Network Support Blog

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch: Tia Health, the developer of a network of digital wellness apps, clinics, and telehealth services focused on women's health, raises $24M Series A  —  Tia Health, the developer of a network of digital wellness apps, clinics and telehealth services designed to treat women's health holistically … https://bit.ly/3gI2csE

Louise Matsakis / Wired: Some Walmart staff claim AI-based tech used in stores to prevent shoplifting misidentifies innocuous behavior as theft and often fails to flag actual stealing  —  The retailer denies there is any widespread issue with the software, but a group expressed frustration—and public health concerns. https://bit.ly/2XQj3k7

Kirsten Grind / Wall Street Journal: COVID-19 Technology Task Force, an effort to let big tech companies assist White House's pandemic response, beset by disagreements over privacy and other issues  —  Effort to join Silicon Valley tech giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon with the White House to fight the coronavirus is faltering https://bit.ly/300Xtfs

Max Chafkin / Bloomberg: US to join Global Partnership on AI, set up to counter China's influence in development of AI technologies, becoming the last of the G-7 countries to sign on  —  The U.S. plans to join an international organization that will advise companies and governments on the responsible development … https://bit.ly/3eDAlYP

The Hacker News: Apple paid a researcher $100K for reporting a flaw in “Sign in with Apple” in April that could have let attackers hijack any user's account on third-party apps  —  Apple recently paid Indian vulnerability researcher Bhavuk Jain a huge $100,000 bug bounty for reporting … https://bit.ly/2BjaJSz

Brandon Vigliarolo / TechRepublic: Stack Overflow's annual survey, taken by 65K+ developers: Rust remains most loved language at 86.1%, followed by TypeScript at 67.1%, Python dropped to third  —  Stack Overflow's 2020 survey of developers provides a snapshot of the programming community that can be useful in building hiring strategies … https://bit.ly/3gN7aV4

Bloomberg: Analysis of Layoffs.fyi data: tech companies have cut over 40,000 jobs during the pandemic, led by the travel and transportation sector with 14,250 layoffs  —  Layoffs have slammed tech companies both large and small since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in mid-March. https://bit.ly/2TTTZaV

Margaret Harding McGill / Axios: Sen. Ted Cruz calls for criminal investigation of Twitter, alleging it is violating US sanctions against Iran by letting Iranian leaders maintain accounts  —  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in a letter Friday to the Justice and Treasury departments, is calling for a criminal investigation of Twitter … https://bit.ly/2yKfYK0

Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today: Zynn, a TikTok clone from ByteDance Chinese rival Kuaishou, pays users to watch videos and has now hit the top of the US iOS App Store following its May debut  —  There's a new, Chinese-owned, short-form video app on the rise, with TikTok-like Zynn hitting the top of the US App Store charts this week. https://bit.ly/2TRcGfz

Nick Statt / The Verge: ACLU sues Clearview AI in Illinois alleging the facial recognition startup violated residents' privacy by scraping, selling their online photos without consent  —  Alleging Clearview violated a well-known Illinois biometric privacy law  —  The American Civil Liberties Union … https://bit.ly/3dhYVy0

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Salesforce Q1: revenue of $4.87B, up 30% YoY, subscription and support revenue $4.58B, up 31% YoY, Q2 guidance lower than expected; stock down ~4% after hours  —  - Salesforce's guidance for the full fiscal year was softer than what analysts had expected.  — The company announced the departure of co-CEO Keith Block in the quarter. https://bit.ly/36HlNEs

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land: Google announces Google Page Experience, an algorithm ranking pages based on user experience, with factors like page speed and HTTPS, arriving in 2021 or later  —  This new ranking factor won't be live until 2021, at the earliest.  Here is what you need to know. https://bit.ly/2ZLzf8V

Rita Liao / TechCrunch: JD.com and Kuaishou, a Chinese livestreaming platform with 300M+ DAUs, announce partnership, allowing users to directly purchase JD products within Kuaishou app  —  JD.com, the online retailer that is Alibaba's long-time nemesis, announced Wednesday a strategic partnership with Kuaishou … https://bit.ly/2XCHPUT

