Techmeme
May 3, 2018, 4:55 AM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Cambridge Analytica is shutting down following the Facebook data misuse scandal, says it was losing clients and facing mounting legal fees  —  Company had lost multiple clients in recent months  —  Cambridge Analytica , a data firm that worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign …
New York Times:
Filing shows executives at Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group, along with the Mercer family, have moved to create a new firm, Emerdata, possibly for “rebranding”  —  The embattled political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica announced on Wednesday that it would cease most operations …
Peggy Sito / South China Morning Post:
Xiaomi files for an IPO in Hong Kong; sources say the Beijing-based company is seeking to raise $10B at a valuation of $100B  —  Xiaomi's 2017 sales jumped by two-thirds to 114.6 billion yuan, while operating profit tripled and adjusted net profit soared from a year earlier
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
Facebook shows how it uses billions of public Instagram photos, annotated by users with hashtags, to help train its AI-based image recognition models  —  In the race to continue building more sophisticated AI deep learning models, Facebook has a secret weapon: billions of images on Instagram.
Jerome Pesenti / Facebook Code:
Spotify Investor Relations:
Spotify reports first ever financial results with Q1 revenue of €1.139B, up 26% YoY, on operating loss of €41M; MAUs up 30% YoY to 170M  —  Spotify Technology S.A. (NYSE:SPOT) today reported financial results for the first fiscal quarter of 2018 ending March 31, 2018.
Paul Vigna / Wall Street Journal:
Source: Telegram is calling off the public part of the ICO for the Telegram Open Network after raising $1.7B from 175 accredited investors via private deals  —  Telegram plans to put the money it raised into a new digital payment platform, Telegram Open Network, meant for a wide audience
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg:
Amazon launches Wag, its own brand of pet products, starting with dry dog food, only available to Prime subscribers  —  Amazon.com Inc. has started its own brand of pet products, called Wag, expanding on existing private-label efforts that include batteries, baby products, clothing and household goods.
More: CNET and BetaNews
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google says it has started rolling out Google Pay on the web through desktop browsers and iOS  —  Since Google Pay launched as the company's unified payment solution in February, it has added a number of new features with more on the roadmap.  Google Pay is now beginning to roll out on the web for desktops and other mobile platforms.
Kara Swisher / Recode:
Zynga founder Mark Pincus reducing his voting power in the social gaming firm from a 70% to 10% stake, will remain on board but as non-executive chairman  —  In an unusual move, Pincus doesn't want the final say anymore and wanted more freedom.  —  In an unusual move for a Silicon Valley company …
Thuy Ong / The Verge:
Google announces investment program for early-stage startups working on Google Assistant hardware or features, similar to Amazon's Alexa Fund  —  Funding the Google Assistant ecosystem  —  Today, Google is launching a new investment program for early-stage startups working to broaden Google Assistant hardware or features.
April Glaser / Slate:
Twitter approved an ad pretending to be a Twitter verification service that pushed users to a phishing scheme after the verification program was suspended  —  On Monday, while taking an early morning scroll through Twitter, I noticed a peculiar ad that seemed perfectly tailored to me …

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Earlier Picks

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Sara Fischer / Axios: