Techmeme
November 20, 2019, 6:40 PM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
PayPal to acquire Honey, a comparison shopping and rewards platform that has 17M MAUs, for ~$4B  —  PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash.
New York Times:
Google has hired IRI Consultants, an anti-union consulting company, signalling the feud between some activist employees and management has escalated  —  After nearly two years of unrest, the company appears to be cracking down on employee activism.  —  Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm …
Nathaniel Popper / New York Times:
On-demand transcription service Rev faces backlash from its contractors after cutting their take to 30 cents for each dollar spent on some jobs, from 45 cents  —  Rev was just a small start-up offering online transcriptions.  Now it's the latest symbol of a gig-economy company whose workers are fed up.
Joel Marcey / Facebook Developers:
Facebook details how it's moving from Nuclide to Visual Studio Code for its internal default development environment and contributing remote development tools  —  History  —  Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code.  There is no mandated development environment.  Some developers use vim.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google launches Google Earth tools that let users create and present virtual tours, with attached text, images, and videos, for specific places  —  It's like a homemade guided tour  —  Today, Google is adding new tools to Google Earth on the web that let you build your own tour of a place right on top of the Google Earth map.
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find bugs in Google and Samsung camera apps from before July 2019 that could record video, take pictures, and extract GPS data without permission  —  A new vulnerability has been found in the Camera apps for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Android devices that could allow …
Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple says it has begun construction of its $1B Austin, Texas campus, opening in 2022, as Trump tours the nearby Mac Pro production plant  —  Apple has announced that it has begun construction of its new Austin, Texas, campus, on the day that President Trump is due to tour the Mac Pro production line a short distance away.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple launches Apple Music for Business, letting businesses play music in retail locations with Apple providing human-curated playlists and recommendations  —  Apple Music is now partnering with businesses to play music at retail stores.  In a partnership with PlayNetwork …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Gravitational raises $25M Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins, to help developers with cloud deployment using Kubernetes  —  As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds.  Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.
Jane Zhang / South China Morning Post:
A profile of Baidu Bake, an encyclopedia with 16 times more Chinese entries than Wikipedia, written by 6.9M+ users comprising about 340 core contributors  —  Transition from hard format encyclopaedias to open-source encyclopaedias has raised some quality-of-information issues though …
Bloomberg:
Alibaba has raised ~$11.2B in its Hong Kong share sale, after pricing 500M new shares at HK$176, in one of the largest equity offerings this year  —  - Company priced 500 million new shares at HK$176 each  — Alibaba's share sale is among the world's largest this year
Angelica Mari / ZDNet:
WhatsApp says it has banned more than 400,000 accounts between August 15 and October 28, 2018, during Brazil's general election  —  The information was submitted by the messaging app as part of ongoing investigations into the spread of fake news.  —  Messaging app WhatsApp reported banning …
More: Engadget
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Starburst, which is seeking to modernize data analytics with the open source Presto distributed query engine, raises $22M led by Index Ventures  —  Starburst, the company that's looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised …
More: Business WireThanks:@andreesa

Sponsor Posts

Airtable:
Meet Airtable ProductCentral  —  The unified solution for managing your entire product development process in the AI era.
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:
Zoho Forms for successful Black Friday sales  —  Black Friday is a retail frenzy that can significantly impact your bottom line.  To make the most of this shopping bonanza, you need a strategy that not only attracts customers …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 11/04 - Apple Buying And Investing In Things
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 6:40 PM ET, November 20, 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

Brad Templeton / Forbes:
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Jordan Novet / CNBC: