Techmeme
September 24, 2020, 1:50 PM

Top News

The Verge:
Live blog of Amazon's Echo and Alexa event  —  Alexa, show me some hardware  —  It's September, and that means it's hardware season.  Amazon makes a lot of it: Echo speakers, Ring doorbells, Eero routers, and weird stuff like smart rings and boxes that are streaming DVR add-ons for the Fire TV.
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon announces redesigned spherical Echo devices, including $99 Echo, $60 Echo Dot with Clock, and $50 Echo Dot, with on-board speech analysis  —  Amazon just unveiled an all-new Echo with a revamped design.  It comes in three colors and features a spherical design.
Sean Endicott / Windows Central:
Microsoft says a standalone, non-subscription version of Office will be released in the second half of 2021 for both Windows and Mac  —  Microsoft will release a new perpetual release of Microsoft Office in the second half of 2021.  The new perpetual release only appears in a single sentence …
Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal:
Epic, Spotify, Match Group, and others form the Coalition for App Fairness to pressure Apple and other app store owners to make changes to marketplace rules  —  The Coalition for App Fairness is seeking legal and regulatory means to address how Apple, other app marketplace operators work with developers
Wired:
A look at Twitter's hack on July 15, the drastic changes it made in the immediate aftermath, and its plans to prevent an Election Day meltdown  —  On July 15, Twitter melted down.  On Election Day, that's not an option.  —  JULY 15 WAS, at first, just another day for Parag Agrawal, the chief technology officer of Twitter.
Sam Shead / CNBC:
Facebook's Oversight Board says it expects to start before the election, in mid to late October, after criticism for a perceived lack of action  —  - The independent Facebook OverSight Board has confirmed to CNBC that it plans to launch ahead of U.S. election in November.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google rolls out updates to Maps with a layer showing COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, with labels to indicate trends, coming to 220 countries and territories  —  Google today announced an update to Google Maps that will bring a new COVID-19 layer to the service to help you better understand the number of cases in a given area.
John Herrman / New York Times:
TikTok users in the US are experiencing something long familiar to much of the world: a flourishing online social space existentially threatened by politics  —  Banned apps, nefarious theories, trade wars, voiceless users.  The case of TikTok isn't news to most of the world.
David Yaffe-Bellany / Bloomberg:
Biz Carson / Protocol:
Marc Bodnick launches Telepath, a “kinder” social network with Reddit's subreddit topic structure, Twitter's in-the-moment feel, and Snapchat's ephemerality  —  The rules of the new social network Telepath are simple: Be kind.  Don't be mean.  No harassment, and no fake news.
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
Sundar Pichai says Google is planning “hybrid” models for future work, to allow partial work from home as 62% of employees want to have that flexibility  —  - Most Google employees want to return to the office at some point, but not every day, according to a recent Google survey …
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Ring announces a new line of security cameras for cars and says it is working with Tesla and others to integrate existing cameras into the Ring platform  —  Also working with Tesla and others to integrate existing cameras into the Ring platform  —  Ring has announced its first foray …
More: CNET
Bloomberg:
Sources: Deliveroo has begun preliminary talks to explore the possibility of an IPO in 2021  —  - Amazon-backed company eyes potential listing in 2021  — Food delivery companies have held up during virus pandemic  —  U.K. food-delivery startup Deliveroo has begun preliminary talks …
Jessica Conditt / Engadget:
Amazon announces Luna cloud gaming service, going live in October for $5.99/month, with a gamepad and support for Fire TV, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android later  —  Spoiler: It's not a native iOS app.  —  4m ago  —  Luna is what happens when you take the subscription model of Prime Video …
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
NHS COVID-19, a contact tracing app created by the UK government, launches in England and Wales with Exposure Notification API from Apple and Google  —  NHS COVID-19, a contact tracing app created by the UK government, is rolling out to residents of England and Wales as of today, with the app available from the iOS App Store.
Nick Statt / The Verge:

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Jeff Stone / CyberScoop:
Sahil Patel / Wall Street Journal:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Bloomberg: