Techmeme
June 15, 2020, 7:45 AM

Top News

Benjamin Mullin / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: at its current pace, Quibi will sign up fewer than 2M paying subscribers by the end of its first year, well under its original target of 7.4M  —  Two veteran executives with contrasting styles are launching Quibi, an on-the-go streaming service, during a pandemic
Amanda Meade / The Guardian:
In response to Australian regulator, Facebook says it will not pay for shared news links and that not having them at all would not significantly impact business  —  Social media giant rejects ACCC proposal, saying it could cut out news completely without any significant impact on its business
Financial Times:
Sources: SoftBank has invested $500M+ into Credit Suisse supply-chain finance funds that then made big bets on the debt of struggling SoftBank-backed startups  —  Japanese conglomerate engages in circular flow of financing to Vision Fund start-ups  —  SoftBank has quietly poured more than $500m …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
GitHub CEO says company is working to replace the name “master” for the default version of source code repositories with a more neutral term  —  GitHub getting on board legitimizes movement aimed at removing racially-charged language from software.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
ByteDance says it's shutting down two of its apps in India, Vigo Lite and Vigo Video, the latter of which reportedly had 4M MAUs, urging users to move to TikTok  —  Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged users to move to TikTok.
Nathan Baschez / Divinations:
Apple's efforts in health amount to a new OS, a bottleneck that all healthcare players, from providers to device makers, must integrate with to get distribution  —  Apple is building an operating system for health  —  This essay was co-authored by Rob Litterst and Nathan Baschez
David Ingram / NBC News:
US efforts to deploy COVID-19 contact tracing apps have fallen flat, as most states retreat from earlier interest and the few with an app struggle with adoption  —  At a briefing this week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy touted his state's efforts to trace the spread of the coronavirus …
Crystal Tse / Bloomberg:
Boston-based Duck Creek Technologies, a software provider for insurers, raises $230M ahead of a planned IPO  —  - Investors include Kayne Anderson Rudnick, Whale Rock Capital  — Insurance software maker announced filing last year for IPO  —  Duck Creek Technologies …
Brian Fung / CNN:
As Microsoft and Amazon push for federal regulation of facial recognition, an overview of related local laws that have been passed and tech lobbying efforts  —  How facial recognition went from bad TV to Big Brother  —  (CNN)In a matter of days, there was a sea change with one of the most cutting-edge …
Jack Bandy / Mac O’Clock:
Research comparing curation by humans and algorithms on Apple News shows that human editors chose more diverse sources, more evenly, and less “soft news”  —  Over one hundred million people use Apple News every month.  Our study showed key differences in the stories that editors and algorithms curate for those people.

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.
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:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:45 AM ET, June 15, 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

Fudge_0001 / reddit:
Google Support:
Stephen Harrison / Slate:
Robert P. Baird / New Yorker:
Margaret Harding McGill / Axios:

Earlier Picks

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Biz Carson / Protocol:
Sean Burch / The Wrap:
CNN: