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April 15, 2020, 6:10 AM
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Top News

Miles Kruppa / Financial Times:
Sources: Airbnb raises another $1B in debt from investors including Apollo Global and Silver Lake, after raising a similar $1B funding round last week  —  New debt finance deal comes a week after an equal-sized funding round to help weather crisis  —  Airbnb is raising $1bn of senior debt …
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon will cut commission rates for its affiliate program starting April 21; amount of drop dependent on category, rates for grocery products dropping 5% to 1%  —  - Amazon on Tuesday told members of its affiliates program that it will cut commission rates beginning April 21.
Jay Greene / Washington Post:
Amazon fires two tech workers who'd been warned for publicly criticizing its warehouse workplace conditions and were outspoken critics of its climate stance
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
Washington AG Bob Ferguson sues Facebook, saying the company violated its commitment to not sell political ads in the state  —  Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a new lawsuit against Facebook claiming the social network continues to violate state laws governing political ad disclosures.
Nat Friedman / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub announces private repositories with unlimited collaborators are now free and reduces the price of the existing paid Team plan from $9 to $4 per month  —  All of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.  🎉  —  Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub …
CNBC:
Apple launches a tool that shows how well people are social distancing, using anonymized data from Apple Maps, similar to efforts from Google  —  - Apple on Tuesday launched a new tool that shows how well people are following social distancing guidelines.  — It gathers anonymous data …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube launches Video Builder, a simple, free DIY tool to help SMBs create short videos  —  YouTube today is launching a new tool aimed at small businesses who need a simple, low-cost way to create videos, but may not have the creative experience or technical know-how required to do so.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
OnePlus 8 review: has great battery life and solid performance with a 90Hz display, but camera could be better and it lacks wireless charging and an IP rating  —  The traditional strengths, plus the traditional omissions  —  Video by Alix Diaconis and Vjeran Pavic
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
OnePlus debuts $699 OnePlus 8, $899 OnePlus 8 Pro with high-refresh 6.55" and 6.78" AMOLED hole-punch screens, WiFi 6, on-screen fingerprint readers, more
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
OnePlus 8 Pro review: great build quality, superb screen, and speedy wireless charging, but its color camera is gimmicky and dim light photography is mediocre
Ryne Hager / Android Police:
Nest will temporarily reduce the recording quality of its security cameras by default to reduce bandwidth impact amid COVID-19, users can easily revert change  —  Google is temporarily dropping Nest camera recording quality and bandwidth over the next few days in an attempt to reduce strain on ISPs and the internet in general.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Facebook debuts Kit, an Apple Watch app, for one-tap communication with close friends via audio recording, emoji, location sharing, scribble, more  —  Facebook's internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
The coronavirus crisis underscores the power and dominance of big tech companies, and that novel legislative approaches are required to regulate them  —  Apple and Google, who last Friday jointly |  announced new capabilities for contact tracing coronavirus carriers at scale …
Andy Patrizio / Ars Technica:
Folding@Home, a ~20 year-old distributed computing project aiding scientific research, has seen a surge in users, breaking an exaFLOP of compute amid COVID-19  —  Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche.  Then came COVID-19.  —  Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department …
Sarah McBride / Bloomberg:
Report: in Q1 2020, 62 VC funds raised a total of $21B in the US despite the pandemic crisis and invested $34.2B in 27% fewer deals than a year earlier

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:10 AM ET, April 15, 2020.

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.

From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Arkansas PBS severs ties with the PBS network, the first state public TV system to do so since Congress cut CPB funds, citing the annual $2M+ membership cost

Pamela McClintock / The Hollywood Reporter:
Disney's Zootopia 2 surpasses $1B at the global box office, the fastest PG-rated film to do so after just 17 days in release

Sam Roberts / New York Times:
Arthur L. Carter, who started a Connecticut newspaper in 1981, bought and sold The Nation, and founded the New York Observer in 1987, has died at 93

More News

Bloomberg:
Amazon says it's appealing a French court order to limit its customers' orders to “essential” items or face fines of €1M/day, a move that suspends the ruling

Earlier Picks

Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Cisco says it is launching a $2.5B financing program to let customers defer 95% of payments until 2021, as business operations move online during the pandemic
TechCrunch:
Apple and Google confirm contact tracing update will work on devices running iOS 13 or Android 6+ via Google Play and say only health authorities can access API
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