Techmeme
April 7, 2020, 7:00 PM

Top News

@jack:
Jack Dorsey says he's moving $1B of his Square equity, ~28% of his wealth, to Startsmall LLC to fund COVID-19 relief, to later focus on girls' health, education  —  I'm moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl's health and education, and UBI. It will operate transparently, all flows tracked here: https://docs.google.com/...
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
WhatsApp now limits forwarding of viral messages, forwarded five or more times, to one group at a time, to fight the spread of misinformation  —  Restrictions on frequently forwarded messages intended to disrupt false Covid-19 claims  —  WhatsApp is to impose a strict new limit …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Facebook's experimental product unit debuts Tuned, an iOS app creating a “private space” for couples, letting them keep a photo diary, exchange notes, and more  —  Keep a photo diary and check in on each other's moods  —  First, Facebook launched a dating feature, and now …
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
Book excerpt from Sarah Frier's No Filter covers how Mark Zuckerberg's jealousy held back Instagram and drove off founders, who gradually lost independence  —  Over the past decade, Instagram has become an engine of commerce and cultural influence with few peers—aside from its parent company …
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News:
Book excerpt: Apple's Information Systems & Technology group, which makes internal tools, operates in tumult, hampering its output and alienating contractors  —  Life in Apple's Information Systems & Technology division reminds some of a sweatshop.  An exclusive excerpt from Always Day One …
Danny Crichton / TechCrunch:
WeWork sues SoftBank over alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty, a few days after SoftBank said it would not consummate its $3B tender offer  —  Just days after SoftBank announced that it would not consummate its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares that would have bought …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Microsoft buys corp.com, a domain that receives sensitive info from misconfigured Windows PCs, for an undisclosed sum to keep it out of the hands of bad actors  —  In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Sensor Tower: Quibi had more than 300,000 downloads on its launch day; heavily promoted in Apple's App Store, it reached #3 but just #29 on Google Play  —  Quibi, the oddly-named mobile streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, was downloaded over 300,000 times on launch day …
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
SoFi says it's acquiring Galileo, a Utah-based financial services API and payments platform, in $1.2B cash and stock deal; sources say Accel's return is 4x  —  Venture firm Accel has a pattern of investing in profitable, previously bootstrapped businesses.  Last November, it led 1Password's …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft expands xCloud beta registration to 11 European countries, rolling out the preview gradually to avoid overloading the internet  —  Microsoft is rolling out the preview gradually due to coronavirus internet impact concerns  —  Microsoft is starting to open up its xCloud game streaming beta to countries across Europe.
The Guardian:
Facebook says it will actively remove false claims that link COVID-19 to 5G and could lead to physical harm, but leaves its policy on other 5G theories unclear  —  Perfect storm of conditions helped nonsense theories about 5G and coronavirus to take hold  —  A year ago, hoax theories …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Firefox 75 comes with a revamped address bar designed to make searches faster and a few performance tweaks  —  Mozilla today launched Firefox 75 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Firefox 75 includes a revamped address bar with significant search improvements, a few performance tweaks, and a handful of developer features.
Feargus O'Sullivan / CityLab:
A look at Airbnb's challenges amid the pandemic crisis, as global bookings fall and prospects for the travel accommodation industry turn murky  —  The short-term rental market is reeling from the coronavirus-driven tourism collapse.  Can the industry's dominant player stage a comeback after lockdowns lift?
New York Times:
Some teachers in the US say under 50% of their pupils participate in online learning; absence rate seems higher in low-income households, marking digital divide  —  Teachers at some schools across the country report that less than half of their students are participating in online learning.
Karen Gilchrist / CNBC:
Profile of Min-Liang Tan, the co-founder and CEO of global gaming giant Razer, one of the few companies managing to thrive in the disrupted business landscape  —  When the #stayathome hashtag emerged on social media last month in response to governments successively announcing coronavirus containment measures, Min-Liang Tan was ready.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
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.
Cape:
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.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
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.
IDrive:
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.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
The Talk Show With John Gruber:
'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:00 PM ET, April 7, 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.

More News

Earlier Picks

Christina Farr / CNBC:
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Alex Konrad / Forbes:
Saheli Roy Choudhury / CNBC:
Taylor Lyles / The Verge:
Christina Farr / CNBC: