Techmeme
January 21, 2019, 5:25 AM

Top News

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook to launch Community Actions, a News Feed petition feature for users to tag government agencies and officials and advocate for changes, on Monday  —  Gather a mob and Facebook will now let you make political demands.  Tomorrow Facebook will encounter a slew of fresh complexities …
James Cook / Telegraph:
Uber is hiring for a new Micromobility Robotics team to develop autonomous scooters and bikes that can drive themselves to reach customers and charging points  —  Uber is hiring engineers to develop electric scooters and bicycles which can drive themselves around cities in order to reach customers and charging points.
Matt Binder / Mashable:
Google Maps rolls out ability to see user-reported speed traps via small camera icons, in North America, UK, Australia, Russia, Brazil, India, and Indonesia  —  Drivers will soon have an extra set of eyes on the road, courtesy of Google.  —  Google's navigation app, Google Maps …
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
SEC filing: Disney lost $1B+ from streaming in its 2018 fiscal year, with a $580M loss attributed to its stake in Hulu and $469M to ownership of BAMtech  —  - Disney's stake in Hulu and its ownership of BAMtech led to a loss of more than $1 billion in the latest fiscal year.
Emily Bell / Columbia Journalism Review:
Facebook's journalism funding does not guarantee the success of high-quality reporting on its platform, which would obviate the need for such cash infusions  —  At some point over the past year, anyone connected with journalism, its present woes, or concerns over its future probably found themselves in a room with a Facebook executive.
James Ball / Columbia Journalism Review:
Kate Clark / TechCrunch:
Knock, a home trade-in platform started by Trulia veterans, has raised $400M Series B in equity and debt financing led by Foundry Group  —  Home trade-in platform Knock has brought in a $400 million investment to accelerate a national expansion and double its 100-person headcount.
Dan Rys / Billboard:
Profile of Audiomack, which started as a mixtape hosting site and now has a popular free music streaming service with 1.5M users, up from 400K a year ago  —  “We're not intent on becoming Spotify.  We're not trying to become Apple Music," says co-founder and CMO Dave Ponte.
Sam Byford / The Verge:
Video of a purported Google Pixel 3 Lite shows a phone with a plastic case, 3.5mm headphone jack, 5.56" 2220x1080 LCD display, and Snapdragon 670 CPU  —  It wouldn't be a new Pixel without a massive leak  —  At this point it may be a tradition that new Google phones show up in unboxing videos …
Wall Street Journal:
A Japanese hotel that opened in 2015 as the “world's first robot hotel” has fired most of its robots after they frustrated guests and made more work for staff  —  The robot revolution will have to wait at the Henn na Hotel in Japan, which is laying off low-performing droids

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
Do you need a Zoho Partner?  Here's why working with one can benefit you.  —  Zoho offers over 60 applications, each one built for a unique use case.  From sales and marketing to finance, HR, and customer support …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
Open Model Wars + Claire Stapleton's Dishy Google Memoir + Substack's Slop Fight
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Great Chat:
Tech's short-term era
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Access:
Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Basis's Matt Harpe: Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood's Sort-of Comeback
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:25 AM ET, January 21, 2019.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Nicole Perlroth / New York Times:

Earlier Picks

Biz Carson / Forbes:
Alex Heath / Cheddar:
Julia Reda:
Financial Times: