Weekly#365

  • “…Google is placing new restrictions on which Android apps can track your location in the background, with a new review process that will check whether an app definitely needs access to the data…”
  • Intuit confirms that it is buying Credit Karma for $7.1B in cash and stock
  • Revolut raises $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation
  • “…Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000 square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products…”
  • Global telcos join Alphabet, SoftBank’s flying cellphone antenna lobbying effort
  • WSJ: Teens Are Deleting Instagrams Almost as Fast as They Post Them (paywall)
  • FT/LEX: Tier/e-scooters: ride at your own risk…Competition in the sector is as crowded as the cities catered for — expect consolidation (paywall)
  • FT: Mastercard announces new chief executive (paywall)
  • PDF: The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem (World Economic Forum)
  • The a16z Marketplace 100: Index and analysis
  • YouTube has more than two billion monthly users around the world, and 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
  • Softech 2020 Tech Report (in Turkish) 
  • Walmart is quietly working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+
  • The first protein to be discovered in a meteorite.
  • Gmail: Improving Malicious Document Detection in Gmail with Deep Learning

Weekly#364

  • AWS acquired Datarow
  • Morgan Stanley Is Buying E*Trade, Betting on Smaller Customers…Investment bank will pay $13 billion for the e-broker (paywall)
  • In 2020, Amazon will deliver more packages in the United States than FedEx…Amazon to deliver 3.5 billion packages through own network in 2019
  • Apple is considering letting users change default email, browser, music apps in iOS
  • Battery charging meets machine learning
  • DoorDash, Grubhub and others are weighing tie-ups or looking for funding…“…DoorDash Inc., Postmates Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.’s Eats have each discussed merging in various combinations last year, according to people familiar with those talks. None resulted in a deal…” (paywall)
  • Elon Musk’s Boring Company Finishes First Tunnel for 155mph Vegas Loop
  • China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements During Coronavirus Outbreak…Tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent tapped to develop color-coded systems to classify people based on their health conditions and travel history (paywall)
  • Twitch to top 40 million US viewers next year, forecast says
  • Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular
  • Google launches the first developer preview of Android 11…Currently, the release schedule calls for monthly developer preview releases until April, followed by three betas and a final release in Q3 2020.
  • Etsy Accelerates AI Experimentation Thanks to Cloud (Paywall)
  • How ‘The Mandalorian’ and ILM invisibly reinvented film and TV production
  • Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
  • A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data
  • Almost half of connected medical devices are vulnerable to hackers exploiting BlueKeep

Weekly#363

  • GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns
  • Our phones can now detect health problems from Parkinson’s to depression. Is that a good thing?
  • Microsoft’s game streaming service Project xCloud launches in preview on iOS
  • Blue Origin’s new rocket engine production facility opens on Monday
  • Rocket Lab will launch a satellite to the Moon for NASA to prepare for the Lunar Gateway
  • Shopify Annual Report PDF [2019]
  • The making of Mojo, AR contact lenses that give your eyes superpowers
  • Tesla owner says remotely disabled Autopilot features have been restored
  • Apple might use its own 5G antenna in its 2020 iPhones
  • Britain sets new daily record for wind generation, topping 44% of country’s electricity consumption
  • Online-only platforms are going offline with permanent spaces
  • YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $3 billion last year
  • WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago
  • Is a $1000 Aftermarket Add-On as Capable as Tesla’s Auto­pilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise?

Weekly#362

  • Spotify Q4 reports 271M total MAUs on revenues of $2B, podcast listening grows 200%
  • Jeff Weiner will step down as CEO of LinkedIn June 1, product head Ryan Roslansky steps up
  • Disney+ is up to 28.6 million subscribers…Disney added 10 million the first day it launched
  • Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer to boost its podcast business…It’s the fourth podcast deal Spotify has done in a year.
  • Scientists have discovered that a longtime fungal resident of the Chernobyl complex could actually “eat” radiation.
  • YouTuber uses neural networks to upscale 1896 short film to 4K 60 fps
  • IMF: Oil-rich Gulf Arab states may spend savings in 15 years
  • SpaceX ‘likely to spin out’ and pursue an IPO for Starlink satellite internet business
  • Good at StarCraft? DARPA wants to train military robots with your brain waves
  • YouTube makes $15 billion a year from ads — and pays more than half of that to video makers
  • Netflix begins streaming in AV1 on Android
  • 7-Eleven is the next retailer to test cashierless stores
  • Apple Watch Outsells the Entire Swiss Watch Industry in 2019
  • Exclusive: China’s mobile giants to take on Google’s Play store – sources
  • Academics steal data from air-gapped systems using screen brightness variations
  • Microsoft now sees Amazon and Google as its main gaming threats
  • How to Approach Industry 4.0 – Your 2020 Checklist