Techmeme River

January 29, 2020, 5:15 PM

January 29, 2020

5:05 PM •	Josh Constine / TechCrunch: Facebook Q4 profits grew 7% YoY, compared to growth of 61% a year ago, while expenses of $12.2B were up 34% YoY as headcount grew 26% to 44,942
4:33 PM •	Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: Microsoft's Personal Computing saw Q2 revenue rise by 2% YoY to $13.2B, with Surface up 6%; Intelligent Cloud rose 27% YoY to $11.9B, with Azure revenue up 62%
4:13 PM •	Microsoft: Microsoft Q2: revenue of $36.9B, up 14% YoY, net income of $11.6B, up 38% YoY; Commercial Cloud revenue up 39% YoY to $12.5B; Office 365 Consumer subs hit 37.2M
4:08 PM •	Facebook: Facebook reports Q4 revenue of $21.1B, up 25% YoY, and net income of $7.4B, up 7% YoY; DAUs rose 9% YoY to 1.66B, MAUs rose 8% YoY to 2.5B; stock drops 5%+
3:35 PM •	New York Times: A look at Covariant.AI, which builds warehouse robots trained with reinforcement learning, as few warehouse tasks remain that cannot be automated
3:10 PM •	Josh Constine / TechCrunch: Verkada, an IoT platform combining security cameras with smart monitoring software, raises $80M Series C led by Felicis Ventures at a $1.6B post-money valuation
2:45 PM •	Colin Lecher / The Verge: A look at the debate about whether Amazon should be held liable for defective 3rd-party products on its Marketplace, which the company argues is like Craigslist
2:25 PM •	Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: GoFundMe says Rob Solomon, its CEO for the last five years, is stepping down in March and will be replaced by OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan
1:50 PM •	The Information: Source: Facebook Watch's programming strategy is changing, backing off pricey original shows and live sports, as its budget has risen from $1B in 2017 to $1.4B
1:20 PM •	Ben Parker / The New Humanitarian: Report: UN did not tell the public nor its general staff about a hacking attack into its IT systems from last July, despite staff records being compromised
12:40 PM •	Joe Rossignol / MacRumors: Kuo outlines Apple's H1 2020: 4.7" iPhone, “AirTags” trackers, smaller wireless charging mat, high-end headphones, and refreshed iPad Pro, MacBook Pro or Air
11:50 AM •	Katy Stech Ferek / Wall Street Journal: US Interior Department introduces a no-fly rule for Chinese drones or those made with Chinese parts, with some exceptions, amid espionage concerns
11:35 AM •	Natalia Drozdiak / Bloomberg: Facebook says Mark Zuckerberg is planning to visit Brussels in mid-February to meet with EU officials amid antitrust and privacy scrutiny
11:25 AM •	Anthony Ha / TechCrunch: Attentive, which offers messaging tools for retailers, raises $70M Series C, led by Sequoia and IVP, less than six months after raising $40M
11:00 AM •	Babu Mohan / Android Central: Samsung says the 5G version of its Galaxy Tab S6, which it claims is the world's first 5G tablet, is available now in South Korea for $850
10:50 AM •	Kate Fazzini / CNBC: In a first, US DOJ is seeking court approval to take enforcement action against several telecom operators for facilitating robocalls
10:45 AM •	Matina Stevis-Gridneff / New York Times: Despite US pressure, the EU told member states they should limit “high risk” 5G vendors, like Huawei, but did not recommend a total ban
9:55 AM •	Dhruv Mehrotra / Gizmodo: Survey of Mechanical Turk workers finds some feel they don't have recourse for underpayment, technical errors, or general abuse from temporary bosses
8:55 AM •	Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: Google says in 2019 its bug bounty program paid 461 security researchers $6.5M, up from $3.4M to 317 researchers in 2018
7:50 AM •	Julia Carrie Wong / The Guardian: Investigation: in 2019, Trump's marketing campaign spent ~$20M on 218K+ Facebook ads targeting conservatives with marketing ploys designed to harvest user data
7:20 AM •	Jake Bright / TechCrunch: Kenyan startup Sendy, an on-demand platform that connects clients to drivers for goods delivery, raises $20M Series B led by Atlantica Ventures
6:35 AM •	Bill Budington / Electronic Frontier Foundation: Ring app on Android covertly sends personally identifiable information of users to third parties including Facebook and MixPanel
6:05 AM •	Shoshana Wodinsky / Gizmodo: Facebook's Off-Facebook Activity tool won't actually clear the data collected about you from other apps and sites, only its connection to your Facebook account
4:05 AM •	MediaNama: Analysis: 126 out of 301 “whitelisted” sites that India restored internet access to in Kashmir, but restricted to 2G connections, are “usable to some degree”
1:45 AM •	Kif Leswing / CNBC: Apple reported Q1 revenue of $10B from its segment that includes AirPods and Watch, which is more than the $7.1B it generated from selling Macs

January 28, 2020

11:20 PM •	Dara Kerr / CNET: Lime to pilot AI-based technology in San Jose, CA which it claims warns riders when they are on a sidewalk 50% or more of the time
10:05 PM •	Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC: Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh, who was instrumental in building Facebook's data center infrastructure, is leaving the company after more than a decade
9:05 PM •	Joel Rose / NPR: Research: Toronto saw the biggest growth in tech jobs of any North American city over past five years, reflecting Canada's more welcoming stance on immigration
8:20 PM •	Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: Online fraud bazaar lists 30M+ US customers' card details for sale, which experts say come from breach of convenience store chain Wawa disclosed in December
6:50 PM •	Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: Tim Cook says the three newest iPhones were the best-selling Apple phones every week of the quarter, propelling iPhone sales to $56B in Q1, up 8% YoY
6:35 PM •	Shara Tibken / CNET: Apple addresses Wuhan coronavirus concerns, offers wider than usual Q2 revenue estimates, says it closed one retail store in China, slightly delayed production
6:00 PM •	Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News: Product Hunt launches YourStack, a social network for discussing various products, including apps, books, and cookware
5:35 PM •	Michael Potuck / 9to5Mac: Apple reached 1.5B active devices, up from 1.4B a year ago, with ~80% of recent iPhones and iPads running iOS/iPadOS 13
5:25 PM •	Dan Primack / Axios: Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg to step down, citing personal reasons; Shar Dubey, current Match Group president, will become CEO on March 1
5:20 PM •	Kevin McLaughlin / The Information: Sources: Google is testing a new communications app for businesses, which brings together functions from Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Meet, Hangouts Chat, and more
5:15 PM •	Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet: eBay beats Q4 expectations with revenue of $2.82B, down 2% YoY, and a net income of $558M; gross merchandise volume was $23.3B, down 5% YoY
4:50 PM •	Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: AMD beats expectations with $2.13B in Q4 revenue, up 50% YoY, with significant market share increases across its x86 server, laptop, and desktop chips
4:50 PM •	Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch: Apple reports Q1 revenue of $91.8B, up 9% YoY, of which $79.1B came from products, $12.7B from services, and net income of $22.2B; $63B-$67B Q2 revenue expected
4:34 PM •	Business Wire: Apple reports record first quarter results
3:40 PM •	Juli Clover / MacRumors: Apple releases iOS 13.3.1 with an option to turn off U1 chip in the latest iPhones, following location tracking privacy concerns
3:05 PM •	Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: UK court orders Bitfinex to freeze bitcoin worth $860K after the crypto exchange and Chainalysis traced the funds to a ransomware payment
2:45 PM •	Ron Miller / TechCrunch: Securiti.ai raises $50M Series B led by General Catalyst to modernize data governance, a pain point that's intensifying with the rise of GDPR-style regulations
2:20 PM •	Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC: Facebook shares proposed bylaws for its oversight board, which some have called a content moderation “supreme court”, that leave Facebook firmly in control
2:05 PM •	Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: Russian cybercrime boss Aleksei Burkov has pleaded guilty in a US court to running a high-profile crime forum and a site that sold stolen credit card info
1:05 PM •	Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Directly, which helps companies train chatbots by crowdsourcing experts and analyzing usage, raises $20M, led by Samsung NEXT, at a $100M+ valuation
12:30 PM •	Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: Chainalysis: in 2019, hackers successfully breached 11 major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, and stole more than $283M worth of cryptocurrency
11:55 AM •	Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Flipboard will now feature local news coverage in 23 cities in US and Canada and start recommending stories based on IP address
11:50 AM •	Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg: Profile of Miranda Sissons, hired by Facebook last November as its first human rights chief, as Facebook struggles with waves of online hate against minorities
10:35 AM •	Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch: Advano, which builds battery components using scrap silicon for powerful and longer lasting batteries, raises $18.5M from investors, including Tony Fadell
9:55 AM •	Scott Stein / CNET: Filmic's free DoubleTake iPhone app lets users shoot video from two cameras at once; it can simultaneously record two 1080p videos at 24, 25, or 30 fps
9:20 AM •	Michael Kwet / The Intercept: A look at the rise of vast AI-enabled video surveillance networks in US cities, which let private businesses and homes provide camera feeds to police HQs
8:55 AM •	Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Swiss brand management platform Frontify raises €20.2M Series B led by EQT Ventures
8:30 AM •	Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Chair of US House climate committee sends Sundar Pichai letter requesting a plan by February 7 to address climate misinformation, specifically on YouTube
8:01 AM •	Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: ActiveCampaign, which helps businesses automate email marketing, CRM, and ad campaigns, raises $100M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity
7:45 AM •	Geoffrey Fowler / Washington Post: Facebook says its Off-Facebook Activity tool, which claims to let users clear data collected from other apps and sites, from their accounts, is now available
7:30 AM •	Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Persona, which develops a secure, real-time identity verification platform for organizations, raises $17.5M Series A
7:10 AM •	The Guardian: UK government says it will let Huawei build non-core elements of Britain's 5G network but will ban the company from operating at sensitive sites
6:25 AM •	Alexa Pavliuc / Medium: A visual analysis of six state-backed disinformation operations on Twitter, including from China and Russia, and how they have evolved over the last decade
5:40 AM •	Jennifer Smith / Wall Street Journal: Grocers offering online orders are testing automated micro-fulfillment systems that can fulfill 4000 orders per week while occupying little space
2:40 AM •	Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: French startup ManoMano, which operates an e-commerce site for DIY, home improvement, and gardening products, raises $139M led by Temasek
12:45 AM •	John Gruber / Daring Fireball: Ten years after the iPad's launch, it has not come close to being revolutionary or living up to its potential because of its inconsistent multitasking software

