Lyft Gets $500 Million in New Funding as Its Rival Uber Wobbles - The New York Times

Probably lots of start-ups changing "The Uber of <target domain>" pitches these days

"Lyft is being bolstered by the woes at Uber, which has been dealing with scandals involving the company’s workplace culture and aggressive leadership team. A grass-roots movement to boycott Uber has sprung up around the country, with the hashtag #deleteuber spreading quickly across Twitter related to the company’s shortcomings. 

Lyft has been trying to capitalize on the stumbles of its opponent. The company has shown investors a recent surge in ride requests, buoyed by Uber’s negative publicity. It has also presented itself as a kinder alternative to Uber."

Lyft Gets $500 Million in New Funding as Its Rival Uber Wobbles - The New York Times

The full extent of Windows 10's data sharing is slightly alarming (Engadget)

Also see Microsoft finally reveals what data Windows 10 really collects (The Verge)

"Microsoft has repeatedly sworn that Windows 10 doesn't violate your privacy, but you've had to take its word on that when it hasn't outlined exactly what data it shares from your PC. At last, though, it's coming clean -- the company has started publishing a complete list of the diagnostic info it collects at the Basic level, and has posted a thorough summary of what it obtains at the Full level. While Microsoft already gave you a good sense of what to expect if you went with Full, the summary is much more thorough... and a little concerning given that it's the default level with a new Windows 10 installation.

For example, Windows collects a surprising amount of info about your media playback. It's not tracking what you're playing, but it will check how long you spent reading a Windows Store book, and will scoop up internet links if there's an error with online video. And when Microsoft says it looks at "browsing history and search terms," we now know just what it means -- that includes text you type in the address bar and Cortana searches. When you search for local files, Windows will collect the kind of search you performed, the number of items your query turned up and the name of the app you use to open a file from that search. It looks like Microsoft is steering clear of collecting particularly sensitive info, but there are incentives to choose Basic if you're privacy-minded."

The full extent of Windows 10's data sharing is slightly alarming

Oath isn’t just a terrible name — it’s going to be a nightmare ad-tracking machine - The Verge

Disconcerting developments for all Verizon customers; on a related note, see Here’s How to Protect Your Privacy From Your Internet Service Provider (EFF)

"This is everything Verizon and AOL have been working toward over the past few years. Like every other broadband provider, Verizon wants to extract more revenue from its network by increasingly owning the media that travels over it.

But unlike AT&T (which bought DirecTV and is in the process of buying Time Warner) or Comcast (which bought NBCUniversal and invested in companies like BuzzFeed and our own Vox Media), Verizon’s plan is far more lowbrow: it’s going to churn out as much cheap content as it can from AOL and Yahoo and tell advertisers it can do a better job of delivering eyeballs because it has better ad-tracking capabilities than Google and Facebook.

What Verizon wants, more than anything, is a piece of Google’s ad business."

Oath isn’t just a terrible name — it’s going to be a nightmare ad-tracking machine - The Verge

10 important things to know before signing up for YouTube TV - The Verge

Check the full post for some useful tips; also see YouTube TV Goes Live in Google’s Biggest Swipe at Comcast Yet (Wired)

"YouTube TV, Google’s internet TV subscription service, launches today. Ben Popper’s got a big look at the app for you, covering how it works and what channels you get. It sounds promising, and unlimited DVR powers (plus having those recordings saved for up to nine months) is awesome.

But I’m a nerd who occasionally spends time reading through FAQs and YouTube’s help pages to find the stuff that’s not include in flashy advertising. What I’ve found so far might be helpful in your decision on whether or not to give YouTube TV a (free) try."

10 important things to know before signing up for YouTube TV - The Verge

Facebook tests Workplace Standard (CNBC)

Also see Why Facebook is giving Workplace away for free (CIO)

"Facebook is introducing a free version of Workplace, its social networking tool for workers to chat and collaborate.

"We're making Workplace work for more companies, so it's a pretty big step for us," Facebook product manager Simon Cross told CNBC.

The new product — which is still being tested and so not widely available — will look and feel the same to users as the paid version, but it's self-serve and will not offer companies the administrative and analytical tools available to paying subscribers."

Facebook tests Workplace Standard

Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space - The New York Times

That funding strategy could be good for another 75 years or so...

"Standing against the backdrop of his New Shepard rocket booster and a full-scale mock capsule for carrying humans into space, Jeff Bezos revealed on Wednesday that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.

Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, showed off the reusable rocket booster and the mock-up of the capsule that will take people up for panoramic views back down at earth, during a symposium here.

Mr. Bezos, who hopes to build Blue Origin into a commercial and tourist venture, also disclosed that it would cost about $2.5 billion to develop an even bigger rocket, New Glenn, capable of lifting satellites and, eventually, people into orbit."

Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space - The New York Times

Google's TPU Chip Helped It Avoid Building Dozens of New Data Centers | WIRED

It'll be interesting to see Microsoft's response, after their FPGA comments at Ignite 2016 and elsewhere (e.g., in this Sept 2016 Wired article...)

"Jouppi joined Google in late 2013 to work on what became the TPU, after serving as a hardware researcher at places like HP and DEC, a kind of breeding ground for many of Google’s top hardware designers. He says the company considered moving its neural networks onto FPGAs, the kind of programmable chip that Microsoft uses. That route wouldn’t have taken as long, and the adaptability of FPGAs means the company could reprogram the chips for other tasks as needed. But tests indicated that these chips wouldn’t provide the necessary speed boost. “There’s a lot overhead with programmable chips,” he explains. “Our analysis showed that an FPGA wouldn’t be any faster than a GPU.”

In the end, the team settled on an ASIC, a chip built from the ground up for a particular task. According to Jouppi, because Google designed the chip specifically for neural nets, it can run them 15 to 30 times faster than general purpose chips built with similar manufacturing techniques. That said, the chip is suited to any breed of neural network—at least as they exist today—including everything from the convolutional neural networks used in image recognition to the long-short-term-memory network used to recognize voice commands. “It’s not wired to one model,” he says."

Google's TPU Chip Helped It Avoid Building Dozens of New Data Centers | WIRED

Feedly’s reader app now caters to knowledge workers with launch of boards, notes & annotations | TechCrunch

Check the full article for an overview of new Feedly features

"What’s interesting about Feedly’s development over the years is that it demonstrates the potential that Google squandered by shuttering its own RSS Reader, instead of realizing how it could have been modernized to become a paid toolset for researchers, knowledge workers, and businesses. It also ties in nicely with the growing interest in email newsletters as a way to reach an audience.

Boards, Notes, and Highlights will also work on any device including the web and mobile, via the Feedly app. Basic accounts can only create up to 3 private Boards. For unlimited boards, you’ll need to upgrade to Pro ($5/mo.) or Teams ($18/mo. per user)."

Feedly’s reader app now caters to knowledge workers with launch of boards, notes & annotations | TechCrunch

The Online Ad Industry Is Undergoing Self-Reflection. That’s Good News. - The New York Times

On a related note, see Google Training Ad Placement Computers to Be Offended (NYT)

"The best way to think of this is as a supply-chain problem. Big, complicated industries that sell commodity goods often get tripped up on sourcing: you don’t know who made your clothes, whether your diamonds are funding war or whether your shrimp may be complicit in slavery. The way to solve these externalities is through investigation and better documentation — to follow the money deep in the supply chain, to figure out who’s ultimately getting it.

Something like that is now happening in the programmatic ad industry. It’s rare to talk to someone in advertising who will tell you that things are working perfectly. They admit that there are holes in the system: Computers aren’t yet great at figuring out what’s racist and what’s not, or what’s fake news and what isn’t.

