Techmeme
October 25, 2019, 7:15 PM

Top News

Facebook:
Facebook begins testing Facebook News with a subset of people in the US across four categories of select publishers: general, topical, diverse, and local news  —  Testing a dedicated place for news in the US  —  Journalism plays a critical role in our democracy.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
As Facebook dangles extra traffic via a dedicated news tab, and journalism outlets leap into its cage, a look at 10 years of Facebook abusing publishers  —  10 years of abusing publishers  —  Are we really doing this again?  After the pivot to video.  After Instant Articles.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
At an event with News Corp's Robert Thomson, Mark Zuckerberg says every internet platform has a responsibility to fund and form partnerships for news  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — aiming to counter skeptics who believe the social network is a chief culprit in promulgating a flood of misinformation …
Peter Kafka / Vox:
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Google says it's improving 10% of English searches in the US by using NLP techniques to better understand query context and words' relationship with each other  —  For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for.
Sequoia Capital:
Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital, dies at 87  —  Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital and one of the generation of leaders who forged Silicon Valley, died today aged 87 at his home in Woodside, California.  He shaped Sequoia and left his imprint not just on his family and friends …
Reuters:
AT&T says HBO Max will be available free to the 10M AT&T customers in the US who are also HBO subscribers when it launches in the spring  —  (Reuters) - In the bestselling novel “Circe” — optioned by WarnerMedia for its forthcoming HBO Max streaming service — the daughter …
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget:
Google Pixelbook Go review: excellent keyboard, good performance and battery life, with solid and stable OS, but remains pricey, and trackpad could be smoother  —  By focusing on the basics, Google's latest Chromebook is less ambitious but more successful.  —  Google has been building …
Sean O'Kane / The Verge:
Sources: Will.i.am's AI startup i.am+ hasn't paid staff in 7 weeks, is late on tax payments, and its smart home platform Wink stopped working with many devices  —  A stalled deal in Dubai has created problems for i.am+  —  Will.i.am's technology company i.am+ is running out of money …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Pentagon awards $10B JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft over Amazon  —  Microsoft has emerged victorious in a dramatic competition for public cloud resources for the U.S. Defense Department, beating out market leader Amazon Web Services, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The Information:
Sources: Sony has hired bankers to explore a sale of its Playstation Vue service, which would include the company's tech and a subscriber list of around 500K  —  Sony Corp. is exploring the sale of its Playstation Vue service, which offers a slimmed-down version of cable TV delivered over the internet …
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:
TikTok says its content moderation policies are led by a US-based team and it will not remove content, including posts about Hong Kong, at the behest of China  —  Short-form video app TikTok can't shake an air of suspicion that surrounds it in the United States.
Washington Post:
Megan Graham / CNBC:
Twitter says some users will start seeing more ads after it changed its historical approach of showing fewer ads to users with high follower counts  —  - Twitter's third-quarter earnings were marred by issues in a product that advertisers use to market mobile apps.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

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