| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
WhatsApp says it now has 2B users worldwide, up from the 1.5B it announced two years ago — WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service, revealed today just how big it has become. The Facebook-owned app said it has amassed two billion users, up from 1.5 billion it revealed two years ago.| John Detrixhe / Quartz: |
Research: Apple Pay makes up about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to double that share by 2025 — Future of Finance — New technology is upending everything in finance. — Apple's mobile wallet is gobbling up a growing chunk of card payments around the world.| Bojan Pancevski / Wall Street Journal: |
US officials claim Huawei has, for over a decade, been able to covertly access mobile-phone networks globally through back doors designed for law enforcement — Trump administration ramps up push for allies to block Chinese company — U.S. officials say Huawei Technologies Co … | Steven Levy / Wired: |
Book excerpt from Steven Levy's Facebook: The Inside Story, with a look at Zuckerberg's lost handwritten journal, in which he noted plans for world domination — In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them.| Financial Times: |
Facebook says it has banned a network of two dozen fake pages and accounts linked to two South Asian telecom providers for using disinformation against rivals — South-east Asian providers said to have used fake accounts to discredit rivals — Facebook has alleged that one of south-east … | Alex Hern / The Guardian: |
UK proposes plans to put media regulator Ofcom in charge of regulating social media, with a focus on removing illegal content and minimizing “harmful” content — Ministers unveil plans to block harmful content, while guaranteeing free speech — Ofcom will be put in charge … | Jon Porter / The Verge: |
Google rolls out Emoji Kitchen, which mashes up two emojis into a sticker, for Gboard on Android — Compatible with WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and more — There are already hundreds of emoji available to cover every emotion from yawning to being a straight-up drunk weirdo.| Chris Velazco / Engadget: |
Hands-on with Samsung's new S20 lineup: 120Hz refresh rate makes the screens stand out, the Ultra is significantly bigger, and the cameras are ambitious — If you were planning to buy a premium Android smartphone this year, you can rest easy knowing they'll all come with more or less the same things.| Dieter Bohn / The Verge: |
| Andrew Morse / CNET: |
Flipboard launches Flipboard TV, an in-app feature that offers professional short-form video, for $2.99/mo; will be a Galaxy S20 exclusive for first 3 months — Flipboard , the popular news aggregator app, is introducing a new subscription video service. Called Flipboard TV … | Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios: |
Meditation app maker Headspace raises $53M in equity, led by Blisce, and $40M in debt and will use the funds to build tools for users with chronic diseases — Meditation app maker Headspace has raised $53 million in new equity funding and another $40 million in debt.| Josh Constine / TechCrunch: |
Reuters launches a new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog and partners with Facebook to review news headlines, deepfakes, and user generated content — Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process.| Eriq Gardner / Hollywood Reporter: |
Profile of DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim who has been privately telling people to expect a criminal antitrust case in Silicon Valley in the next few months — As Hollywood scales up to battle big tech, Makan Delrahim, the nation's top antitrust regulator (and a former movie producer) … | Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: |
FBI says it received 467,361 cybercrime complaints in 2019, with attacks involving business email compromise causing about half of the estimated $3.5B in losses — Average loss per BEC scam amounted to nearly $75,000, per complaint, on average. — The FBI received 467,361 internet … | The Verge: |
A look at online coding program Lambda School, which lets students defer tuition payments until they have jobs, but that many say is costly and under-delivers — Students at Lambda School say the program hasn't delivered on its promise — Bethany Surber was sleeping on friends' couches … | Hired: |
State of Software Engineers 2019: global demand for AR/VR engineers up by 1,400%, gaming developers up 146%, security engineers up 49% but slower than in 2018 — Overview — The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company.| Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: |
Battery Ventures closes on $2B in commitments across two funds, a $1.2B flagship and another $800M companion vehicle, two years after its last fundraise — Battery Ventures, the now 37-year-old investment firm, just closed on two new funds that — at $2 billion in capital commitments … | Juli Clover / MacRumors: |
Malwarebytes detected 11 threats per endpoint for its Mac users in 2019, up from 4.8 threats per endpoint in 2018, while PCs saw 5.8 threats per endpoint — Antivirus software developer Malwarebytes today shared its State of Malware Report for 2020 [PDF], which suggests that Mac malware is growing much more common.| Jem Aswad / Variety: |
Research: over the past year, 95M people in the US used a major streaming service, 25M had a family plan, 13M had a free trial, and 10M+ were sharing a login — Over the past year, 95 million people in the U.S. used a major streaming service, 68 million were self-paying … | Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: |
Samsung announces Galaxy Z Flip with a foldable 6.7" FHD+ AMOLED display, 3,300 mAh battery, dual front-facing cameras, coming February 14 starting for $1,380 — Foldable phones still feel like a dream, but to kick off the 2020 smartphone season, Samsung is hoping to change that.| Kadhim Shubber / Financial Times: |
The FTC is asking Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft about acquisitions from the past decade that were small enough to not be reported to the gov't — FTC to review acquisitions made by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — The Federal Trade Commission … | John Herrman / New York Times: |
Third-party sellers from China and other countries are flooding Amazon with thousands of new brands, overwhelming the USPTO as applications soar for trademarks — How Amazon is causing us to drown in trademarks. — Maybe it's cold, and you need some winter gloves.| Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: |
Boston- and DC-based Carbon Relay raises $63M led by Insight Partners to automate Kubernetes app deployment, bringing its total raised to roughly $70M — Four out of 10 enterprises report that they're using Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration framework for automating app deployment … | Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: |
Deep Instinct, which has developed a threat detection platform that uses deep learning, raises $43M Series C led by Millennium New Horizons — Cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct Ltd. is hoping to make a name for itself after raising an impressive $43 million in a funding round led by Millennium New Horizons.| Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: |
Nova Credit raises $50M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins to expand its service sourcing credit reports across borders — Around 70% of the world's population now has some form of bank account or — thanks to mobile phones — a facility to receive and send money virtually, according to the World Bank.| Sean Hollister / The Verge: |
Nvidia says that Activision Blizzard has removed its catalog of games like Overwatch, WoW, and Call of Duty from Nvidia's cloud gaming service GeForce Now — A bad precedent for cloud gaming — Nvidia's GeForce Now feels like one of the very best ways to get a free taste of cloud gaming … | Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: |
Irish startup Fenergo, whose platform helps financial institutions onboard customers, meet compliance, and more, raises $80M at an $800M post-money valuation — Europe has emerged as a key region for hatching and scaling fintech companies, and today one of the bigger hopefuls is announcing …
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.
Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.
From MCP to billing: Updates that accelerate hiring — TL;DRConnect your favorite AI tools to Zoho Recruit with Zoho Recruit MCP.Catch up on conversations faster with Zia email summaries.Review candidate context instantly …
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 11:55 AM ET, February 12, 2020.
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.
| Sam Nussey / Reuters: |
| BBC: |
| Peter Kafka / Vox: |
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
| Bloomberg: |
| Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: |