January 27, 2020

9:20 PM •	Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE: Experts say tech has made US labor laws obsolete and in need of a massive overhaul to benefit organizing workers, such as requiring safe digital meeting spaces
8:35 PM •	Reuters: Sources: Turkey-backed hackers have used DNS hijacking to obtain login credentials, targeting ~30 EU and Middle East governments and organizations since 2018
7:00 PM •	Danny Palmer / ZDNet: UK government proposes new IoT rules: firms must tell consumers how long security updates will be provided, ship individual devices with unique passwords, more
5:45 PM •	Azeem Azhar / Exponential View: As Alphabet and Microsoft clamor for regulation of tech like facial recognition, potential new rules and their obstacles pose existential threats to startups
4:20 PM •	Raymond Zhong / New York Times: As China tries to contain the coronavirus, the sheer volume of criticism of the government overwhelms censors and tests China's ability to control the narrative
3:15 PM •	Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat: FCC unlocks 3.5GHz band of spectrum used by Citizens Broadband Radio Service, enhancing connectivity via “OnGo” services in the latest iOS and Android phones
3:07 PM •	Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note: Consumer IoT is in trouble because normal people can't be expected to manage a house full of smart things or keep track of their bugs and looming obsolescence
2:10 PM •	Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: SuperAwesome, which offers tools for kid-safe advertising, parental controls, and more, raises $17M from Microsoft's M12, says it had $55M in revenue in 2019
1:20 PM •	Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Bird adds $75M to its Series D, bringing the total raised in the round to $350M, acquires European scooter-sharing startup Circ that was previously called Flash
12:25 PM •	Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: Google says it will shut down App Maker, G Suite's low-code environment for building custom business apps, on January 19, 2021
11:25 AM •	Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch: Mural, a visual collaboration platform for enterprises, raises $23M Series A led by Radian Capital, with Gradient Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst participating
10:25 AM •	Tara Duggan / San Francisco Chronicle: Grubhub admits to adding restaurants without their permission, after restaurateur found her Thai restaurant had a page on Grubhub and its subsidiary Seamless
10:20 AM •	Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Gravyty, a Massachusetts-based fundraising platform that uses AI to analyze donor behavior in order to help nonprofits reach fundraising goals, raises $21M
9:30 AM •	Joseph Cox / VICE: Documents reveal that Avast has sold its users' internet browsing data, through a subsidiary called Jumpshot, to clients like Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft
9:10 AM •	Romita Majumdar / Livemint: Mumbai-based Bizongo, an online B2B marketplace for packaging, raises $30M Series C led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq
8:40 AM •	Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Iguazio, which develops a platform for developing, deploying, and managing AI applications at scale, raises $24M led by INcapital Ventures
7:50 AM •	Financial Times: As France announces new rules that make it easier for startups to grant stock options to employees, a look at stock option taxation in other European countries
6:30 AM •	Gary Marcus / The Gradient: A critical look at OpenAI's GPT-2 text generation AI and why the knowledge acquired by systems like the GPT-2 has been superficial and unreliable
2:15 AM •	Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: US mobile app subscription revenue jumped 21% in 2019 to $4.6B across the top 100 subscription apps in the Google Play and App Store

January 26, 2020

10:05 PM •	Angela Strange / Andreessen Horowitz: Fintech startups tackling every layer of banking stack, from core tech to KYC/AML, enable startups and companies like Apple to start adding financial services
9:20 PM •	Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire: The protest of Amazon's business practices by 340+ staff openly challenges Amazon after two employees say they were threatened with firing over climate activism
8:14 PM •	Amazon Employees for Climate Justice: Amazon employees share their views on Amazon's global impact, from climate change to “enabling Palantir and ICE to surveil and separate” families at the border
7:45 PM •	Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Currencycloud raises $80M Series E from Visa, BNP Paribas, and others for cross-border payment APIs that have transferred $50B+ and are used by ~350 companies
5:25 PM •	Eric Niiler / Wired: Profile of BlueDot, which uses AI to sift through news reports in 65 languages to detect and warn about infectious disease outbreaks like Wuhan Virus
4:00 PM •	Shannon Liao / CNN: Inside game streaming wars, where Ninja reportedly got paid $20M to $30M to move to Mixer and streamers with 10K concurrent views on Twitch can get $10M+ offers
3:08 PM •	Dieter Bohn / The Verge: With the launch of Razr pre-orders, Motorola released a video “Caring for razr”, which says “Screen is made to bend; bumps and lumps are normal”
1:10 PM •	Electronic Frontier Foundation: Appeals court reverses a lower court and reinstates a suit challenging constitutionality of sex-trafficking law FOSTA, finding plaintiffs have standing to sue
11:05 AM •	Lucas Matney / TechCrunch: Unito, whose tool helps teams communicate between different workplace productivity software suites, raises $10.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners
8:05 AM •	Sean O'Neill / Skift: Payments processor Wex to acquire travel focused B2B payments services providers eNett and Optal for a combined $1.7B
5:00 AM •	Times of India: India-based Pine Labs, which offers POS services, raises an undisclosed round from Mastercard; source: the $100M-$150M round values the company at $1.5B-$1.6B
1:55 AM •	Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters: An overview of nine leading US presidential candidates' positions on Big Tech, with Warren and Sanders leading the charge to break up big tech companies
1:25 AM •	Michelai Graham / Technical.ly DC: Socially Determined, which offers a data analytics platform focused on measuring the impact of the social determinants of health, closes $11.1M Series A
12:20 AM •	Charlie Osborne / ZDNet: Report: betting companies had access to a UK Department for Education database with records of 28M children, after a third-party gave access without permission

January 25, 2020

11:55 PM •	Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch: FloQast, a startup that sells accounting software, raises $40M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to over $90M
10:35 PM •	Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Anchore, which offers automated container security management to clients including US DOD, raises $20M Series A led by SignalFire, bringing total raise to ~$30M
8:30 PM •	Samuel Gibbs / The Guardian: Fossil Gen 5 review: best Wear OS watch yet with clever notification handling, good battery life, but hardware UX is unpredictable and phone can disconnect
6:25 PM •	Lauren Goode / Wired: How adding wireless chips, motion and pressure sensors, displays, and machine learning to products like toothbrushes is changing our oral hygiene habits
4:20 PM •	Anshika Jain / Counterpoint Research: India's smartphone market surpassed the US, becoming the second-largest smartphone market globally, reaching 158M shipments in 2019, up 7% YoY
2:10 PM •	Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Report: Samsung's upcoming foldable smartphone, possibly called Galaxy Z Flip, to use “Ultra Thin Glass” with a Dynamic AMOLED display underneath
11:40 AM •	Danny Crichton / TechCrunch: Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource, an SF-based machine learning training data company with a large workforce in East Africa, dies at 37
11:05 AM •	Bloomberg: A federal jury in California reduces the damages Apple has to pay Canadian IP licensing company WiLan for infringing on two wireless patents from $145M to $85M
7:05 AM •	Chris Smith / Trusted Reviews: UK's science minister Chris Skidmore says the UK won't implement EU's Copyright Directive, which includes Article 13, after the country leaves the EU
2:00 AM •	The California Sunday Magazine: An in-depth look at facial recognition technology, with a primer on how it works, who is using it in the US, and how to avoid it online and in public
1:50 AM •	Bruce Schneier / New York Times: Laws that ban facial recognition miss the larger point: we need laws on all tech used for identification and to decide how much of our data should be surveilled
1:15 AM •	Jeremy Bogaisky / Forbes: GelSight raises $10M Series B for its imaging system that uses an elastomeric-based sensor and computer vision to produce highly accurate 3D maps of surfaces

January 24, 2020

10:30 PM •	Kate Clark / The Information: Galvanize to be acquired by education company K12 Inc. for $165M in cash, according to an email to shareholders; some shareholders won't get proceeds
8:45 PM •	Josh Constine / TechCrunch: Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann launches Byte, a Vine-like short-form video app, on iOS and Android, aims to start its partner program to pay creators “soon”
7:55 PM •	New York Times: Google has started charging law enforcement agencies fees for legal demands of user information such as emails, location tracking information and search queries
6:45 PM •	Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch: LA-based commercial real estate marketplace CRExi raises $29M, says it had $700B worth of transactions on its platform
5:30 PM •	Nick Statt / The Verge: YouTube gains exclusive streaming rights to Activision Blizzard's big esports events like Overwatch League, which was a Twitch exclusive for the past two years

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