Techmeme
November 13, 2018, 9:15 PM

Top News

Day One: The Amazon Blog:
Amazon selects New York City and Arlington, Virginia for its new headquarters, receiving $1.5B in performance-based incentives from NY and $573M from VA  —  Amazon to invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs across the two new headquarters, and announces Nashville as new Operations Center …
Washington Post:
A look at the likely factors behind Amazon's decision to choose Crystal City, VA, as one of its HQ2 locations and how it may affect the region  —  Amazon will open major new outposts in Northern Virginia's Crystal City and in New York City, splitting its much-sought investment …
Douglas MacMillan / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon says it has more than 10,000 employees working on its Alexa virtual assistant and Echo devices, up from 5,000 in September 2017  —  Number of employees doubles the staff in that division a little more than a year ago  —  LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.— Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -.35% …
J. David Goodman / New York Times:
Tom Randall / Bloomberg:
Source: Waymo plans to launch the world's first commercial driverless car service in December under a new brand that will compete directly with Uber and Lyft  —  Under a new name, the Google sibling plans to methodically build a futuristic rival to Uber and Lyft.  This is how it will unfold.
Christina Farr / CNBC:
DeepMind's health subsidiary, maker of an app called Streams that helps with diagnosing specific conditions, is moving under the newly-formed Google Health unit  —  - DeepMind's health subsidiary is moving under the newly-formed Google Health led by former Geisinger CEO David Feinberg
Tom Warren / The Verge:
The Windows 10 October 2018 Update is finally re-released, after data loss bugs caused it to be pulled; Microsoft says it's focusing on improving code quality  —  October update, or November update?  —  Microsoft is releasing its Windows 10 October 2018 Update again today, after bugs forced the company to pull it offline last month.
AJ Dellinger / Engadget:
Snapchat introduces Friendship Profiles highlighting close relationships, custom Bitmoji merchandise, and Bitmoji Stories  —  Snapchat is introducing new Friendship Profiles that will celebrate your relationships with your closest friends.  The feature will dig up some of the highlights …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Sources: Yahoo Finance is launching a subscription service, Yahoo Finance Premium, in Q1 2019 that a source says will likely cost $100+/month  —  Yahoo Finance, the decades-old money brand now owned by Verizon, is launching a subscription service that aims to compete with Bloomberg for the cash …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Zendesk announces Sunshine, a development platform that's free for its enterprise customers, and Sell, a CRM tool launching for $19 per user per month  —  Cloud customer-support software company Zendesk on Tuesday announced a new tool for salespeople and a compatible system for developing custom applications.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Ridecell, a SaaS platform for self-driving, ride-hailing, and other mobility companies, raises Series B extension, closing the round at $60M  —  Car-sharing, ride-sharing, and ride-hailing companies have something in common: They rely on fairly sophisticated backends to keep fleets up and running on time.
Variety:
Spotify launches in 13 markets across the Middle East and North Africa, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, with a fully Arabic user experience  —  As expected, today Spotify announced that it has launches its service in 13 new markets in the Middle East and North Africa, bringing the service to 78 markets in total.
Livemint:
Flipkart Group CEO Binny Bansal resigns after probe into allegations of serious misconduct  —  Binny Bansal's resignation “follows an independent investigation done on behalf of Flipkart and Walmart into an allegation of serious personal misconduct.”  —  05 27 PM IST

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Earlier Picks

Nick Statt / The Verge:
New York Times:
Joe Uchill / Axios:
Vibhuti Sharma / Reuters: