Techmeme
March 4, 2020, 1:30 PM

Top News

Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
In an email to staff, Amazon says an employee at its Seattle headquarters has tested positive for COVID-19 and that the affected employee remains in quarantine  —  An Amazon employee at the company's Seattle headquarters has tested positive for the novel coronavirus spreading across the country …
Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg details how Facebook and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are responding to COVID-19: free ads for WHO and other health orgs, misinfo flagging, more  —  Mark Zuckerberg has outlined some of the steps that Facebook and his family's non-profit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google says it will not host an in-person I/O event this year, due to coronavirus fears, and will instead offer a series of online events  —  Following a string of other tech cancellations in recent days, Google just announced that it will not host an in-person I/O 2020 over coronavirus concerns.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Sam Dean / Los Angeles Times:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitter will begin testing Fleets, letting iOS and Android users make posts that disappear after 24 hours, in Brazil, finally using a Stories-like format  —  Twitter is testing its own version of Stories.  The company announced today it will begin to trial a new sharing format called “Fleets …
Upmanyu Trivedi / Bloomberg:
India's Supreme Court strikes down central bank's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country  —  - RBI banned banking services for digital currencies in 2018  — Start ups, exchanges, industry body challenged RBI's directive  —  India's Supreme Court struck …
R.T. Watson / Wall Street Journal:
Quibi says it has closed a second round of financing worth $750M that includes about $400M raised at the end of 2019, bringing its total raised to $1.75B  —  Closing $750 million financing round brings total raised to $1.75 billion  —  Short-form video streamer Quibi said it has closed …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook fact-check partner Daily Caller faces scrutiny for labeling Politico, NBC News stories on Trump's COVID-19 comments as false, raising process concerns  —  Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?  Did Trump call coronavirus the Democrats' “new hoax”?  —  Those are the big questions emerging …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Robinhood says recent outages were caused by an “unprecedented load” on its system and will waive Gold customers' $15 fee for 3 months as initial compensation  —  It wasn't the leap year, a coding blip, or a hack that caused Robinhood's massive outages yesterday and today that left customers unable to trade stocks.
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE:
Netlify, which has built a cloud-based platform for automating web development projects, raises $53M Series C led by EQT Ventures  —  Every month, about 8% of the world's internet users visit at least one website powered by Netlify Inc., a San Francisco startup that today announced …
More: FinSMEs and PR Newswire
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Legal tech startup Atrium is shutting down, laying off 100+ employees; CEO Justin Kan says Atrium failed to be more efficient than a traditional law firm  —  Justin Kan's hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm.
Susan Decker / Bloomberg:
CB Insights analysis of top 100 AI startups: the “most promising” 65 are US-based, though some have a dual HQ in China; overall US investment share is dropping  —  - Study finds companies focus on health, retail, transportation  — Investment from other countries could slow American share
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google adds support to Pixel 4 for “firmly” pressing, initially as a way to expedite a long press, mimicking Apple's 3D Touch using just software  —  It also finally fixed the boarding pass problem  —  Yesterday, Google announced the latest “feature drop” for its Pixel line of Android phones.

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Earlier Picks

Alex Heath / The Information:
Jim Salter / Ars Technica:
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Tom Warren / The Verge: