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.

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 11:05 PM ET, May 19, 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

Karen Weise / New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: