 months  —  Startup fueled by $1.5 billion from Japanese tech fund faces scrutiny following wave of executive departures
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez / The San Francisco Examiner:
San Francisco grants permits to Lime, JUMP, Scoot, and Spin to deploy up to 2,500 electric scooters each, starting from October 15  —  Rev your (electric) engines, San Francisco: E-scooters are going to spread across The City.  —  Four e-scooter companies just won a coveted permit to rent electric kick scooters in San Francisco.
More: Axios and TechCrunch

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