Techmeme
April 15, 2020, 9:40 AM

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.
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.
Bryan Menegus / Gizmodo:
Amazon says a manager at a facility in California died of COVID-19 on March 31, its first warehouse worker death; Amazon claims worker contracted virus offsite  —  A worker at an Amazon facility in California has died after contracting covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
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 …
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.
Kanishka Singh / Reuters:
Self-driving car startup Zoox agrees to settle lawsuit with Tesla over misappropriation of trade secrets, requiring it to pay an undisclosed amount  —  (Reuters) - Zoox Inc said on Tuesday it had settled a lawsuit with Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) after admitting that some new hires from the electric carmaker …
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  —  As the world is in quarantine, smartphone companies aren't standing still and are still moving forward with their new product launches.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
More: 9to5Mac
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Nifty Games, which is partnering with NFL and NBA to publish officially licensed games, raises $12M Series A led by March Capital Partners  —  Nifty Games is aiming to reshape the mobile gaming strategies of national sports leagues, partnering with associations like the NFL and NBA …
More: VentureBeat and FinSMEs
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Edited, a retail tech startup leveraging AI to optimize product pricing, raises $29M led by Boston-based Wavecrest Growth Partners and Beringea UK  —  Edited, a retail tech company leveraging AI to optimize product pricing, today announced that it raised $29 million.

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