Techmeme
January 27, 2020, 11:15 AM

Top News

Joseph Cox / VICE:
Documents reveal that Avast has sold its users' internet browsing data, through a subsidiary called Jumpshot, to clients like Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft  —  An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
With the launch of Razr pre-orders, Motorola released a video “Caring for razr”, which says “Screen is made to bend; bumps and lumps are normal”  —  Pre-sale begins today  —  Today's the day that the Motorola Razr is available for pre-sale for $1499, exclusively on Verizon.
Shannon Liao / CNN:
Inside game streaming wars, where Ninja reportedly got paid $20M to $30M to move to Mixer and streamers with 10K concurrent views on Twitch can get $10M+ offers  —  New York (CNN Business)When Jeremy Wang started streaming on Twitch in 2016, he was an unknown twenty-something with a few coding internships under his belt.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Gravyty, a Massachusetts-based fundraising platform that uses AI to analyze donor behavior in order to help nonprofits reach fundraising goals, raises $21M  —  Nonprofit organizations send an average of 3 email newsletters and 2 donation appeals monthly, and for every 1,000 emails sent to subscribers, they raise an average of only $42.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Currencycloud raises $80M Series E from Visa, BNP Paribas, and others for cross-border payment APIs that have transferred $50B+ and are used by ~350 companies  —  Sending money from one country to another — either because you are a business paying someone for a service …
Angela Strange / Andreessen Horowitz:
Fintech startups tackling every layer of banking stack, from core tech to KYC/AML, enable startups and companies like Apple to start adding financial services  —  This is an abbreviated version of a presentation I gave live at the a16z Summit in November 2019.  You can watch a video version on YouTube.
Eric Niiler / Wired:
Profile of BlueDot, which uses AI to sift through news reports in 65 languages to detect and warn about infectious disease outbreaks like Wuhan Virus  —  The BlueDot algorithm scours news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases like those linked to the flu outbreak in China.
Gary Marcus / The Gradient:
A critical look at OpenAI's GPT-2 text generation AI and why the knowledge acquired by systems like the GPT-2 has been superficial and unreliable  —  OpenAI's GPT-2 has been discussed everywhere from The New Yorker to The Economist.  What does it really tell us about natural and artificial intelligence?
Tara Duggan / San Francisco Chronicle:
Grubhub admits to adding restaurants without their permission, after restaurateur found her Thai restaurant had a page on Grubhub and its subsidiary Seamless  —  Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call.
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
The protest of Amazon's business practices by 340+ staff openly challenges Amazon after two employees say they were threatened with firing over climate activism  —  Amazon employees are responding to threats of termination for their climate advocacy by intentionally violating the company's corporate communications policy.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
US mobile app subscription revenue jumped 21% in 2019 to $4.6B across the top 100 subscription apps in the Google Play and App Store  —  Outside of in-app purchases in mobile games, subscription revenue from non-game apps helped to boost 2019's mobile consumer spend — a figure …
More: Bloomberg

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Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: