Techmeme
January 27, 2020, 3:50 PM

Top News

Joseph Cox / VICE:
Documents reveal that Avast has sold its users' internet browsing data, through a subsidiary called Jumpshot, to clients like Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft  —  An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data …
Tara Duggan / San Francisco Chronicle:
Grubhub admits to adding restaurants without their permission, after restaurateur found her Thai restaurant had a page on Grubhub and its subsidiary Seamless  —  Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call.
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat:
FCC unlocks 3.5GHz band of spectrum used by Citizens Broadband Radio Service, enhancing connectivity via “OnGo” services in the latest iOS and Android phones  —  Following six years of private and public collaboration to open up some of the United States' most valuable wireless spectrum …
More: Engadget
Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:
Consumer IoT is in trouble because normal people can't be expected to manage a house full of smart things or keep track of their bugs and looming obsolescence  —  The everything-computerized-and-always- connected smarthome is a work in progress.  This slow pace is a good thing because it gives us …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Gravyty, a Massachusetts-based fundraising platform that uses AI to analyze donor behavior in order to help nonprofits reach fundraising goals, raises $21M  —  Nonprofit organizations send an average of 3 email newsletters and 2 donation appeals monthly, and for every 1,000 emails sent to subscribers, they raise an average of only $42.
Gary Marcus / The Gradient:
A critical look at OpenAI's GPT-2 text generation AI and why the knowledge acquired by systems like the GPT-2 has been superficial and unreliable  —  OpenAI's GPT-2 has been discussed everywhere from The New Yorker to The Economist.  What does it really tell us about natural and artificial intelligence?
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Mural, a visual collaboration platform for enterprises, raises $23M Series A led by Radian Capital, with Gradient Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst participating  —  This morning Mural, a software startup focused on visual collaboration1, announced that it closed a $23 million Series A round of capital.
More: FinSMEs
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Currencycloud raises $80M Series E from Visa, BNP Paribas, and others for cross-border payment APIs that have transferred $50B+ and are used by ~350 companies  —  Sending money from one country to another — either because you are a business paying someone for a service …
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Earlier Picks

Angela Strange / Andreessen Horowitz:
Eric Niiler / Wired: