Techmeme
April 30, 2021, 12:10 AM

Top News

Amazon - Investor Relations:
Amazon reports Q1 revenue of $108.5B, up 44% YoY, net income of $8.1B, up from $2.5B YoY, and says AWS has become a $54B annual sales run rate business  —  Amazon today announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2021.  • Operating cash flow increased 69% …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft says it will reduce its cut for PC games in Microsoft Store from 30% to 12% starting August 1, in a bid to compete with Steam  —  Microsoft puts the pressure on Valve's Steam store  —  Microsoft is shaking up the world of PC gaming today with a big cut to the amount of revenue it takes from games on Windows.
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple clarifies that the first-gen Magic Keyboard is “functionally compatible” with the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro but may not “precisely fit when closed”  —  In a new support document published today, Apple has clarified the situation around the Magic Keyboard's compatibility with the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Tonya Riley / Washington Post:
A task force of 60+ experts from industry, government, nonprofits, and academia calls on the US and allies to take steps to fight a surge in ransomware attacks  —  A task force of more than 60 experts from industry, government, nonprofits and academia is urging the U.S. government and global allies …
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Twitter reports Q1 revenue of $1.04B, up 28% YoY, vs $1.03B est., monetizable DAUs of 199M, up 7M QoQ, vs 200M est.; stock drops ~8%+  —  - The company reported revenue of $1.04 billion for the quarter, which was up 28% from $808 million a year prior.  — Twitter guided that it is expecting …
Nandita Bose / Reuters:
US Labor Secretary says “in a lot of cases” gig workers should be classified as employees; shares of Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash fell sharply afterwards  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's top labor official said most gig workers in the United States should be classified as …
Shira Ovide / New York Times:
Combined revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook hit ~$1.2T this year, up 25% since March 2020, benefitting from a “perfect positive storm”  —  The dictionary doesn't have enough superlatives to describe what's happening to the five biggest technology companies …
Marie Fazio / New York Times:
Zoë Roth, the girl from the “Disaster Girl” meme who is now a college senior studying peace, war, and defense, sells the meme as an NFT for ~$500,000  —  Zoë Roth, now a college senior in North Carolina, plans to use the proceeds from this month's NFT auction to pay off student loans and donate to charity.
Liam Tung / ZDNet:
Facebook joins the Rust Foundation, the org driving Rust, following Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla, and details its use of Rust since 2016  —  Facebook is also ramping up internal developer support for Rust after targeting infrastructure written in C++.
Arielle Pardes / Wired:
Founders and VCs are flocking to Miami for “Miami Tech Week”, an impromptu event kicked off by a tweet from Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund  —  Founders and funders are flocking to the beach for an impromptu event that some are calling “South by Southeast.”
The Markup:
Financial services use Facebook's ad targeting to block people in certain age groups from seeing their ads, violating Facebook's anti-discrimination policies  —  Such ads, along with other age-targeted financial product ads, may violate civil rights laws, attorneys say
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:
Filing: during Q1, Alphabet saved $268M in expenses from company promotions, travel, and entertainment, compared to Q1 2020, “primarily as a result of COVID-19”  —  With Covid-19 restrictions lifting, more people are booking trips and hotels online, which is very good for Google's advertising business.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Instagram adds new features to let users mute their microphones and even turn their video off while using Instagram Live, as it seeks to compete with Clubhouse  —  In addition to Facebook's Clubhouse competitor built within Messenger Rooms and its experiments with a Clubhouse-like Q&A platform on the web …
Canalys.com:
Global smartphone shipments in Q1 reached 347M, up 27% YoY; Samsung took first place, shipping 76.5M for a 22% share, while Apple shipped 52.4M for a 15% share  —  Shanghai (China), Bengaluru (India), Singapore, Reading (UK) and Portland (US) - Thursday, 29 April 2021

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 12:10 AM ET, April 30, 2021.

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

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
James Vincent / The Verge:
James Vincent / The Verge:
Sheila Dang / Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Gilad Edelman / Wired: