Techmeme
August 18, 2016, 9:40 AM

Top News

Max Chafkin / Bloomberg:
Uber's first self-driving fleet, supervised by humans in the driver's seat, arrives in Pittsburgh this month with free trips for the time being  —  Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world's experts in autonomous vehicles.
Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes:
Cisco And Fortinet Confirm Flaws Exposed By Self-Proclaimed NSA Hackers  —  American firewall companies Cisco and Fortinet have issued warnings and fixes for bugs exposed by the Shadow Brokers, who claimed this weekend to have breached the Equation Group, believed to be an NSA operation.
Garett Sloane / Ad Age:
Verizon has offered to preinstall marketers' apps on subscribers' Android phones for $1-2 per device, according to ad agency execs  —  Unique Program Guaranteed Downloads, Agency Execs Say  —  Forget bloatware.  Brandware may be the next extraneous app software coming to Verizon customers' smartphones.
Cisco:
Cisco announces it will eliminate 5,500 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, beginning this quarter, and reports quarterly revenue of $12.6B, up 2% YoY  —  Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today reported fourth quarter and fiscal year results for the period ended July 30, 2016.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Amazon launches a dedicated shop for items featured on Product Hunt  —  Amazon has teamed up with Product Hunt — the San Francisco-based startup that helps curate and surface the hottest new apps, websites, gadgets, tech creations and more — by offering a collection of products for purchase …
Kurt Wagner / Recode:
Instagram starts showing US users personalized video suggestions of live events in the Explore tab  —  The photo sharer is getting into event curation again.  —  Instagram really wants to become a video destination.  It's one of the reasons (I suspect) it built its own version …
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
Amazon is experimenting with tech teams comprised entirely of part-time employees with full benefits in an effort to shed perceptions of a harsh company culture  —  A new pilot program inside Amazon is creating technical teams consisting entirely of part-time employees — including managers …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google updates its Classroom learning suite with optional lesson summaries for parents, collaborative document annotation, more  —  Google Classroom, the company's platform that brings together Google Apps for Education and a number of tools for managing classes and content …
Lucian Armasu / Tom's Hardware:
Intel unveils next-gen Xeon Phi chips for deep learning; Nvidia says Intel used old benchmarks in marketing; Xeon Phi chips seem to compete on price regardless  —  Intel recently published some Xeon Phi benchmarks, which claimed that its “Many Integrated Core” Phi architecture …
Cherlynn Low / Engadget:
Kobo launches 7.8" waterproof Aura One e-reader for $229, with a colored backlight for better nighttime reading  —  Whether you read before bed, in the bathtub, during your commute or at the beach, Kobo wants to be there for you.  The e-reader maker just released the $229 Aura One …
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Dan Richman / GeekWire:
Google Cloud Platform releases three enterprise cloud database services from beta: Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud Datastore  —  Google Cloud Platform today released three database services from beta, signaling that they're ready for production use.  Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable …

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Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
Tim Peterson / Marketing Land:
Eva Dou / Wall Street Journal: