Techmeme
November 23, 2020, 11:20 AM

Top News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Snap announces Spotlight, a vertically scrollable TikTok-like feed inside Snapchat, and will pay $1M everyday to users who create the top Snaps through 2020  —  After taking on TikTok with music-powered features last month, Snapchat this morning is officially launching a dedicated place within …
New York Times:
A look at Sugon, a Chinese company at the heart of the country's surveillance efforts, and how it uses Intel and Nvidia chips to analyze video feeds at scale  —  Intel and Nvidia chips power a supercomputing center that tracks people in a place where government suppresses minorities …
Laura Forman / Wall Street Journal:
Analysis: Facebook and Instagram ads appear to be reaching a saturation point after rising by a ~30% quarterly average since Q3 2015  —  Spending big money to make big money in the ad business may no longer be on the table inside Facebook's network  —  Facebook Inc.'s platforms are starting to feel like homes with too much furniture.
New York Times:
As bots plague everything from Tinder to Twitter, a look at how generative adversarial networks create images and videos of fake people, sold on many websites  —  There are now businesses that sell fake people.  On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000.
Peter Grant / Wall Street Journal:
CoStar, which provides commercial real estate information and analytics, says it will buy Homesnap, an app that improves real estate agent workflows, for $250M  —  Purchase would mark the company's first significant step into residential data  —  CoStar Group, Inc., one of the world's largest providers …
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Sydney-based Metigy, which helps SMBs automate online ad campaigns, raises ~$14.6M led by Cygnet Capital and says it has 26,000 businesses on board  —  Metigy, a marketing platform created to help small businesses automate more of the decision making in their online ad campaigns …
David Pierce / Protocol:
Inside YouTube Music's plans to compete with Spotify and others by putting the entire music business, including livestreams and tickets, onto a single platform  —  For the last eight months, musicians and bands haven't been able to tour, play festivals or go much of anywhere.
Drew Armstrong / Bloomberg:
A look at Covid Tracking Project, a website run mostly by volunteers, which has become one of the most trusted sources on the spread of COVID-19 in the US  —  At the start of 2020, Amanda French was in between academic jobs.  Her mother had died about a year earlier, and she'd taken time off to help settle her affairs.

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Earlier Picks

Apoorva Mandavilli / New York Times:
Max Kim / Rest of World:
Forbes:
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: