Techmeme
January 30, 2020, 1:20 PM

Top News

Charlie Osborne / ZDNet:
Avast will shut down its marketing subsidiary Jumpshot following controversy over selling user data to third parties  —  Avast's CEO said the move is “absolutely the right thing to do.”  —  Avast is winding down its subsidiary Jumpshot following an explosive investigation into the sale …
Emma Court / Bloomberg:
Practice Fusion, which offers free, ad-supported health records software to doctors, agrees to pay $145M DOJ fine for its role in boosting opioid prescriptions  —  - Practice Fusion ensured that addictive drugs were on the menu  — 'It's evil.  There's really no other word for it,' doctor says
Financial Times:
Sources: Uber and DoorDash held failed merger talks around six months ago at the behest of SoftBank to consolidate the food-delivery industry  —  Uber and DoorDash held talks to combine last year in a deal that would have accelerated the long-awaited consolidation of the lossmaking food delivery industry …
Eun-Young Jeong / Wall Street Journal:
Samsung reports weak Q4 earnings from low memory chip sales as net profit slumps to $4.4B, down 39% YoY, on revenue of $50.52B, up 1.1% YoY  —  Company reports weak fourth-quarter earnings from low memory-chip sales  —  SEOUL—Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 39% drop in fourth-quarter net profit …
Microsoft:
Microsoft Q2: revenue of $36.9B, up 14% YoY, net income of $11.6B, up 38% YoY; Commercial Cloud revenue up 39% YoY to $12.5B; Office 365 Consumer subs hit 37.2M  —  Microsoft Commercial Strength Powers Second Quarter Results REDMOND, Wash. — January 29, 2020 — Microsoft Corp. today announced …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Nintendo says Switch passed SNES in lifetime sales with 52M+ sold, reports sales of $9.39B and net profit of $1.8B for the nine months ended in December  —  Nintendo said it is upgrading its forecast for profits in the fiscal year ending March 31, thanks to strong sales of the Nintendo Switch and games that run on it.
Facebook:
Facebook reports Q4 revenue of $21.1B, up 25% YoY, and net income of $7.4B, up 7% YoY; DAUs rose 9% YoY to 1.66B, MAUs rose 8% YoY to 2.5B; stock drops 5%+  —  Facebook, Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) today reported financial results for the quarter and full year ended December 31, 2019.
New York Times:
Facebook agrees to pay $550M to settle a class action suit over Illinois biometric law violations for tagging users in photos, after SCOTUS rejected its appeal  —  It was another black mark on the privacy record of the social network, which also reported its quarterly earnings.
Bloomberg:
California court orders Apple to pay $838M and Broadcom to pay $270M for infringing California Institute of Technology patents on Wi-Fi transmissions  —  Apple Inc. and Broadcom Inc. must pay $1.1 billion in damages for infringing California Institute of Technology patents on Wi-Fi transmissions, a jury in California ordered.
The Information:
Source: Apple has terminated AI startup Xnor.ai's involvement in the Pentagon's Project Maven after its recent acquisition of the startup  —  Big technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have jockeyed to secure lucrative contracts supplying their products and services to the military.
Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News:
Woman tried for 4 years to get Facebook to remove a business page someone created for her butthole, which the company removed only after BuzzFeed wrote about it  —  “This unofficial Page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business.
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Fantastical, a popular calendar app for iOS and macOS, switches to a subscription model to unlock new premium features like Calendar Sets and weather forecasts  —  Admit it, you've lost track of how many years it's been since you paid for Fantastical.  The answer could be as long ago as 2013 …
Bloomberg Quint:
Online insurance marketplace Policygenius raises $100M Series D led by KKR  —  (Bloomberg) — Online insurance startup Policygenius raised $100 million from investors including KKR & Co. and venture capital operations backed by Axa SA, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Transamerica.
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
OpenAI says it will migrate to Facebook's PyTorch machine learning framework for future projects, eschewing Google's TensorFlow platform  —  In what might only be perceived as a win for Facebook, OpenAI today announced that it will migrate to the social network's PyTorch machine learning framework …
More: OpenAI

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Earlier Picks

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
New York Times:
Ben Parker / The New Humanitarian:
Matina Stevis-Gridneff / New York Times:
Shara Tibken / CNET: