Techmeme
March 2, 2020, 5:50 PM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Waymo raises $2.25B from Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, parent-company Alphabet, and others to scale up its autonomous vehicles operations  —  Waymo, the autonomous vehicles division of Google parent company Alphabet, just got a massive capital infusion from a coterie of investors.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
AT&T TV launches across the US after rolling out in over a dozen markets last year, with prices that start at $49.99/month but go up dramatically after a year  —  AT&T's next big TV play has a problem: pricing  —  AT&T TV is launching nationwide today after initially rolling out to over a dozen markets last year.
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Behind Facebook's rewrite of Messenger, going live today, that has shrunk the iOS app's size from 130MB to 30MB and its codebase from 1.7M to 360K lines of code  —  To make its iPhone messaging app run better—especially on older phones—Facebook rewrote it from the ground up.  The new version is going live now.
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:
Sources: Airbnb's long-planned IPO, previously scheduled for March or April, has been derailed by the coronavirus fallout and could be pushed back to 2021  —  - Startup was targeting first half to kick off the process  — Shares of rivals dive as travel bookings canceled globally
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Frank McShan / MacRumors:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Verge survey of 1,123 US adults: 72% said Facebook has too much power; 51% said Google and YouTube should be split up into separate companies  —  Ahead of the election year, we polled Americans about which big tech companies they trust with their personal information …
Bloomberg:
Robinhood says it has been experiencing a “system-wide outage” today that it is affecting “all functionalities” on the platform  —  - Issue has been identified and fix is under way, company says  — Some customers of online broker couldn't access their accounts
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Report: Apple and its suppliers are among the 83 big companies benefitting from China's abusive labor transfer programs for Uyghur Muslims and other minorities  —  A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think-tank has named Apple among 83 other major companies benefiting …
Financial Times:
Analysis: one-third of donations from employees at big tech firms went to Sens. Warren and Sanders, despite a lack of enthusiasm from tech executives  —  Progressive Democratic candidates receive most cash from tech workers ahead of Super Tuesday  —  Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders …
Jack Nicas / New York Times:
Study: YouTube has reduced recommendations of some conspiracy theories like flat earth and QAnon but has let others flourish for topics like climate change  —  A new study examines YouTube's efforts to limit the spread of conspiracy theories on its site, from videos claiming the end times are near to those questioning climate change.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
US sanctions two Chinese nationals for allegedly laundering cryptocurrency for North Korea's Lazarus Group, which has hacked two crypto exchanges since 2018  —  Two Chinese men laundered funds from two hacked cryptocurrency exchanges.  —  The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions today …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO after over half a decade; Pekka Lundmark, outgoing President and CEO of energy firm Fortum appointed as President and CEO  —  Rajeev Suri, the chief executive of Nokia, is stepping down from his leadership role after overseeing the Finnish networking giant for more than 10 years.

Sponsor Posts

TELUS Digital:
What you need to know about fine-tuning LLMs  —  Success with generative AI hinges on honing a pretrained LLM to be a specialist at your intended domain or application.  Learn how to fine-tune for four key characteristics.
Intel:
Intel Delivers powerful CPUs for AI and Networking  —  With the onset of AI, businesses demand powerful and efficient CPUs.  Explore new Intel Xeon 6 processors, for the broadest set of workloads with leadership performance and lower TCO.
Zoho:
Planned India Data Center Maintenance on 5th and 6th April 2025 from 09.00 AM to 09:30 AM IST for Zoho Payments  —  Dear customers,Our bi-annual infrastructure maintenance for our India Data Center is scheduled for April 5 & 6 …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Techmeme Ride Home:
Me On The Big Technology Podcast Talking This Week In Tech
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.
Lenny's Podcast:
A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of "Shape Up," early employee at 37signals)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Hard Fork:
The Tech Behind Signalgate + Dwarkesh Patel's "Scaling Era" + Is A.I. Making Our Listeners Dumb?
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Logan Bartlett Show:
Aaron Levie (CEO, Box) on Enterprise AI Trends No One is Talking About Yet
A podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett, an investor at Redpoint Ventures, covering tech with industry insiders.
Subscribe to The Logan Bartlett Show.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:50 PM ET, March 2, 2020.

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

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Thomas Ricker / The Verge:
New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Ben Gilbert / Business Insider: