Techmeme
February 11, 2021, 12:30 PM

Top News

Financial Times:
Sources: Microsoft made an offer to acquire Pinterest in recent months; source says the talks are not active right now  —  Microsoft approached Pinterest in recent months about a potential deal to acquire the $51bn social media company popular with hobbyists posting home decor …
Sami Fathi / MacRumors:
Starting with iOS 14.5, Apple will proxy the Safe Browsing service in Safari through its own servers instead of Google's to protect user data  —  Starting with iOS and iPadOS 14.5, Apple will proxy Google's “Safe Browsing” service used in Safari through its own servers instead of relying …
Daniel Goldblatt / The Wrap:
Facebook says Instagram has removed Robert F Kennedy Jr's account for making false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines  —  Move comes as the company is expanding efforts to crack down on conspiracy theory content  —  Instagram removed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s account on Wednesday …
Dave Gershgorn / OneZero :
CBP scanned 23M+ people with facial recognition tech at airports, seaports, and pedestrian crossings in 2020, and reveals it caught zero imposters at airports  —  U.S. Customs and Border Protection scanned more than 23 million people in public places with facial recognition technology in 2020
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Labelbox, which develops data annotation and labeling software, raises $40M Series C led by B Capital Group, bringing its total raised to $79M  —  Labelbox, a startup developing a data annotation and labeling platform, today announced that it's raised $40 million, bringing its total raised to $79 million.
Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
Sweden-based digital bank Northmill raises $30M led by M2 Asset Management  —  Northmill Bank, the Sweden-based challenger that has around 200,000 customers across three European countries, has raised around $30 million in new funding.  —  Leading the round is M2 Asset Management …
Amy Lewin / Sifted:
Dublin-based food ordering service Flipdish raises €40M round from Tiger Global Management  —  Pre-Covid, says McCarthy, lots of restaurants relied on platforms like Deliveroo for a small portion of orders, but when everything moved online, “they realised they weren't making a whole load …
Kevin McLaughlin / The Information:
Source: Amazon Connect, its cloud call center software, had $175M in sales during 2020, up ~150% YoY, and the company expects $1B annual sales by 2022  —  A few years ago, Amazon released a cloud service that used some of the same software smarts behind Alexa—its voice assistant …
Tweets: @jerrycap
Elena Schneider / Politico:
Political campaigns are shifting marketing dollars after ad bans by Facebook and Google, with email lists, influencers, and other ad platforms on the rise  —  Renting, swapping and selling campaign email lists to new candidates and causes is a booming political business, but it comes with risks.
Ax Sharma / BleepingComputer:
A researcher was able to breach 35+ companies, including Microsoft and Apple, using a software supply chain attack that leveraged an open source ecosystem flaw  —  A researcher managed to breach over 35 major companies' internal systems, including Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, Netflix …
Justine Calma / The Verge:
Tesla's $1.5B bitcoin purchase conflicts with its environmental goals, as mining the cryptocurrency consumes massive amounts of energy by design  —  Tesla's banking on a cryptocurrency that's inherently inefficient  —  Tesla just gave bitcoin a big boost that's likely to result …

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The Information:
The Information:
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

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