Techmeme
February 4, 2020, 6:25 PM

Top News

HuffPost:
Sources: Shadow, a company affiliated with Democratic digital nonprofit ACRONYM, built the Iowa caucus app that contributed to delays in reporting results  —  Shadow, a Democratic digital firm, created the app that was supposed to deliver quicker caucus results.
Charlie Warzel / New York Times:
Shadow's Iowa failure was a dangerous combination of techno-utopianism and laziness, which led to slapdash software engineering, procurement, and deployment  —  Democrats desperately need to win the internet to beat Trump.  Their first big test was a massive failure.  —  Mr. Warzel is an opinion writer at large.
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Some users' Google Photos videos in Takeout backups were exported to strangers between November 21-25, 2019; those affected were notified by email  —  With Google Takeout, you can download your data from Google apps as a backup or for use with another service.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service launches from beta with Steam, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay support, rivaling Google Stadia at $5/month  —  The BYOG cloud gaming service with Steam, Epic, Battle.net, and Uplay support  —  For the past eight years …
David McCabe / New York Times:
How the big companies like Marriott, Disney, and IBM, are pushing to limit Section 230 of the CDA, challenging Facebook, Google, and the internet as we know it  —  A motley group of powerful companies have their knives out for Section 230, which shields platforms from lawsuits over content posted by users.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Instagram generated ~$20B in advertising revenue in 2019, making up more than a quarter of Facebook's revenue  —  - Unit brought in about $20 billion in 2019, people familiar say  — Photo-sharing app has gained in importance since 2012 purchase
Financial Times:
Michael Ronen, a US managing partner for SoftBank's Vision Fund, says he is “negotiating” his exit from the fund, amid concern about its direction  —  A top US executive at SoftBank's $100bn Vision Fund is leaving after expressing concerns about “issues” at the technology conglomerate …
Twitter:
Twitter says users “may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media” likely to cause harm; such tweets will be labeled or removed  —  It's our responsibility to create rules on Twitter that are fair and set clear expectations for everyone on our service.
Michael Santoli / CNBC:
Tesla's stock more than tripled in 3+ months, from $255 on Oct. 23 to $877 today, closing up 13.7%; 12K+ Robinhood users bought TSLA for the first time Monday  —  Jim Cramer: Tesla is a tech company and must be valued as one  — Yes, there's an entrenched short base that's getting torched …
Davey Alba / New York Times:
Alphabet-owned Jigsaw is testing Assembler, a tool to identify doctored photographs, even ones created with the help of AI, with over a dozen news organizations  —  The company, owned by Google's parent, introduced a free tool it calls Assembler to sort out real images from fake ones.
Wall Street Journal:
The White House says companies, including Dell, Microsoft, and AT&T, are working together to create an open standard for 5G tech to reduce reliance on Huawei  —  Companies including Dell, Microsoft and AT&T are part of the effort, White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow says
Sarah Buhr / TechCrunch:
Real estate startup Homie, which employs realtors who don't take commission, raises $23M Series B and plans to expand to more US cities  —  Homie has made an impression among younger, first-time home buyers in the Utah and Arizona markets for cutting out the traditional closing costs …
Paul Mozur / New York Times:
Amid virus outbreak, authorities in China are using its vast surveillance network to identify potential carriers, ostracizing even those without the symptoms  —  The authorities hunt for people from Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, encouraging citizens to inform on others.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Seattle-based Kaskada raises $8M Series A for its machine learning feature engineering platform  —  Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data — is essential to tuning machine learning performance.  It's also typically arduous …
Annie Musgrove / Tech.eu:
Paris-based Convelio, a logistics startup for fine art, raises €9M Series A led by Acton Capital as it looks to expand to the US and into other market segments  —  Convelio, a Paris-based logistics tech startup in the fine art industry, has raised a €9 million in Series A round led …
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Hinge Health, which offers a digital physical therapy platform complete with an app and sensors, raises $90M Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners  —  If you have chronic back or joint pain, you know the struggle of schlepping to a physical therapist every week or two to help get better.

Sponsor Posts

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Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
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