Techmeme
April 23, 2020, 5:35 PM

Top News

Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon employees often consulted sales info on third-party vendors when developing private-label merchandise, contrary to assertions to Congress  —  Contrary to assertions to Congress, employees often consulted sales information on third-party vendors when developing private-label merchandise
Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips by 2021 and is working on three Mac processors based on the 5nm A14 chip in the next iPhone  —  - New processors to be based on iPhone designs, replacing Intel  — Transition will be gradual, start with less-powerful computers
Megan Graham / CNBC:
Google to require all advertisers to verify their identities, starting in the US; existing advertisers will have 30 days to complete the verification process  —  - Google began requiring political advertisers wanting to run election ads on its platform to verify their identity back in 2018.
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Report: EU commissioner says Tim Cook told him Apple and Google's contact tracing API will be available to developers from April 28  —  The first version of Apple and Google's jointly developed, cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers as of next week …
Ry Crist / CNET:
FCC adopts a proposal that opens the 6GHz band for unlicensed Wi-Fi use, freeing up more than 1,200MHz of additional bandwidth for next-gen Wi-Fi 6E devices  —  The unanimous decision opens 1,200MHz of new bandwidth for Wi-Fi 6E devices that are expected to begin arriving this year.
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Apple Music app is now available on Samsung's smart TV models from 2018 and later  —  Another Apple service comes to Samsung's sets, available now  —  Apple Music is getting an app on Samsung's most recent smart TVs, the two companies announced today.  It's the latest expansion …
Aaron Sankin / The Markup:
Facebook removes “pseudoscience” from the list of categories advertisers can use to target people after report that the category contained more than 78M people  —  While vowing to police COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, Facebook let advertisers target users interested in"pseudoscience"
Julia Black / The Verge:
Following layoffs at Bird, interviews with 16 former employees paint a picture of a workplace with high-turnover and an erratic, careless leadership  —  Inside the electric scooter startup with big workplace problems  —  Emma* was up late working on a complex analysis from her laptop in bed for Bird.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Research tracking tech company layoffs finds 29,463 employees were laid off from 292 companies between March 11 and April 21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic  —  Today, the U.S. Labor Department reported some sobering figures: The number of unemployment claims filed over the past five weeks surged to 26.4 million.
More: CNBC
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, an integration service for developers to easily transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications  —  AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics …
Karen Weise / New York Times:
Jeff Bezos, who sources say only worked on projects that posed a major risk to the company, has taken an active leadership role at Amazon amid COVID-19  —  The chief executive, who had distanced himself from day-to-day management, is closely involved in the company's response to the pandemic.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Boston Dynamics says its quadruped Spot robot is in use at one Boston hospital for remote triage of patients suspected of having COVID-19  —  The company has ambitious plans for using robots to assist COVID-19 treatment  —  Robot maker Boston Dynamics announced on Thursday that its quadruped Spot robot …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Digits comes out of stealth with a $22M Series B led by GV and launches a free AI-powered expense monitoring dashboard for small businesses  —  Digits, a fintech startup hailing from the same team that built and sold Crashlytics to Twitter, is officially launching today after two years of development.
Tweets: @levynews
Financial Times:
The coronavirus is accelerating the shift to automation, chatbots, and AI in the call center industry and threatening jobs  —  The industry is already being transformed by the pandemic as a shift to automation accelerates, threatening jobs  —  When Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte announced …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Digital whiteboard maker Miro raises $50M Series B led by Iconiq Capital, bringing its total raised to around $75M  —  Miro is a company in the right place at the right time.  The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards.
More: FinSMEs
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
France is hypocritical to ask Google and Apple to ease their privacy protections for a French contact-tracing app, while being such a vocal critic of big tech  —  We keep trying to explain to people that privacy is always about trade-offs, and arguing for privacy laws that protect “privacy” …

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
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:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 11/22 - An LLM Siri But... Only The Year AFTER Next?
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 5:35 PM ET, April 23, 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

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Adi Robertson / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Patrick Shanley / Hollywood Reporter:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / VICE: