“…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)
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
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
Traditional colleges will be forced to adapt to meet the needs of employers
We’re going to see more and more alternatives to traditional colleges
Soft skills will continue to be important, but most jobs will require a high level of technological competence
Specialists will be more valued than generalists
Micro credentialing will become more prevalent
Lifelong learners and companies that encourage a culture of learning will be the ones to thrive
Atari is opening eight video game hotels across the U.S.
Google’s tenth messaging service will “unify” Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Chat…The GSuite team already has a Slack clone, but now it’s making a second Slack clone.
AirPods: The New It Item Among the Playground Set (paywall)
Arvind Krishna will replace Ginni Rometty as IBM CEO in April
Amazon now has more than 150 million Prime members across the world
More than 400,000 German jobs at risk in switch to electric cars
Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range…The three-year-old startup’s secret sauce has to do with AI on the edge — machine learning and image recognition tools that can be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud…
SpaceX achieves key safety milestone for crewed flight with 10th parachute test
The Next Big Streaming Trend? Recommendations From Actual People
“…In 2016, researchers at Harvard and Syracuse University found that human cognitive function declined by about 15 percent when indoor CO₂ reached 945 parts per million, and crashed by 50 percent when indoor CO₂ reached 1,400 parts per million…”
Fintech’s next decade will look radically different
Amazon wants to patent technology that could identify shoppers by their hands
