Techmeme
July 20, 2016, 6:30 PM

Top News

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
A history of Facebook Messenger as it reaches 1B monthly users five years after its debut; 17B photos are now sent through the service each month  —  Facebook's gamble of forcing users to download Messenger has paid off.  Despite the backlash, Messenger has doubled its user count in 20 months …
Dan Primack / Fortune:
Unilever acquires Dollar Shave Club, sources say for $1B; DSC founder and CEO Michael Dubin to continue running the company  —  Unilever announced on Tuesday evening that it is getting into the razor business, by agreeing to acquire Dollar Shave Club.  —  No financial terms were disclosed …
Avery Hartmans / Business Insider:
Airbnb hires former Attorney General Eric Holder to help “craft a world-class anti-discrimination policy”  —  Airbnb has hired former Attorney General Eric Holder.  —  CEO Brian Chesky announced the hire in a blog post on Airbnb's website.  Holder will help “craft …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Microsoft debuts Bookings, a new Office 365 service for online appointment scheduling  —  Microsoft this morning announced an expansion to its Office 365 suite with the debut of a new service called Bookings, which will allow customers to schedule appointments with a business using online software.
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed:
Twitter permanently suspends Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos for repeated violation of rules regarding targeted abuse of users  —  After years of provocation, Twitter has permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos from its service.  —  After years of provocation, Twitter has permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos from its service.
Jack Clark / Bloomberg:
Google says DeepMind-powered AI has improved its datacenters' power usage efficiency by 15%  —  Game-playing AI coordinates data center tasks like cooling  —  DeepMind efficiencies cover part of cost of 2014 acquisition  —  Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way.
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
SwiftKey debuts its first product since Microsoft acquisition, emoji prediction keyboard Swiftmoji  —  Keyboard app maker Swiftkey, which was acquired by Microsoft for $250 million in February, has officially launched its first product since that acquisition — and it's an emoji-predicting keyboard app, called Swiftmoji.
Ganesh T S / AnandTech:
Seagate unveils three 10TB, helium-based 7200 RPM hard drives for the consumer market, with prices starting at $460  —  Our recent interview with Seagate's CTO, Mark Re, gave us an idea about of the future of the hard drive market.  As late as Q1 2016, Seagate had considered helium-based drives suitable for high-end applications only.
Benjamin Smedberg / Future Releases:
Firefox will block non-essential, invisible Flash content starting in August  —  Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content.  But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers.

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Earlier Picks

Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Nick Statt / The Verge: