Techmeme
May 17, 2019, 11:35 AM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces Minecraft Earth, a real-world AR version of Minecraft, available in closed beta on iOS and Android this summer  —  Alex Kipman, Microsoft's HoloLens and Kinect creator, is always enthusiastic about the future of computing.  As he stands in front of me inside …
Arjun Panchadar / Reuters:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy supercomputer maker Cray in a deal valued at $1.3B, or $35 per share, which represents a premium of 17.4% to Cray's last close  —  (Reuters) - Supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc said on Friday it would be bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co in a deal valued at about $1.30 billion, net of cash.
Financial Times:
Washington Post:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft and Sony announce a strategic partnership to explore development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure for game and content-streaming services  —  An unusual partnership  —  Microsoft and Sony are announcing an unusual partnership today, allowing the two rivals to partner on cloud-based gaming services.
New York Times:
Profile of Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, who admits AI alone may not be enough to deal with toxic content and chokes up when discussing the scale of the issue  —  Facebook has heralded artificial intelligence as a solution to its toxic content problems.  Mike Schroepfer, its chief technology officer, says it won't solve everything.
Sean Lyngaas / CyberScoop:
DOJ says that it has indicted 10 members of the criminal network that used the GozNym malware to attempt to steal an estimated $100M from 41,000+ victims  —  Law enforcement officials from the U.S. and some European allies say they have broken up a criminal network that used banking malware …
Julian Chokkattu / Digital Trends:
Tests of Verizon's 5G in Chicago on the Galaxy S10 5G show download speeds of up to 1.35 Gbps, but speeds were inconsistent, though never fell below 550 Mbps  —  I'm in Chicago.  Again.  It's my second trip to the windy city in the past month, and I don't expect it to be my last.  —  Why?  5G!
Chloe Taylor / CNBC:
Deliveroo announces that Amazon is leading a $575M funding round for the UK-based food delivery service, bringing total raised to $1.53B  —  KEY POINTS  — Deliveroo is a British company that allows users to order food deliveries from nearby restaurants using an app.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Sources: acceptance rates for Facebook job offers among graduates of top US schools like Stanford fell from nearly 90% in late 2016 to around 50% in early 2019  —  KEY POINTS  — Among top schools, Facebook's acceptance rate for full-time positions offered to new graduates has fallen …
Dan Woods / The Register:
Sources shed light on Amazon's Away Team model inside AWS, where one team's service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability  —  Cloud giant's structure, staff practices revealed  —  Deep dive Companies inside and out of Silicon Valley have found their own ways …
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google to add the ability to save transcriptions in Live Transcribe and will include indicators for sounds like door knocks, dog barks, and phones ringing  —  [Clapping]  —  When Google released Live Transcribe this past February, it was a hugely important accessibility feature for people …
Theodore Schleifer / Vox:
Sources: Quora, which has 300M+ MAUs, is raising a $60M round led by Valor Equity Partners at a valuation of $2B, and told investors it had $20M in 2018 revenue  —  According to some, the financing round for the question-and-answer platform speaks to the high valuation for virtually everything these days in the tech sector.
Russell Brandom / The Verge:
Researchers: NYPD used edited suspects' photos and photos of celebs, when witnesses said the suspects looked like them, to generate facial recognition matches  —  In one case, a photo of the actor Woody Harrelson was used to locate a suspect  —  A new report from Georgetown Law's Center …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Stack Overflow says hackers breached its systems on May 11 but that there is no evidence of customer data being accessed, promises more info when probe ends  —  Stack Overflow said it detected a security breach over the weekend.  —  Stack Overflow, the internet's largest Q&A site for programming …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Health at Scale, which wants to match patients to the right treatments from the right providers at the right time using AI, raises $16M Series A  —  Health at Scale, a startup with founders who have both medical and engineering expertise, wants to bring machine learning to bear …
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Sheryl Sandberg: there is concern in US “with the size and power of Chinese companies, and the realization that those companies are not going to be broken up”  —  KEY POINTS  — Sandberg said breaking up Facebook does not address the underlying issues people have with tech companies.

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 11:35 AM ET, May 17, 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

Earlier Picks

Larry Cermak / The Block:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Makena Kelly / The Verge: