• 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

• Facebook hits 2.5 B users
• NASA finds real uses for VR and AR in astronomy and engineering
• Self-driving company Waymo teams up with UPS for package delivery
• SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink satellites
• Will you still need a college education in 2040?
  • 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
• Corona Virus Map

• Nytimes: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
• World Economic Forum (Video)
• 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…
• Amazon Ring sales nearly tripled
• Boston Dynamics appoints its first-ever new CEO
• Scientists re-create voice of 3000-year-old mummy
• NASA reveals the payloads for the first commercial Moon cargo deliveries… in total, there are 16 payloads
  
• First space-baked cookies took 2 hours in experimental oven
• Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029
• Jira Software gets better roadmaps
• What we can learn about robots from Japan
• Tesla Surges Past $100 Billion Market Value, Eclipsing VW

• US patents hit record 333,530 granted in 2019; IBM, Samsung (not the FAANGs) lead the pack
• Facebook Backs Off Controversial Plan to Sell Ads in WhatsApp (paywall)
• Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion, 2x its final private valuation
• Renewables will be cheaper than coal by 2026 in China – study
• 25% of users watching Netflix on their iPhones also watch Disney+
• Grubhub sale rumors highlight the state of the struggling food-delivery industry
• Twitch’s loss of top streamers impacts hours watched and streamed in Q4 2019, report says
• Mojo Vision is developing AR contact lenses
• Copilot is a subscription personal finance tracker aiming to kill Mint
• JWT The Future 100: 2020 Report [PDF]
• Michael Moritz backs Turkish grocery start-up ($40m funding into ultrafast delivery company Getir) (paywall)
• Hyundai and Kia put over $110M into UK electric delivery vehicles startup Arrival 
• Alphabet Becomes Fourth U.S. Company to Reach $1 Trillion Market Value (paywall)
• Germany to invest 86 bln euros to upgrade ageing railway network
• DeepMind found an AI learning technique also works in human brains…An algorithm that learns through rewards may show how our brain does too
• These living bricks use bacteria to build themselves
• Here’s how just four satellites could provide worldwide internet

• Here’s everything Google announced at CES 2020
• California’s new privacy law, explained
• Arduino launches a new modular platform for IoT development
• In 2018, the oil and gas industries spent an estimated $1.75 billion on AI — a sum that is projected to balloon to $4 billion by 2025.
• WSJ: Silicon Valley to Big Oil: We Can Manage Your Data Better Than You (paywall)
• Amazon has sold more than 100 million Alexa devices
• Google Assistant is now used by 500 million monthly active users
• The new Bluetooth standard will be known as LE Audio and one of the biggest improvements it will include will be a feature called Multi-Stream Audio
• Toyota will transform a 175-acre site in Japan into a ‘prototype city of the future’
• The End of the Beginning
• Uber is bringing audio recording, irregular ride checks and authentication code safety features to India
• Huawei unveils openEuler, CentOS-based Linux distribution
• Warner Bros. Signs Deal for AI-Driven Film Management System 
• A New Protein Source Made From Air Could Be A Planet-Saving Game Changer
• Apple says its software business is booming
• Bosch Deploys AI to Prevent Attacks on Cars’ Electronic Systems (paywall)

• Samsung shipped more than 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones in 2019
• Grab and Singtel team up to apply for a digital full bank license in Singapore
• Tesla battery researcher unveils new cell that could last 1 million miles in ‘robot taxis’
• Tesla’s market cap is now double Ford’s, after being eclipsed by it eight months ago
• Will Apple get rid of the charging port, too? All signs point to portless iPhones
• How streaming and other data demands take a toll on the environment
• Amazon’s Biggest Threat Isn’t a Huge Competitor but a Collective
• These Breakthroughs Made the 2010s the Decade of the Brain

• Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices
• Fjord 2020
• 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
• A.I. Is Making it Easier to Kill (You). | NYT
• Elon Musk says Tesla will add Disney+ to its vehicles ‘soon’
• The State of JavaScript 2019
• Uniqlo’s Tokyo warehouse is 90 percent robotic and yes, the robots can even fold shirts
• VW’s prototype charging robot can find your EV in the parking garage
• ‘This is the farming of the future’: the rise of hydroponic food labs
• Spotify will ‘pause’ political ads in early 2020
• A new trend: customers caring about how their purchases affect the planet
• Futuristic hotels for business travelers in China and Japan

• Over 1,500 Ring passwords have been found on the dark web
• Uber’s ride-hailing business hit with ban in Germany
• Abu Dhabi leads $167 million investment in Spanish delivery app Glovo
• Broadcom Looks to Sell Unit That Could Fetch $10 Billion | Credit Suisse helping chip maker find a buyer for its RF wireless-chip unit (paywall)
• The Earth’s magnetic North has moved 1,400 miles since it was discovered in 1831
• Amazon will establish a new headquarters for its Kuiper satellite broadband project
• SpaceX successfully launches Kacific 100Mbps satellite…The satellite will provide connectivity to remote areas across 25 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
• Amazon Logistics division was on track to deliver 3.5 billion packages globally in 2019 — which accounts for approximately half of all of its worldwide orders, according to a spokesperson. (For comparison, UPS, which was founded 112 years ago, delivered 5.2 billion packages and documents for all of its customers in 2018.)
• Nvidia unveils Orin, its next-gen SOC for autonomous vehicles and robots
• The Machines Are Learning, and So Are the Students…[1]
• Airbnb is a platform not an estate agent, says Europe’s top court

• Pandora launches interactive voice ads
• DataRobot is acquiring Paxata to add data prep to machine learning platform
• Robot bartending company is handing out cash to the people it is replacing
• Google Assistant’s interpreter mode is coming to iOS and Android
• Blue Origin has now flown – and landed — the same rocket six times
• Salesforce promotes Bret Taylor to president and COO
• Chrome now warns you when your password has been stolen
• NASA releases Martian water map for future astronauts