Techmeme
December 28, 2016, 7:50 PM

Top News

Billy Steele / Engadget:
Report: police sought Echo data with warrant in murder case; Amazon declined to share the data Echo logged on servers but did provide suspect's account details  —  Amazon's Echo devices and its virtual assistant are meant to help find answers by listening for your voice commands.
Alessandro Sabatelli / The Twitter Blog:
Twitter introduces live 360-degree videos on Periscope and Twitter from select partners  —  Today, we're introducing a new way to see what's happening on Twitter - through live 360 video.  —  Starting today, you can check out live, interactive 360 videos from interesting broadcasters and explore what's happening with them.
Erin Griffith / Fortune:
As the list of SV startup scandals grows, entrepreneurs' “fake it till you make it” ethos garners continued scrutiny from reporters, while investors defend bets  —  As the list of startup scandals grows, it's time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking “fake it till you make it” too far.
Flurry Blog:
44% of global smartphone and tablet activations from December 19-25 were iOS, down 5% YoY, while 21% were Samsung devices; Pixel, Pixel XL not among top sellers  —  With the dates of Christmas and Chanukah synced this year, smartphones were once again predominate on everyone's wish lists.
Se Young Lee / Reuters:
South Korea's antitrust regulator fines Qualcomm $850M+, says firm forced phone makers to pay royalties for too broad a set of patents on modem chip sales  —  South Korea's antitrust regulator said on Wednesday it fined U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm Inc 1.03 trillion won ($854 million) …
Brett Howse / AnandTech:
Lenovo updates Thinkpad lineup with Microsoft Precision TouchPad drivers, Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, Intel Optane SSD support, unveils Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C docks  —  Today Lenovo is announcing a refresh of most of its ThinkPad lineup, and although the model numbers have only changed a bit …
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Ford debuts upgraded self-driving car with extra compute power, better vision despite now having two LiDAR sensors; plans to triple fleet to 90 vehicles in 2017  —  Ford has developed a new generation of autonomous development vehicle, a hybrid Fusion that uses the same essential platform …
Kevin McCoy / USA Today:
Three Chinese citizens charged in US for computer intrusion, insider trading, and more, after allegedly trading on information obtained by hacking law firms  —  Chinese traders hacked into the computer systems of U.S. law firms that handle mergers, then used the data for insider trading …
Natt Garun / The Verge:
Facebook's Safety Check in Bangkok, Thailand falsely triggered by fake news reports about a bomb explosion, was deactivated after about an hour  —  There was no bomb scare in Thailand  —  Facebook got fooled by its own algorithm.  Today, the social network falsely activated its Safety Check feature …
Jason Del Rey / Recode:
Online dress rental service Rent the Runway raises $60M Series E led by Fidelity, says this year was profitable as revenue grew to $100M+  —  The company was profitable in 2016 on revenue north of $100 million.  —  In March, Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman told Recode …
John Callaham / Android Authority:
T-Mobile rolls out update to Samsung Galaxy Note7 phones that prevents battery from charging, becoming the first major US carrier to do so  —  Samsung's previously announced plan to kill the battery in the remaining active Galaxy Note 7 smartphones in the US has begun.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Agentic AI in data & analytics: The next evolution of business intelligence  —  In a recent conversation, Clarence Rozario, Business Head - Zoho BI Suite, joined Ravit Jain on The Ravit Show to discuss how Agentic AI …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Kimi K3 & AI's Price War, What Happened To Google?, OpenAI's Partner Trouble
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
Never follow your heroes (on X)
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Hard Fork:
The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Pigment's Eléonore Crespo: Building France's Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Access:
This AI will push back if you're rude to it
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:50 PM ET, December 28, 2016.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Martin Brinkmann / gHacks Technology News:
David Streitfeld / New York Times:
Wall Street Journal:
Aaron Tilley / Forbes: