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November 20, 2019, 7:00 PM
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| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
PayPal to acquire Honey, a comparison shopping and rewards platform that has 17M MAUs, for ~$4B — PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash.
More:
PayPal, Inc., The Verge, ZDNet, Silicon Valley Business …, CNBC, Honey News, Fast Company, and Slashdot
Tweets: @mikeisaac, @business, @balajis, @yuris, @delane, @ianrborthwick, @anthony, @joshconstine, @patrickmcgee_, @iankar_, and @mdudas
| New York Times: |
Google has hired IRI Consultants, an anti-union consulting company, signaling the feud between some activist employees and management has escalated — After nearly two years of unrest, the company appears to be cracking down on employee activism. — Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm …
More:
CNET, Wired, and CNBC
Tweets: @tsimonite, @laurengoode, @carnage4life, @daiwaka, @josheidelson, @paulg, @sarahnemerson, @wired, @hshaban, and @kateconger
| Scott Spencer / The Keyword: |
Google announces new political ad rules, limits microtargeting to age, gender, and general location categories, will start enforcing them in UK within a week — We're proud that people around the world use Google to find relevant information about elections and that candidates use Google … | Janko Roettgers / Variety: |
Sonos has acquired voice assistant startup Snips for $37M, says it has sold 6.1M speakers in 2019, reports fiscal Q4 revenue of $294.2M, up 8% YoY — The company grew its 2019 revenue by 11%, but saw losses rise in Q4 due to increased R&D spending — Smart speaker maker Sonos is getting ready …
More:
Sonos, Engadget, GeekWire, VentureBeat, AppleInsider, TechCrunch, and Seeking Alpha. Tweets: @jank0. Thanks:@jank0
| Nathaniel Popper / New York Times: |
On-demand transcription service Rev faces backlash from its contractors after cutting their take to 30 cents for each dollar spent on some jobs, from 45 cents — Rev was just a small start-up offering online transcriptions. Now it's the latest symbol of a gig-economy company whose workers are fed up.| Joel Marcey / Facebook Developers: |
Facebook makes Visual Studio Code its default internal development environment, partners with Microsoft on tools to let devs do remote development at scale — History — Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code. There is no mandated development environment. Some developers use vim.
More:
Windows Central, Neowin, WinBuzzer, MSPoweruser, OnMSFT.com, and Seeking Alpha
Tweets: @johnbristowe and @thosjleeper
| Washington Post: |
The US says it has begun processing businesses' applications for licenses to sell tech to Huawei, approving those that do not pose national security risks — Commerce Department confirms it's granted “limited” exceptions to the ban on sales to the Chinese tech giant
More:
Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Wccftech, and Android Central
| Jay Peters / The Verge: |
Google launches Google Earth tools that let users create and present virtual tours, with attached text, images, and videos, for specific places — It's like a homemade guided tour — Today, Google is adding new tools to Google Earth on the web that let you build your own tour of a place right on top of the Google Earth map.
More:
The Keyword, Engadget, Android Police, Ars Technica, Neowin, Yahoo Finance, 9to5Google, Fast Company, Digital Trends, MSPoweruser, and Mashable
Tweets: @bmcclendon and @googleearth
| Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: |
Researchers find bugs in Google and Samsung camera apps from before July 2019 that could record video, take pictures, and extract GPS data without permission — A new vulnerability has been found in the Camera apps for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Android devices that could allow …
More:
Checkmarx, Ars Technica, Lifehacker, The Daily Dot, Dark Reading, Gizmodo, Tech Xplore, International Business Times, Computerworld, TalkAndroid.com, BGR, Android Central, SamMobile, XDA Developers, Gizchina, CNN, Phandroid, Telecoms.com, The Hacker News, ZDNet, and CNET
Tweets: @0xmatt, @rvawonk, @arunsub, @scmagazine, and @lukolejnik
| Ben Lovejoy / 9to5Mac: |
Apple says it has begun construction of its $1B Austin, Texas campus, opening in 2022, as Trump tours the nearby Mac Pro production plant — Apple has announced that it has begun construction of its new Austin, Texas, campus, on the day that President Trump is due to tour the Mac Pro production line a short distance away.
More:
Apple, Business Insider, The Verge, MacRumors, CNET, CNBC, Silicon Valley Business …, MacRumors, CNN, Apple Must, MSPoweruser, SiliconANGLE, Bloomberg, CNBC, Business Insider, and Mashable
Tweets: @tim_cook, @ivankatrump, @westonloyd45, @pinboard, @stevenportnoy, @johnpaczkowski, and @caseynewton
| Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac: |
Apple launches Apple Music for Business, letting businesses play music in retail locations with Apple providing human-curated playlists and recommendations — Apple Music is now partnering with businesses to play music at retail stores. In a partnership with PlayNetwork … | Ron Miller / TechCrunch: |
Gravitational raises $25M Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins, to help developers with cloud deployment using Kubernetes — As we move into an increasingly multi-cloud world, there is a portability problem moving applications between clouds. Gravitational wants to fix that, and today it announced a $25 million Series A.
More:
GlobeNewswire News Room, FinSMEs, GitLab, and PE Hub Blog
| Jake Bright / TechCrunch: |
After converting to a for-profit status, Samasource raises $14.8M Series A for its AI data annotation service used by companies like Google and Walmart — AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures.| Megan Graham / CNBC: |
Facebook begins rolling out new “brand safety” tools to let advertisers control the content their ads appear around, including white-listing publishers — - Facebook announced a slate of new “brand safety” tools for advertisers Wednesday, a way to let advertisers have more control over the content where their ads appear.| Jane Zhang / South China Morning Post: |
A profile of Baidu Bake, an encyclopedia with 16 times more Chinese entries than Wikipedia, written by 6.9M+ users comprising about 340 core contributors — Transition from hard format encyclopaedias to open-source encyclopaedias has raised some quality-of-information issues though … | Bloomberg: |
Alibaba has raised ~$11.2B in its Hong Kong share sale, after pricing 500M new shares at HK$176, in one of the largest equity offerings this year — - Company priced 500 million new shares at HK$176 each — Alibaba's share sale is among the world's largest this year
More:
Business Wire, Financial Times, Alizila.com, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Axios, CNBC, Financial Times, and Moneycontrol
Tweets: @jonrussell and @lisaabramowicz1
| Angelica Mari / ZDNet: |
WhatsApp says it has banned more than 400,000 accounts between August 15 and October 28, 2018, during Brazil's general election — The information was submitted by the messaging app as part of ongoing investigations into the spread of fake news. — Messaging app WhatsApp reported banning …
More:
Engadget
| Juli Clover / MacRumors: |
Apple launches $129 Smart Battery Cases for the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, now with a physical button that launches the camera app — Apple today launched new battery cases for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, with the new cases available for $129.
More:
9to5Mac, The Verge, Business Insider, iMore, Engadget, CNET, and iDownloadBlog.com
| Dr. Ian Cutress / AnandTech: |
Q&A with Intel SVP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri on upcoming chips, the company's Xe architecture, and an all-encompassing SDK for Intel's stack called oneAPI — Ever since Raja Koduri left AMD and joined Intel, I have been continuously asking for a 1-on-1 interview, as I'm sure a number of my peers in the industry have also.| Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: |
Uber says user data requests in 2019 from the US and Canada rose 27% YoY, with 3,825 US requests for 21,913 user accounts; Uber shared data 72% of the time — Uber says the number of legal demands for riders' data made by U.S. and Canadian authorities has risen sharply in the past year.| Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: |
Starburst, which is seeking to modernize data analytics with the open source Presto distributed query engine, raises $22M led by Index Ventures — Starburst, the company that's looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised … | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Spotify says its free tier will now stream across Alexa-powered devices in the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and smart speakers from Sonos and Bose globally — Spotify has worked with Amazon Echo since 2016, but only for premium subscribers. Today, that changes as Spotify says its free tier …
More:
Spotify, The Verge, SlashGear, Business Insider, and TechHive
| VICE: |
Anonymous users, on Reddit, Patreon, and other websites, are making and selling 3D likenesses of celebrities and real people to fulfill their sexual fantasies — A community of 3D graphics hobbyists are making and selling avatars of real people in order to fulfill their sexual fantasies, and there's little anyone can do to stop them.Sponsor Posts
Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work — Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work — Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
How EWS deprecation affects Zoho Calendar Interoperability — Understanding the impactMicrosoft began blocking Exchange Web Services (EWS) requests in Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) as of October 1, 2026.
How EWS deprecation affects Zoho Calendar Interoperability — Understanding the impactMicrosoft began blocking Exchange Web Services (EWS) requests in Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) as of October 1, 2026.
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.
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.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser — Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox. Use local models or your preferred AI provider. Get started free.
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser — Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox. Use local models or your preferred AI provider. Get started free.Featured Podcasts
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Thurrott, MSPoweruser, OnMSFT.com, CCN.com, cloudpro.co.uk, GeekWire, GeekWire, SiliconANGLE, Barron's Online, MarketWatch, TheStreet, TechSpot, Reuters, Microsoft 365 Blog, Business Insider, Wccftech, Crunchbase News, Reuters, MSPoweruser, ZDNet, Windows Central, Seeking Alpha, and Slashdot. Tweets: @lauriepottmeyer. Thanks:@oliviaandrus