Techmeme
January 30, 2020, 5:55 PM

Top News

Amazon:
Amazon Q4: $87.4B revenue, up 21% YoY, net income of $3.3B, up from $3B in Q4 2018, AWS revenue of $9.9B, up from $7.4B in Q4 2018; stock up 11%+ after hours  —  SEATTLE—(BUSINESS WIRE) January 30, 2020—Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2019.
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 …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple says its updated Maps are rolling out across the US, with more detailed visuals and new features like Look Around, and coming to Europe later this year  —  Apple's updated and more detailed Maps experience has now rolled out across the U.S., the company announced this morning.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
Reports from four analytics companies: Huawei surpassed Apple in 2019 with global smartphone shipments of 241M vs. 198M; Samsung retains its top spot with 298M  —  Apple's strong fourth quarter wasn't enough to hold off the Chinese challenger  —  Huawei overtook Apple to become …
Financial Times:
Sources: Uber and DoorDash held failed merger talks about six months ago; the talks were at SoftBank's behest which wanted to consolidate food-delivery industry  —  Uber and DoorDash held talks to combine last year in a deal that would have accelerated the long-awaited consolidation …
Wall Street Journal:
Angela Chen / MIT Technology Review:
Pitch deck details Column, a paid social network centered on tech/business notables, with Aron Ping D'Souza as CEO; investor Sarah Cone later said she was CEO  —  Business and technology leaders are being asked to spend $100,000 buying in to the service.  —  A proposed new social network …
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
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.
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 …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down on April 6, to be replaced by SVP of Cloud and Cognitive Software Arvind Krishna; Jim Whitehurst to become President  —  - Ginni Rometty has been executive chairman, president and CEO since 2012.  — Rometty has been at IBM for almost four decades; the next one has been there for three decades.
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.
Sarah O'Rourke / Google Online Security Blog:
Google releases OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards  —  Posted by Elie Bursztein, Security & Anti-abuse Research Lead, and Jean-Michel Picod, Software Engineer, Google  —  Today, FIDO security keys are reshaping …
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.

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The Information:
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Matina Stevis-Gridneff / New York Times:
Shara Tibken / CNET: