Techmeme
November 20, 2019, 12:55 PM

Top News

Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac:
Apple says it has begun construction of its $1B Austin, Texas campus, opening in 2022, as Trump is scheduled to tour the nearby Mac Pro production plant  —  Apple has announced that it has begun construction of its new Austin, Texas, campus, on the day that President Trump is due to tour …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find bugs in Google and Samsung camera apps from before July 2019 that could record video, take pictures, and extract GPS data without permission  —  A new vulnerability has been found in the Camera apps for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Android devices that could allow …
Joel Marcey / Facebook Developers:
Facebook details how it's moving from Nuclide to Visual Studio Code for its internal default development environment and contributing remote development tools  —  History  —  Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code.  There is no mandated development environment.  Some developers use vim.
Bloomberg:
Alibaba has raised ~$11.2B in its Hong Kong share sale, after pricing 500M new shares at HK$176, in one of the largest equity offerings this year  —  - Company priced 500 million new shares at HK$176 each  — Alibaba's share sale is among the world's largest this year
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Starburst, which is seeking to modernize data analytics with the open source Presto distributed query engine, raises $22M led by Index Ventures  —  Starburst, the company that's looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised …
More: Business Wire.  Thanks:@andreesa
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Amazon's Ring says police can request 12 hours of video footage from users near suspected crime scenes, keep the video forever, and share it with anyone  —  Police officers who download videos captured by homeowners' Ring doorbell cameras can keep them forever and share them with whomever …
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple launches Apple Music for Business, letting businesses play music in retail locations with Apple providing human-curated playlists and recommendations  —  Apple Music is now partnering with businesses to play music at retail stores.  In a partnership with PlayNetwork …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Gravitational raises $25M Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins, to help developers with cloud deployment using Kubernetes  —  As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds.  Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Vayyar, which builds radar-imaging chips, sensors, and software, for auto and IoT applications, raises $109M Series D led by Koch Disruptive Technologies  —  The future of the connected home, connected car and connected everything will have a lot of imaging technology at the center of it …
Brad Templeton / Forbes:
NTSB finds Uber's safety driver the primary cause of fatal Tempe crash, also blames lack of “safety culture” at Uber; AI not detecting jaywalkers played no role  —  The National Transportation Safety Board presented its findings today on the fatal crash involving an Uber test robocar and Elaine Herzberg.
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Pensa Systems raises $10M in additional seed funding for its tech that can help retailers automatically track in-store inventory using AI and autonomous drones  —  Pensa Systems, an Austin startup with its eye on “eliminating” a trillion dollar blind spot for the retail industry, has raised $10 million in additional seed funding.
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google announces Your News Update, an Assistant-powered audio feature that chooses stories based on interests, location, and more, available first in the US  —  It plays from a variety of sources instead of just the few you hand-pick  —  Google is rolling out a new service for Google Assistant that it's calling “Your News Update.”

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Earlier Picks

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Jordan Novet / CNBC: