Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And every fresh Facebook content concern — be it about discrimination or hate speech or cultural insensitivity — adds to a damaging flood. The overarching discussion topic at the...

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Should cash-strapped Snapchat sell out? To Netflix?

Snapchat needs a sugar daddy. Its cash reserves dwindling from giant quarterly losses. Poor morale from a battered share price and cost-cutting measures sap momentum. And intense competition from Facebook is preventing rapid growth. With just $1.4 billion in assets remaining at the end of a brutal Q3 2018 and analysts estimating it will lose $1.5 billion in 2019 alone, Snapchat could run out of money well before it’s projected to break even in 2020 or 2021. So what are Snap’s options? A long and lonely road Snap’s big hope is to show a business...

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Expedia acquires Pillow and ApartmentJet to conquer the short-term rental market

To keep up with the rising demand for short-term rentals in U.S. cities and compete with the home-sharing giant Airbnb, travel booking site Expedia has picked up a pair of venture-backed hospitality startups, Pillow and ApartmentJet. Employees of both companies will join Expedia. The company declined to disclose the financial terms of the deals. “Acquiring Pillow and ApartmentJet will help unlock urban growth opportunities that, over time, will contribute to HomeAway’s ability to add an even broader selection of accommodations to its marketplace...

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Twitter suspends accounts linked to mail bomb suspect

At least two Twitter accounts linked to the man suspected of sending explosive devices to more than a dozen prominent Democrats were suspended on Friday afternoon. Facebook moved fairly quickly to suspend Sayoc’s account on the platform, though two Twitter accounts that appeared to belong to Sayoc remained online and accessible until around 2:30 p.m. Pacific. Both accounts featured numerous tweets, many of which contained far right political conspiracy theories, graphic images and specific threats. TechCrunch was able to review the accounts extensively...

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Twitch announces group streaming and a karaoke game for its 1M concurrent viewers

The teens were out in force today in San Jose for the annual TwitchCon game streaming conference. There, Twitch announced that at any given time, 1 million people are watching it (up from 746,000 last year), and it seemed like that many game lovers were at TwitchCon in person to meet some of the half-million web celebs that broadcast each day on the service. Considering Twitch said just 2 million were broadcasting per month in December, the service’s growth is still explosive under Amazon’s ownership. Amongst the major reveals at TwitchCon...

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Snapchat’s new Camera desktop camera app brings AR masks to Twitch, Skype…

Snapchat is launching its first Mac and Windows software that takes over your webcam and brings its augmented reality effects to other video streaming and calling services. Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, and more plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can browse through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer to try on AR face filters. And through its easily-equipped new Twitch extension. streamers can trigger different masks with hotkeys. You can download the Mac and Windows version...

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Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, raises $1.25 billion

It pays to have the most popular game in the world. Epic Games, the creators of the runaway gaming smash hit Fortnite, have raised $1.25 billion in a new round of financing. via GIPHY It’s been 20 years since Epic Games first released its Unreal game development engine in concert with its first person shooter, Unreal. Since then, the company has been releasing free-to-play games as a loss leader to show off what its powerful development toolkit can do. Now, with the insane success of Fortnite, the company has flipped the script. Since Fortnite...

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Facebook takes down more disinformation activity linked to Iran

Facebook has removed 82 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that originated out of Iran. The social networking giant discovered the “inauthentic behavior” a week ago, according to a blog post by the company’s cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher. He said the operation targeted U.S. and U.K. citizens, and “posted about politically charged topics such as race relations, opposition to the President, and immigration.” The company said that although its investigation is in its early stages, it traced...

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China’s Nio invests in LiDAR startup Innovusion

Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital. Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said. Nio Capital is the venture arm of Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla. Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations...

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Chat fiction startup Hooked unveils ‘Dark Matter,’ its first feature-length thriller

Chat fiction startups have been exploring the types of stories that you can tell in the form text message conversations, and now Hooked is taking that exploration one step further with the launch of “Dark Matter.” The company describes this as its first feature-length story. “Dark Matter” tells the story of Tasneem (Taz) Singh, a South Asian American student at Stanford who, after the mysterious death of her twin sister, discovers that she has the ability to interact with the paranormal. The story debuts today on Snapchat, with a new chapter coming...

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Tap, a new startup from Sam Rosen, wants to be the Google of drinking water

MakeSpace founder and former CEO Samuel Rosen is ready to launch his next venture, and it has little or nothing to do with the on-demand economy. This time, Rosen is setting his sights on the world of water. Tap aims to be the world’s first public index and global search engine for drinking water. Plastic water bottles are, in many ways, the scourge of the planet. More than 90 percent of the environmental impact of plastic water bottles happens during manufacture, and the Guardian reported that more than 1 million plastic water bottles were sold...

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More than half of crypto news sites are pay-for-play

In a clever bit of sleuthing by Corin Faife at Breaker, we find that over half of the most popular crypto blogs offer pay-for-play posts including “CEO interviews” that are not labelled as sponsored. Further, many sites offer premium services in which blog writers will repost PR content without a sponsored tag. As I noted a few weeks ago, the crypto industry is awash with money and “journalists” are taking advantage of the naivety and dishonesty of the marketers tasked with pushing another me-too crypto product in front of an unreceptive audience....

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Valentin Stalf to talk about scaling N26 at Disrupt Berlin

We couldn’t put together a conference in Berlin without inviting Valentin Stalf from N26, the co-founder and CEO of one of Europe's most promising startups. A few years ago, few people would have bet on a startup creating a bank from scratch. N26 now has over 1.5 million clients and a ton of funding. N26 originally launched at TechCrunch Disrupt London back in 2014. The company didn't win the Startup Battlefield. At the time, the company was called Number26 and they had 0 client. It was probably too early and too risky for our panel of judges....

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Quizlet hits 50M monthly users

Most students in the U.S. have used or at least heard of Quizlet, the website for creating digital flashcards. The company leverages machine learning to predict in which areas its users need the most help and provides 300 million user-generated study decks, maps, charts and other tools for learning. Roughly eight months after closing a $20 million financing, Quizlet chief executive officer Matthew Glotzbach has disclosed some notable feats for the emerging edtech: it’s reached 50 million monthly active users, up from 30 million one year...

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