Techmeme
April 8, 2019, 8:20 PM

Top News

Chris Welch / The Verge:
Sonos and Ikea unveil a $179 Symfonisk table lamp and a $99 bookshelf speaker, both of which can be controlled with Sonos' app, shipping in August  —  The lamp speaker and a bookshelf speaker are coming in August  —  Sonos and Ikea have fully unveiled the pair of speakers that the two companies have collaborated on for years.
Joe Hindy / Android Authority:
Snap is officially rolling out a faster version of its Snapchat Android app, which it's been rebuilding since the beginning of 2018 for better performance  —  Snapchat announced a big move in late 2017.  It was going to fix all of the problems its Android version had in comparison to the iOS version.
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft makes developer and “canary” builds of its Chromium-based Edge browser available today for Windows 10 64-bit, says builds for macOS “coming soon”  —  Microsoft today released the first Edge build based on Google's Chromium open source project, the same browser that Google's Chrome is based on.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Pinterest sets IPO price range at $15-$17 per share, to raise as much as $1.275B at up to a $11.3B valuation; Pinterest was valued at $12.3B in its last round  —  After dropping its IPO filing two weeks ago, today Pinterest, the social media platform where people can discover and share ideas …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitter lowers the number of accounts a user can follow per day from 1,000 to 400 to cut down on spam and bot activity  —  Twitter just took another big step to help boot spammers off its platform: it's cutting the number of accounts Twitter users can follow, from 1,000 per day to just 400.
James Vincent / The Verge:
EU publishes seven guidelines for developing ethical AI applications including being accountable, sustainable, explainable, privacy-respecting, and unbiased  —  The European Union has published new guidelines on developing ethical AI  —  The European Union today published a set of guidelines …
Ajit Mohan / Facebook:
As it preps for India's elections, Facebook says it removes ~1M accounts/day using AI, will open centers on election integrity in Singapore and Dublin this week  —  As Facebook continues to play a larger role in civic discussions and debate, we are committed to working hard to prevent abuse on our services, especially during elections.
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
EU starts investigation into Microsoft products used across EU institutions, after a Dutch probe found some products' hidden telemetry violated GDPR  —  EU starts investigation of Microsoft's contracts with EU institutions after Dutch government report.  —  The European Data Protection Supervisor …
Ian Boudreau / PCGamesN:
Tencent launches WeGame X, a global version of its games distribution platform WeGame  —  Like most people, you may have missed the fact that Chinese gaming giant Tencent launched the global version of its games distribution platform WeGame, called WeGame X, this week.
Scott Scrivens / Android Police:
14 HTC apps that were on the Google Play Store have been unpublished in the last three months, including HTC Mail and HTC Calendar  —  Back in February, we wrote about the disappearance of the HTC Mail app from the Play Store, but it was quickly restored.  More recently, we received a tip …
Brian Merchant / Gizmodo:
Once boastful of its plans to rely on 100% renewable energy for new datacenters, Amazon's quietly tamped down those ambitions  —  In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centers with 100 percent renewable energy.  Apple, Facebook, and Google …
Jake Bright / TechCrunch:
Branch, which gives loans starting at $2 in emerging markets like India and Kenya, raises $170M, partners with Visa to offer virtual pre-paid debit cards  —  The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announced
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft changes the default removal policy for external storage like USB thumb drives in Windows 10 from “Better performance” to “Quick removal”  —  The default removal policy for external storage media was changed by Microsoft in Windows 10 version 1809 from …

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