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February 27, 2020, 8:35 AM

Top News

Aaron Holmes / Business Insider:

Report: Rajeev Misra, head of the $100B Vision Fund, is accused of sabotaging other SoftBank execs for career advancement; Misra and SoftBank deny allegations — - Rajeev Misra, the head of SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund, is accused of overseeing a plan to lure SoftBank's then-president into a …

Source: Wall Street Journal. More: Seeking Alpha

Tweets: @dseetharaman, @maheshmurthy, @profgalloway, @modestproposal1, @katierosman, @dickc, @stephendodson, @newley, @robert_fenner, @birdyword, @annimaniac, @thomasfarley, @profgalloway, @dtrinh, @punitsoni, @vcstarterkit, @iamsamirarora, @newley, and @mikeisaac

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:

At Apple's shareholder meeting, Tim Cook says Apple will open its online store in India this year, with physical stores in 2021, and addresses COVID-19 concerns — - CEO hints wearables sales $40 billion; equal to Marriott, Visa — Company plans to open retail stores in India next year

Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says TikTok is “fundamentally parasitic”, always listening, and its fingerprinting technology is “truly terrifying” — TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms but the CEO of Reddit had some harsh words for the popular app …

More: Business Insider, Protocol, Silicon Republic, and WebProNews

Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:

Square beats Q4 expectations with revenue of $1.31B, up 41% YoY, says its Cash App has 24M MAUs, up 60% YoY, with a profit of $144M; stock up ~6% after hours — The company reported its fourth quarter financial results on Wednesday. — Square reported its fourth quarter financial results on Wednesday.

More: Square Investor Relations, The Kraft, PYMNTS.com, Cointelegraph, and MarketWatch

Tweets: @hedgemind and @thekenyeung

Brady Dale / CoinDesk:

Square reports nearly half of its $361M Cash App revenue in Q4 came from bitcoin transactions, totaling $178M, up 240% YoY

More: The Next Web, The Market Refresh, PYMNTS.com, and The Block

Tweets: @coindesk and @ledgerstatus

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Online gaming platform Roblox raises $150M led by a16z's Late Stage Venture fund, reportedly at a $4B valuation; Roblox was valued at $2.5B+ as of last year — Online gaming platform Roblox, now home to 115 million largely Gen Z players per month, announced today it has raised $150 million …

Source: Wall Street Journal. More: Roblox, PC Games Insider, GameSpot, Gamasutra, Hollywood Reporter, Silicon Valley Business …, and VentureBeat

Tweets: @sjeneris, @jonrussell, @excellion, @jonrussell, @greylockvc, @cyberjournalist, @benfritz, @saraheneedleman, @chrisfralic, and @nongaap

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:

Sources: Apple has lost a pair of veteran execs from manufacturing, supply chain, and operations groups who had key roles in the production of major devices — - Company's vice president of manufacturing design departs — Operations executive who worked on iPhone discussing exit

More: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, iMore, and MacRumors

Tweets: @davezatz and @markgurman

New York Times:

Several high-profile Instagram accounts switch to private to avoid scrutiny when posting sponsored content for Bloomberg's campaign — The Bloomberg campaign is putting out more memes on private Instagram accounts — and running faster than Facebook can keep up.

More: The Guardian. Tweets: @hshaban, @juliacarriew, @hshaban, @taylorlorenz, @nytimes, @juliacarriew, @alexkotch, @taylorlorenz, @meganmorrone, @loisbeckett, @emilybell, and @mccarthyryanj

See also Mediagazer

Aaron Harris / Y Combinator:

YC shares learnings across 190 Series A rounds, providing a term sheet that's the “fairest one possible”, an extensive Series A Guide, and more — We started YC's Series A Program two years ago to fix a problem faced by every startup raising an A: VCs understand how Series A's work and founders do not.

More: TechCrunch and Hacker News

Tweets: @ycombinator, @cgventureshq, @aaron_epstein, @kazanjy, @trengriffin, @gustaf, @akberzins, @ckneumann, @alexisohanian, and @mwseibel

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Q&A with Steven Levy on his new book, “Facebook: The Inside Story”, Instagram, interviewing Facebook executives, and the company's future after Mark Zuckerberg — A Q&A with the author of one of our mostly hotly anticipated books of 2020 — People kept having the idea …

More: iPhone in Canada Blog, New York Times, and GamesIndustry.biz

Tweets: @caseynewton, @lagorio, @caseynewton, @stevenlevy, @stevenlevy, @zoeschiffer, @j_amesmarriott, @joshelman, @nytimesbooks, and @andrew_adonis

Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:

Profile of Downdetector, a resource for determining website and platform outages; Downdetector relies almost exclusively on user reports since 2001 — It can happen at any moment, yet we're never prepared. When Twitter crashes, how do we tweet about it? We try and try.

Tweets: @mattnavarra, @kait_tiffany, and @slaskow

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Bug in Cypress and Broadcom Wi-Fi chips meant billions of devices, many now patched, were left open to eavesdropping; Apple, Amazon, and others were affected — Cypress and Broadcom chip bug bit iPhones, Macs, Android devices, Echoes, and more. — SAN FRANCISCO — Billions of devices …

Jordan Novet / CNBC:

Microsoft says it will likely miss its guidance for its More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows, due to COVID-19's impact on its supply chain — Microsoft shares fell 2% on Wednesday after the company said it doesn't expect to meet the quarterly revenue guidance …

More: PR Newswire, coinspeaker.com, TrueAchievements, Neowin, GameSpot, Wccftech, Telegraph, SiliconANGLE, Windows Central, New York Times, ZDNet, MSPoweruser, OnMSFT.com, GeekWire, CNET, The Verge, Axios, and Computer Business Review

Tweets: @stevekovach, @neilcybart, @mattrosoff, @frankcurzio, @scottmcgrew, and @scottmelker

Betsy Swan / The Daily Beast:

Clearview AI, in a letter to customers, says an intruder accessed its client list and the number of searches clients conducted, but not their search histories — Clearview AI, which contracts with law enforcement after reportedly scraping 3 billion images from the web, now says someone got …

More: CNN, The Verge, ZDNet, BBC, Ars Technica, Engadget, Mashable, Axios, MSN, Tom's Guide, MediaNama, SiliconANGLE, infosecurity-magazine.com, OneZero , CP24, PYMNTS.com, TechSpot, Channel Futures, USA Today, Gizmodo, The Hill, The Next Web, Vox, Business Insider, Input, IT Management, VICE, and The Daily Dot

Tweets: @woodruffbets, @bernardkeane, @wolven, @joshbutler, @eff, @monscience, @marietjeschaake, @martinsfp, and @adamblickstein

Denise Howard Long / OneZero :

Profile of Visible Figures, a support network founded in 2016 for black women startup founders that now has more than 100 members as it plots expansion — Started as a listserv, Visible Figures is a support network for Black women in tech — This article is part of Into the Valley …

Tweets: @drewcostley, @drewcostley, @ozm, @medium, @ozm, @dlberes, @drewcostley, @drewcostley, @drewcostley, @drewcostley, @ozm, and @drewcostley

Khari Johnson / VentureBeat:

OpenAI's Jeff Clune shares a new ML algorithm, ANML, which can learn 600 sequential tasks with minimal catastrophic forgetting, a long-standing challenge of AI — People learn differently from neural networks. If a human comes back to a sport after years away, they might be rusty …

More: arXiv.org. Tweets: @jeffclune, @epro, and @usmansattarmd

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From Mediagazer

Clare Malone / New Yorker:

A profile of Bari Weiss and an in-depth look at her hostile takeover of CBS News; a source says Weiss has said she is pursuing a “de-Baathification of CBS”

Yue Stella Yu / Los Angeles Times:

Gov. Newsom's 2026 budget proposal contains no funding for the California Civic Media Fund, despite a 2024 deal to provide $175M to newsrooms over five years

Matthew Keys / TheDesk.net:

Study: local broadcast TV supported 1.5M+ US jobs in 2025 and had a $748B annual GDP impact, with advertising accounting for the largest share at $628B

More News

Grant Stoner / Washington Post:

A look at the role of accessibility consultants in the video game industry, whose efforts are beginning to become standard practice within the industry

Tweets: @launcherwp, @theesa, @rangerstation, and @respect_ability

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:

Ribbon Health, which builds a data platform of doctors, insurance plans, and costs for healthcare companies, raises $10.25M Series A led by a16z

More: Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbon Health, FinSMEs, and hitconsultant.net. Tweets: @ellenjdasilva

Charles McLellan / TechRepublic:

A look at the current state of IoT in monitoring biodiversity loss and climate change, with examples of how it is being used to monitor vulnerable ecosystems

Tweets: @vodafoneiot, @techrepublic, @techrepublic, @techrepublic, and @techrepublic. Thanks:@steveranger

Stephanie Condon / ZDNet:

Box beats Q4 expectations with revenue of $183.6M, up 12% YoY, says its achieved first full year of non-GAAP profitability; stock is up ~8% after hours

More: Business Wire and Reuters

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:

Judge allows class action lawsuit against Ripple, which alleges the company misrepresented its XRP currency as a security, to proceed

More: coinspeaker.com and SiliconANGLE

Tweets: @xrpcryptowolf and @nikhileshde

TechCrunch:

Particle, a back-end IoT startup that raised $40M Series C in October 2019, says it laid off 10% of its staff, or 14 people, just weeks after co-founder left

Charlie Savage / New York Times:

Declassified study: NSA system to analyze American domestic call and text logs cost $100M from 2015 to 2019 and yielded only one significant investigation

More: Techdirt, Input, Engadget, Schneier on Security, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mashable, The Hill, and Slashdot

Tweets: @faizapatelbcj, @snowden, @shiraovide, and @jameeljaffer

Nick Statt / The Verge:

Google adds five new languages to Translate, including Uyghur, Turkmen, and Tatar, its first additions in four years, bringing its total to 108

More: The Keyword, Thurrott, Android Central, SlashGear, The Next Web, CNET, Android Police, Engadget, Neowin, BetaNews, MSPoweruser, 9to5Google, ZDNet, and Memeburn

Tweets: @dovletogly_b, @etawakening, @naswirushema, @cholericcleric, @google, and @jambhalaalpina

Earlier Picks

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News:

An in-depth look at what India's internet blackout looks like in Kashmir: social control with select media allowed, businesses crippled, the vulnerable isolated

More: Slashdot. Tweets: @husseinsabrie, @meghara, @mobbiemobes, @r_d, @sanasaeed, @matthewchampion, @mattzeitlin, @mattzeitlin, @scottlucas, and @pranavdixit

Karandeep Singh / Android Police:

Samsung says the S20 series came with its first dedicated security chip, called the Secure Element, separating memory from main storage

More: Samsung Global Newsroom, Android Authority, Android Central, XDA Developers, Neowin, and Android Authority

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet / ZDNet:

HackerOne reports hackers on its platform, which doubled to 600K in 2019, received $40M in bounties in 2019, $82M total since 2012, with 7 hackers passing $1M

More: WeLiveSecurity, VentureBeat, Tom's Hardware, TechSpot, and HackerOne

Tweets: @hacker0x01 and @campuscodi

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

D-Wave launches Leap 2, the latest version of its quantum cloud service for developers that can handle problems with up to 10,000 variables

More: VentureBeat, GeekWire, HPCwire, and SiliconANGLE

Eric Newcomer / Bloomberg:

Sources: Invite Media reduced its assets before Google's $80M acquisition in 2010 to avoid requiring FTC approval, the kind of deal the FTC is now re-examining

More: The Diff. Tweets: @mattrosoff, @vranicawsj, @ericnewcomer, @ericnewcomer, @ericnewcomer, @ericnewcomer, @ericnewcomer, @jason_kint, @alex, and @ericnewcomer

Sophia Kunthara / Crunchbase News:

Connected fitness startup Tempo, which uses AI to tailor workouts, raises $17.5M Series A from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and others

More: The Verge, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch

Taylor Soper / GeekWire:

Jury convicts ex-Microsoft engineer of 18 felonies after he stole $10M in digital currencies from the company and used it to make extravagant purchases

More: U.S. Department of Justice, CoinDesk, infosecurity-magazine.com, news.com.au, Decrypt, Business Insider, Micky, ZDNet, PYMNTS.com, and Renton Reporter. Tweets: @counternotions

Salesforce:

Salesforce says Keith Block has stepped down as co-CEO but will still advise Marc Benioff; Gavin Patterson named President and CEO of Salesforce International

More: Motley Fool, Protocol, Vlocity, Business Insider, TheStreet, TechCrunch, WebProNews, coinspeaker.com, and CNBC

Tweets: @cloudsynapps, @salesforce, @tyler_sfdc, @ntaychak, @benioff, @sallyshin, @parkerharris, @wsj, and @teddyschleifer