Stephanie Condon / ZDNet: Box beats expectations with Q1 revenue of $183.6M, up 13% YoY, and billings of $128.1M, up 8% YoY, expects “softness” in revenue from small businesses  —  While the company expects enterprise customers to continue increasing their adoption of Box services, it does anticipate some softness from small business customers. https://bit.ly/2M2gTIQ

Travis M. Andrews / Washington Post: Profile of Charli D'Amelio, a 16-year-old from Connecticut who's become TikTok's biggest star after joining in 2019, thanks to a fun and relatable persona  —  The young people of Ohio weren't physically distancing, and Gov. Mike DeWine needed to do something.  —  “Young people think they're pretty invincible. https://bit.ly/2ZIY1Xe

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch: Israel-based D-ID, which is working on tech to make faces unrecognizable to face recognition software, raises $13.5M led by AXA Ventures  —  If only Facebook had been using the kind of technology that TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus D-ID was pitching, it could have avoided exposing … https://bit.ly/2X57NRW

Wall Street Journal: Sources: major advertisers on Quibi, including PepsiCo and Walmart, are seeking to defer payments as Quibi aims to cut costs after last month's lackluster debut  —  Some major advertisers have asked to defer their payments or revise their billing schedules  —  Streaming service Quibi … https://bit.ly/2TKUhku

Taylor Soper / GeekWire: DefinedCrowd raises $50.5M Series B to help companies including Mastercard, BMW, others improve their AI services, says revenue spiked more than 650% in 2019  —  Artificial intelligence services require mountains of reliable data to reach their full potential. https://bit.ly/2X2L7Sb

Zheping Huang / Bloomberg: Chinese food delivery service Meituan Dianping beats estimates with sales of $2.4B, net loss of $221M; Meituan stock rose 9.7%, taking its market cap to $100B+  —  - CEO Wang Xing warns of persistent pressure over 2020  — Hotel and travel services hit by virus fears, travel curbs https://bit.ly/36viPTv

Ben Smith / New York Times: How services like Cameo and Substack have opened up new ways for prominent media figures and journalists to make a living from smaller audiences  —  With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize individuality.” https://bit.ly/36tLQz7

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch: VergeSense, which offers AI-powered workplace sensors for occupancy tracking, raises $9M led by Allegion Ventures, as offices restructure for social distancing  —  Facilities management looks to be having a bit of a moment, amid the coronavirus pandemic.  —  VergeSense, a US startup … https://bit.ly/3ddYDrK

Mary-Ann Russon / BBC: The UK's National Cyber Security Centre is conducting a new review into the impact of allowing Huawei telecom equipment to be used in British 5G networks  —  The UK government is conducting a new review into the impact of allowing Huawei telecoms equipment to be used in British 5G networks. https://bit.ly/3dcJdo1

Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch: MasterClass, which offers celebrity-taught online classes for a $180 annual subscription, raises $100M Series E, at a reported valuation of $800M  —  MasterClass, a startup that sells celebrity-taught classes to people, has raised $100 million in a Series E round. https://bit.ly/2Xxg54e

Lily Hay Newman / Wired: Jailbreaking team Unc0ver has released a tool that will jailbreak most versions of iOS from 11 to 13.5; the tool makes use of a 0-day flaw in the iOS kernel  —  The Unc0ver tool works on all versions of iOS from 11 to 13.5, the current release.  —  Over the years, Apple has made it prohibitively difficult … https://bit.ly/2ZxF61K

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: JioMart rolls out its online grocery delivery service, including directly sourced farm produce, in dozens of cities in India, after a month of testing in Mumbai  —  The rationale behind the deluge of dollars flooding into billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Platforms is beginning to become … https://bit.ly/2A9jX31

Kyle Bradshaw / 9to5Google: An internal build of Google Messages 6.2 shows end-to-end encryption could be coming soon to RCS messages  —  Today, the folks at APKMirror got ahold of an internal “dogfood” build of Google Messages version 6.2.  Here, “dogfood” is used in the sense of the phrase “eat your own dog food,” … https://bit.ly/2zhlODb

