Techmeme
May 19, 2020, 11:05 PM

Top News

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook Shops, a free tool that helps businesses easily list products on their Facebook Page, Instagram profile, Stories, or in ads  —  - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Shops, a new e-commerce feature that allows businesses to easily list their products on Facebook and Instagram.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Facebook details the AI behind its shopping experiences, accounting for consumer traits like body type, skin tone, location, socioeconomic class, age, and poses  —  Facebook today announced improvements to the shopping experiences across its platform, including Facebook Shops …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces Project Reunion, its latest attempt to unify the Windows developer platform by reducing fragmentation between Win32 and UWP APIs  —  At Build 2020 today, Microsoft unveiled Project Reunion, its latest attempt to unify the Windows developer platform by reducing fragmentation …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Mehedi Hassan / Thurrott:
Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is buying older movies and shows for Apple TV+ to build a back catalog; as of February it had ~10M subscribers but only half actively used it  —  - Company wants to create back catalog to complement originals  — TV+, launched in November, had 10 million sign-ups by February
Sara Fischer / Axios:
NYT says it will stop using third-party data to target ads in 2021, building a first-party data platform instead, starting with 45 proprietary audience segments  —  The New York Times will no longer use 3rd-party data to target ads come 2021, executives tell Axios, and it is building out a proprietary first-party data platform.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Google launches Chrome 83 with updated safety and privacy settings, third-party cookies blocked in Incognito mode, DNS-over-HTTPS support, and new dev features  —  Google today launched Chrome 83 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.  Chrome 83 includes redesigned safety and privacy settings …
BBC:
Budget airline EasyJet says email addresses and travel details of ~9M passengers were stolen; some payment info also leaked; it learned of the attack in January  —  EasyJet has admitted that a “highly sophisticated cyber-attack” has affected approximately nine million customers.
The Verge:
Interview with Sundar Pichai on Google's diversity, long-term plans for its hardware division, the pandemic's effect on its ads business, and more  —  Like all big tech companies, Google and Alphabet are playing an outsized role in our lives as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces the Fluid Framework, a new type of Office document built around collaborative Lego-like blocks on the web, and says it will be open source  —  Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document.  Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web.
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Joe Rogan's podcast, which he said had ~190M downloads/month in 2019, will become a Spotify exclusive this year; his YouTube will no longer have full episodes  —  A massive gain for the platform  —  Joe Rogan, comedian and host of one of the most popular podcasts in the world, is taking his show to Spotify.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Microsoft says it acquired Windows task automation startup Softomotive for an undisclosed sum, merging its tools with Microsoft's Power Automate  —  Microsoft today announced that it acquired robotic process automation (RPA) startup Softomotive for an undisclosed sum.
Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia:
Chinese fitness app Keep raises $80M Series E at a $1B valuation led by Jeneration Capital Management  —  Chinese fitness app Keep has become the country's first sports tech startup to achieve a $1 billion valuation after raising an $80 million Series E funding round led …
Tweets: @ruima
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Khatabook, which helps small Indian businesses digitize bookkeeping and accept payments online, raises $60M led by B Capital; source: startup valued at ~$300M  —  Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app …
Brian Merchant / OneZero:
Google says it won't “build custom AI/ML algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry”, after new Greenpeace report on Big Oil ties  —  A Greenpeace report details Silicon Valley's ties to Big Oil — and spurs Google to take a step toward opting out
David Meyer / Fortune:
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court rules that spying on the Frankfurt exchange's global internet traffic by the BND, its intelligence agency, is illegal  —  In the world of online spying, great power lies with those who can get their hands on the data flowing through the world's Internet infrastructure.
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Productivity tool Notion opens up its free tier to allow for the creation of unlimited notes and blocks  —  There's never been a better time to check out the collaborative note-taking app  —  Notion, the workspace and note-taking app, just became much more appealing to individual users.

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