| The Keyword: |
Larry Page steps down as Alphabet CEO; Sundar Pichai to lead both Alphabet and Google — Our very first founders' letter in our 2004 S-1 began: … We believe those central tenets are still true today. The company is not conventional and continues to make ambitious bets on new technology, especially with our Alphabet structure.| Peter Kafka / Vox: |
| Paresh Dave / Reuters: |
Instagram says it will now require birthdates from new users, in order to improve safety features for minors and better target ads for age-restricted products — SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's Instagram said it will require birthdates from all new users starting on Wednesday … | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Reddit publishes its 2019 retrospective: 430M MAUs, up 30% YoY, with 199M posts, 1.7B comments, and 32B upvotes; Bill Gates AMA had the most upvotes with 110K — In a year-end retrospective released this morning, Reddit says its user base grew 30% this year to reach 430 million monthly active users, as of the end of October.| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
Amazon launches a battery-powered portable Echo speaker in India with an enclosed 4,800mAh battery, claims up to 10 hours of continuous music playback — After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix … | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Plex launches a free, ad-supported streaming service featuring thousands of movies and shows from studios like MGM, available in ~220 countries — Plex today is launching its own ad-supported streaming service, a rival to The Roku Channel, Tubi, Crackle, Vudu's Movies on Us … | Paul Sawers / VentureBeat: |
Language learning app Duolingo raises $30M Series F from Alphabet's CapitalG at a $1.5B valuation, more than double the valuation from its 2017 Series E — Popular language learning app Duolingo has raised $30 million in a series F round of funding from Alphabet's investment arm CapitalG.| Abner Li / 9to5Google: |
Google says Focus mode, a Digital Wellbeing feature for Android that mutes notifications, is rolling out to Android 9 and 10 users — At I/O 2019 in May, Google announced the latest Digital Wellbeing features to build on last year's initial launch. In testing for the past several months … | Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: |
Mozilla removes four Firefox extensions made by Avast and AVG after reports that they were harvesting user data and browsing histories — The four extensions, two from Avast and two from AVG, are still available on the Chrome Web Store. — Mozilla removed today four Firefox extensions … | Newley Purnell / Wall Street Journal: |
India, which is increasingly trying to shelter local companies, has erected regulatory hurdles over the past year for how US tech firms operate in the country — New barriers make world's biggest untapped digital market a slog for Walmart, Facebook; taking cues from China's protectionism| Annie Palmer / CNBC: |
Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom and CFO Alan Pickerill are stepping down, with day-to-day work taken up by Chairman Barry Diller, after a disagreement over strategy — KEY POINTS — Expedia announced Wednesday that CEO Mark Okerstrom and CFO Alan Pickerill are stepping down from their roles at the company.| TechCrunch: |
SEC filing: Sequoia Capital has raised nearly $1B for later-stage US investments and ~$2.4B for venture and growth deals in China — Noted Silicon Valley venture capital fund Sequoia Capital has raised nearly $1 billion for later-stage U.S. investments and roughly $2.4 billion for venture … | Li Yuan / New York Times: |
Huawei's reputation in China, once unimpeachable, has been dented by a labor dispute over severance pay with an employee, who was recently freed from jail — When an executive wrote about her house arrest in Canada, an outcry about a former employee's treatment arose on social media.| Anna Wiener / New Yorker: |
A profile of Hipcamp, a platform for campsite booking where listings include off-grid plots, RV hookups, ski huts, farmhouses, tepees, tree houses, and cabins — Can a startup save the wilderness by disrupting it? — In Northern California, booking a public campsite is a blood sport.| Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: |
Firefox 71 arrives with Picture-in-Picture support on Windows for all video sites, Enhanced Tracking Protection and Lockwise password manager improvements, more — Mozilla today launched Firefox 71 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Firefox 71 includes Lockwise password manager improvements … | Anthony Ha / TechCrunch: |
Flow, which helps companies build a cross-border e-commerce business, raises $37M Series B led by New Enterprise Associates — Flow, a startup that helps brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business, has raised $37 million in Series B funding.| Mike Isaac / New York Times: |
Sources: Facebook's NPE team is exploring the creation of apps for podcasts, travel, workplace services, and newsletters, although these may never be released — The social network is exploring new product areas through a team dedicated to building the company's future.| Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: |
Kustomer, an omnichannel CRM platform for enterprise customer service, raises $60M Series E led by Coatue, bringing its total raised to ~$173M — Kustomer, a CRM startup that's taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce, and many other bigger and older providers, has closed yet another round of funding … | Larry Dignan / ZDNet: |
AWS updates its Arm-powered processor line with Graviton2, which it claims offers 40% better performance over comparable x86-based cloud instances for 20% less — With Graviton2, AWS is making it clear that it is serious about Arm processors in the data center as well as moving cloud infrastructure innovation at its pace.| Tom Krazit / Mostly Cloudy: |
| Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: |
Researchers achieve new cryptography milestones, including factoring the largest RSA key size ever, largely thanks to improved algorithms, not better hardware — 795-bit factoring and discrete logarithms achieved using more efficient algorithms. — 34 with 24 posters participating| Reuters: |
Nintendo says it has partnered with Tencent to sell the Switch in China, starting on December 10 for ~$300 — TOKYO/BEIJING (Reuters) - Japan's Nintendo Co Ltd said on Wednesday it will officially launch its Switch gaming console in mainland China on Dec. 10 priced 2,099 yuan ($298) with local partner Tencent Holdings Ltd.
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.
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.
Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.
Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM — This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.
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.
This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:55 PM ET, December 4, 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.
| Greg Bensinger / Washington Post: |
| Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC: |
| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
| Shara Tibken / CNET: |
| Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge: |
| Dani Deahl / The Verge: |
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
| Shirin Ghaffary / Vox: |