What's Popular on Techmeme
Profile of VSCO, a photo-sharing app with a reported valuation of $550M, which is trending towards 4M paying users in 2020, up from 2M in late 2018
Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck is leaving at the end of the year, to be replaced by David Shim, who joined Foursquare as president in June
Report: Magic Leap sold ~6,000 headsets in six months after release, compared to a goal of 100,000 in the first year, and recently laid off dozens of employees
Facebook says its AI bot achieved high scores playing Hanabi, a card game requiring teamwork, showing how AI can work with other bots or people to reach a goal
SEC has rejected NYSE's proposal to allow companies going public through a direct listing to raise capital at the same time
Adobe is acquiring Oculus Medium, a virtual reality sculpting tool launched in 2015, from Facebook
Amazon expands Bezos' elite 'S-team', adding 6 execs from its emerging branches such as advertising and fashion, bringing the number of execs on the team to 22
geekwire.com · 4 days ago
Netflix says it is spending ~$420M on content in India over the next year, a majority of which will be on original programming
Facebook's tactic of announcing features to a small minority of its users often garners positive press coverage, even if the features aren't live for most
May Mobility, a Michigan-based startup that is operating autonomous shuttle services in three US cities, raises $50M Series B led by Toyota
Spotify says it now has 500K+ podcasts, podcast listeners are up more than 50% since the start of 2019 and podcast hours consumed by listeners grew 39% QoQ
New York-based used car marketplace Vroom raises $254M Series H, bringing its total raised to $721M
Sources: China-based AI start-up SenseTime expects 2019 revenue to increase by more than 200%+ YoY to around $750M
Hungary's regulator fines Facebook $4M, arguing that it misled users by claiming its services are free, while earning money from ads based on user activity
Survey: 50% plan to subscribe to new OTT services, of which 64% intend to downgrade or cancel existing subs; users say they spend ~$76/month on average on video
Sources: Galaxy S11 to have a 108MP sensor, ultrawide-angle lens, 5x zoom, and time-of-flight sensor like in Note 10+; Galaxy Fold to have 108MP sensor, 5x zoom
Sources: digital bank Chime raises $500M Series E at a $5.8B valuation led by DST Global, just nine months after its Series D which valued Chime at $1.5B
Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 8c, with a Kryo 490 CPU, Adreno 675 GPU, and X24 LTE modem, and a lower-end 7c chip; both designed for budget Windows laptops
Cyberhaven, which provides data behavior analytics to protect company trade secrets such as IP for customers including Motorola and DARPA, raises $13M Series A
Fourteen former Razer employees say company CEO Min-Liang Tan instituted and celebrated a culture of fear; Tan says violent threats were "figurative or in jest"
DOJ charges two members of Evil Corp, a Russian hacker gang behind the Dridex malware, which allegedly stole $100M+ from banks; US Treasury sanctions Evil Corp
In report, Uber discloses 3,045 sexual assaults, 9 murders, and 58 people killed in crashes out of its 1.3B US rides in 2018
Facebook sues a Hong Kong-based company and two persons for compromising user accounts via a browser extension and running deceptive ads using those accounts
Sundar Pichai's most important job now is to stabilize Google's internal culture, which became increasingly closed and antagonistic during his tenure as CEO
DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who has been on a leave for the past six months, is joining Google to work on "opportunities and impacts of applied AI"
After criticism, DHS drops a proposal to expand facial recognition scans to US citizens arriving and departing the country
Apple says iPhone 11 Pro shares location data even when the feature is turned off due to ultra wideband tech, will provide a new toggle in an upcoming update
Microsoft brings Fluent Design to mobile Office apps, creates mobile UI toolkits to let third-party developers adopt Fluent Design elements in their apps
Qualcomm unveils 5G-compatible Snapdragon XR2 to power standalone headsets, says it is working with Niantic Labs to develop a reference design for smart glasses
Analysis: Series A and Series B rounds have annually accounted for between 21% and 37% of total $100M+ VC rounds across the globe since 2010
Jerome Pesenti, VP of AI at Facebook, on using AI for content moderation, limitations of deep learning and current AI, commercializing AI research, and more
Alibaba-backed Chinese startup AutoX applies to test self-driving vehicles without an in-car backup driver in California
Imgur says it now has 300M MAU and launches Melee, an iOS app where users see a feed of memes and gameplay clips for the games to which they subscribe
techcrunch.com · 5 days ago
Kashmiris, who are subject to an ongoing four month internet shutdown, are losing their WhatsApp accounts because of the platform's policy on inactive accounts
Figure, the lending platform led by Mike Cagney, who resigned as CEO of SoFi due to sexual harassment allegations, raises $103M Series C at a $1.2B valuation
DOJ charges a Russian citizen, accusing him of leading a hacker group called "Evil Corp" behind the Dridex malware, which allegedly stole $100M+ from banks
Ming-Chi Kuo: the highest-end model in the 2021 iPhone lineup will launch without a Lightning port, offering a "completely wireless experience"
Sao Paolo-based mobile game maker Wildlife Studios, which says it will reach 2B downloads by the end of 2019, raises $60M, at a valuation of $1.3B
Huawei files lawsuit with a federal appeals court against the FCC's decision to bar rural carriers from using federal subsidies to buy Huawei's equipment
Sources: FTC investigators, who have been looking into Amazon's e-commerce business, have begun asking software companies about Amazon's practices around AWS
bloomberg.com · 5 days ago