News

https://techcrunch.com

• The EU launches investigation into Apple/Shazam deal

  The European Union has been eyeing Apple’s plans to buy Shazam for a while now. Back in February, it noted that the deal raised some preliminary competitive concerns. Today, the EU announced that it’s all in, launching an “in-depth” investigation into the deal. In a press release issued earlier today, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager notes, “The […]
  
  

• Rapchat raises $1.6 million to help you make and share your def jams

  The first thing to understand about media-sharing app Rapchat is that co-founder Seth Miller is not a rapper and his other co-founder, Pat Gibson, is. Together they created Rapchat, a service for making and sharing raps, and the conjunction of rapper and nerd seems to be really taking off. Since we last looked at the […]
  
  

• You can now give Amazon the keys to your car

  Last week, I was sitting in the office, waiting for an Amazon package to be delivered to my house. Typically, the driver would just leave the package at the door, where anybody could steal it. But this time around, the process was a bit different because the driver arrived, used his phone to unlock the […]
  
  

• Facebook reveals 25 pages of takedown rules for hate speech and more

  Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public’s constant calls for […]
  
  

• Google beats expectations again with $31.15B in revenue

  Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported another pretty solid beat this afternoon for its first quarter as it more or less has continued to keep its business growing substantially — and is growing even faster than it was a year ago today. Google said its revenue grew 26% year-over-year to $31.16 billion in the first quarter […]
  
  

• Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows

  A year ago, I visited the Apple campus in Cupertino to figure out where the hell the new Mac Pro was. I joined a round-table discussion with Apple SVPs and a handful of reporters to get the skinny on what was taking so long. The answer, it turns out, was that Apple had decided to […]
  
  

• Apple has a new iPhone recycling robot named ‘Daisy’

  Meet Daisy. Apple’s latest recycling robot was revealed, not coincidentally, a few days before Earth Day, in a press announcement summing up the company’s recent environmental accomplishments. The new ‘bot is an update to Liam, the recycling robot the company announced back in 2016. Daisy was developed in-house by Apple engineers, using some of Liam’s […]
  
  

• Facebook moves to shrink its legal liabilities under GDPR

  Facebook has another change in the works to respond to the European Union’s beefed up data protection framework — and this one looks intended to shrink its legal liabilities under GDPR, and at scale. Late yesterday Reuters reported on a change incoming to Facebook’s T&Cs that it said will be pushed out next month — meaning […]
  
  

• Ethereum falls after rumors of a powerful mining chip surface

  Rumors of a new ASIC mining rig from Bitmain have driven Ethereum prices well below their one-week high of $585. An ASIC – or Application-specific integrated circuit – in the cryptocurrency world is a chip that designers create for the specific purpose of mining a single currency. Early Bitcoin ASICs, for example, drove adoption up […]
  
  

• Twitter banned Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab from buying ads

  The U.S. government isn’t the only one feeling skittish about Kaspersky Lab. On Friday, the Russian security firm’s founder Eugene Kaspersky confronted Twitter’s apparent ban on advertising from the company, a decision it quietly issued in January. No matter how this situation develops, we won’t be doing any more advertising on Twitter this year. The […]