Kai-Fu Lee / Wired: AI has played a useful but fragmented role in the global fight against COVID-19, from predicting outbreaks to aiding diagnosis and drug discovery efforts  —  Disease diagnosis, drug discovery, robot delivery—artificial intelligence is already powering change in the pandemic's wake. https://bit.ly/2zfIR1a

Reuters: US Commerce Dept. adds 7 Chinese tech companies to economic blacklist for complicity in human rights violations, including Softbank-backed CloudMinds  —  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Friday it would add 33 Chinese firms and institutions to an economic blacklist … https://bit.ly/2LOebGS

Reuters: Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveils plans targeting gross savings of at least $1B by 2022, including layoffs and temporary pay cuts of 25% for top executives  —  (Reuters) - Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.N) on Thursday unveiled a plan targeting gross savings of at least $1 billion by 2022 … https://bit.ly/2AU1B6K

George Anadiotis / ZDNet: Comparing Nvidia's new A100 Ampere AI chip with competition from Intel and GraphCore in terms of performance, economics, and software  —  Now that the dust from Nvidia's unveiling of its new Ampere AI chip has settled, let's take a look at the AI chip market behind the scenes and away from the spotlight https://bit.ly/3bRUJDL

Sarah Holder / CityLab: Nextdoor is building close ties with local law enforcement and public officials in the US, worrying some civil rights advocates  —  The hyper-local social media platform Nextdoor is winning over local law enforcement and other government officials in the U.S., alarming civil rights advocates. https://bit.ly/2Zv9klR

Jon Swartz / MarketWatch: HPE reports Q2 revenue of $6.01B, down 16% YoY, and a loss of $821M, expects to save $1B in future costs with “changes in workforce”; stock down ~5% after-hours  —  Stock falls 5% in after-hours trading, Neri introduces three-year plan to cut $1 billion in costs  —  Referenced Symbols https://bit.ly/3d54RtW

Casey Newton / The Verge: Zuckerberg: Facebook could get to about half of staff working remotely permanently in 5-10 years and will be the “most forward-leaning company on remote work”  —  In January, as reports about the spread of a novel coronavirus emerged from China, Mark Zuckerberg began to prepare for a potential pandemic. https://bit.ly/2XiqaBF

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: NYT's proprietary ads platform plan has been misread as protecting user data more than Facebook and Google do, yet NYT will still sell targeted ads using data  —  from the now-they're-doing-the-same-thing-as- facebook dept  —  One of the most frustrating aspects of discussing the internet … https://bit.ly/36gmBA6

Ron Miller / TechCrunch: Google Cloud says it's made a deal with the DoD's Defense Innovation Unit, which will use Google Cloud's Anthos for its multi-cloud management solution  —  Google dropped out of the Pentagon's JEDI cloud contract battle fairly early in the game, citing it was in conflict with its “AI principals.” https://bit.ly/2ZmMJb7

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: Signal launches profile PINs and says it's the first step towards moving away from using phone numbers as profile IDs  —  Signal launches profile PINs, the first step in supporting Signal user accounts that are not tied to phone numbers.  —  Secure instant messaging app Signal launched … https://bit.ly/2TmQbP8

Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia: Chinese fitness app Keep raises $80M Series E at a $1B valuation led by Jeneration Capital Management  —  Chinese fitness app Keep has become the country's first sports tech startup to achieve a $1 billion valuation after raising an $80 million Series E funding round led … https://bit.ly/36fsu0o

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Facebook details the AI behind its shopping experiences, accounting for consumer traits like body type, skin tone, location, socioeconomic class, age, and poses  —  Facebook today announced improvements to the shopping experiences across its platform, including Facebook Shops … https://bit.ly/2zeuWIn

Helene Fouquet / Bloomberg: After its truce with French unions, Amazon will keep its extra €2/hour offer through May and says warehouse workers will return with increased sanitary measures  —  - Workers return to warehouses with masks, temperature checks  — Company will be released from ban on ‘non-essential’ items https://bit.ly/3g73Van

Bloomberg: A Facebook conducted survey of 86K small business owners and employees shows 31% of SMBs have stopped operating and 11% more expect to fail in next 3 months  —  - April survey shows another 11% expect to fail within 3 months  — Half don't have plans to rehire employees they had to cut https://bit.ly/2X6hpKY

Brooks Barnes / New York Times: Disney's top streaming exec, Kevin Mayer, resigns to become CEO of TikTok and COO of parent company ByteDance; Disney names Rebecca Campbell as his successor  —  Kevin Mayer will lead the Chinese-owned app for making and sharing short videos, which has exploded in popularity during the pandemic. https://bit.ly/2TgnD9Y

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: GO1, an online service for professional training courses with over 3,000 enterprise customers, raises $40M Series C from Microsoft, Salesforce, and others  —  With a large proportion of knowledge workers doing now doing their jobs from home, the need for tools to help them feel connected … https://bit.ly/3dRgmFs

Bloomberg: Chinese state-backed funds invest $2.25B in chip factory of local company Semiconductor Manufacturing International, amid US move to limit chips sold to Huawei  —  - State-backed funds invest in Semiconductor Manufacturing plant  — China is aiming to increase monthly capacity by 5 times https://bit.ly/2zHxE9j

South China Morning Post: While the pandemic has boosted recruitment at Chinese tech companies in some sectors, many smaller online companies have experienced job cuts and hiring freezes  —  In the first quarter of 2020, the number of Chinese recruitment postings across all industries fell 22.6 per cent compared … https://bit.ly/2Tf1UiW

Martin Giles / Forbes: Gartner survey of IT leaders forecasts 8% YoY decline in global IT spending to $3.46T in 2020, vs. $3.76T in 2019, as budgets are slashed due to the pandemic  —  Another week brings another clear sign that CIOs are making deep budget cuts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. https://bit.ly/3cJeezE

Aditi Shrivastava / The Economic Times: Internal email: Indian food delivery startup Zomato to layoff 520 employees, or 13% of its workforce, and temporarily cut salaries of the rest  —  Employees being let go will receive half their salaries and health insurance for six months  —  Food delivery platform Zomato will layoff 520 employees … https://bit.ly/2LA5IqC

Alexis Ong / Wired: How members of the gaming community in Romania and Singapore helped lay the foundation for robust high-speed broadband networks in those countries  —  Romania and Singapore don't seem to have much in common, but they both owe their robust broadband in part to videogame fanatics seeking better connections. https://bit.ly/366mPtu

Marguerite Reardon / CNET: The Pentagon argues that a proposal from satellite company Ligado to meld satellite spectrum with a terrestrial 5G IoT network would interfere with GPS signals  —  Even as major players like Verizon and AT&T are rushing to roll out 5G, a little-known company is looking to build … https://bit.ly/2zFGmVA

Stratechery: Forcing Facebook and Google to pay for news could lead to uncritical reporting on tech; better approaches would tackle roots of media woes, including ad markets  —  Exponent — as promised! — will be back tomorrow, talking about podcasting, Spotify, and working from home.  —  On to the update: https://bit.ly/2Lug5wd

Christian Lowe / Reuters: Amazon says it is aiming to gradually reopen its French warehouses starting May 19 as it finalizes an agreement with unions and work councils  —  PARIS (Reuters) - Amazon said on Friday it is aiming to gradually reopen its French warehouses from May 19 as the U.S. e-commerce giant is finalizing … https://bit.ly/2Z7pG3P

Axios: Facebook to buy Giphy, keep its branding, integrate with Instagram; sources say the deal is worth ~$400M, while Giphy was valued at ~$600M in its latest round  —  Facebook has agreed to buy Giphy, the popular platform of sharable animated images, Axios has learned from multiple sources. https://bit.ly/361K8oc

Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review: As pandemic-related budget cuts come to call centers, organizations turn to chatbots like IBM's Watson to filter calls, reducing the need for human operators  —  Covid-19 is accelerating job losses in an industry that was already automating work at a rapid pace.  —  Brian Pokorny had heard of AI systems for call centers before. https://bit.ly/35ZNich

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: UK-based ANNA, a mobile-first banking, tax accounting, and financial service assistant aimed at SMBs, raises $21M from ABHH Group to expand into Europe  —  Small and medium businesses and sole-traders account for the vast majority of businesses globally, 99.9% of all enterprises in the UK alone. https://bit.ly/2WuEkAC