But they’re getting better, and the more activists push platforms like YouTube on this issue, the more incentive the platforms have to keep improving things."

The Online Ad Industry Is Undergoing Self-Reflection. That’s Good News. - The New York Times

Facebook Adds Wifi Hotspots to Sustain African Growth - Bloomberg

Later in the article: "Facebook’s attempt to connect rural Africans last year was scuppered by an exploding SpaceX rocket. While the loss was disappointing, Facebook is using a combination of land-based and satellite technologies to roll out wifi hotspots and is evaluating other options as they become available, the executive said."

"Facebook Inc. has increased the number of its African users to 170 million and plans to expand further by adding wifi hotspots and laying fiber-optic cables in a bid to spread its reach outside of developed markets.

The figure is 42 percent higher than when the U.S. social network first opened an African office in 2015, Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Tuesday. The rollout of wifi in Nigeria and Kenya will be done via partnerships with international wireless carriers such as Emirates Telecommunications Group Co., known as Etisalat, and closely held Surf, she said."

Facebook Adds Wifi Hotspots to Sustain African Growth - Bloomberg

Samsung’s TV and watch OS is reportedly full of security holes - The Verge

Room for improvement

"Tizen runs on around 30 million TVs, and Samsung plans to have 10 million phones running the software by the end of the year. Samsung has attempted to move to Tizen on its devices as a way to loosen its reliance on Google’s Android software, but it’s clear Tizen isn’t secure and ready for popular devices like the company’s Galaxy range of handsets. 

Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman claims Samsung’s open-source Tizen operating system “may be the worst code I've ever seen,” noting in an interview with Motherboard that “you can see that nobody with any understanding of security looked at this code or wrote it. It's like taking an undergraduate and letting him program your software.""

Samsung’s TV and watch OS is reportedly full of security holes - The Verge

Apple working on ‘completely rethought' Mac Pro and pro display - The Verge

Tbd when the current Mac Pro will become a collector's item; also see The Mac Pro Lives (Daring Fireball)

"Apple is finally talking about its plans to refresh its Mac Pro. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Apple’s Phil Schiller claims the company is “completely rethinking the Mac Pro” after its last refresh back in 2013. While Apple is currently building a new Mac Pro, it won’t arrive this year. Schiller says Apple is hard at work on a new Mac Pro system with a separate pro display, but it's not clear exactly when either will arrive. The team responsible for both have been told to take their time on designing the next Mac Pro, to avoid some of the design constraints of the existing model.

“We designed ourselves into a bit of a corner,” admits Apple’s Craig Federighi, who looks after software engineering and regularly appears on stage at Apple events to demonstrate OS improvements. “We wanted to do something bold and different. What we didn’t appreciate completely at the time was how we had so tailored that design to a specific vision that in the future we would find ourselves a bit boxed in — into a circular shape.”"

Apple working on ‘completely rethought' Mac Pro and pro display - The Verge

Uber is '5,000 times worse than Google's Waymo at self-driving cars' | Technology | The Guardian

Later in the article: "“If we are not tied for first” to develop the technology, Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick said last year, “then the person who is in first, or the entity that’s in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber’s, then Uber is no longer a thing.”"

"According to driving statistics published by California, Uber is the worst of six major self-driving car companies testing its vehicles in the state.

The minicab firm experienced a “disengagement” – when the automated system forces the human driver/passenger to take over control of the vehicle – once every mile driven, with a total of 20,354 miles clocked up before it was banned from testing in the state.

By contrast, at the top of the table was Waymo, Google’s sibling company, with one disengagement every 5,128 miles driven, and more than half a million miles driven in the last 12 months."

Uber is '5,000 times worse than Google's Waymo at self-driving cars' | Technology | The Guardian

Tim Berners-Lee: 'Privacy is not a partisan thing' | Technology | The Guardian

Check the full article for a wide-ranging interview

"Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, was declared recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s AM Turing award on Tuesday.

In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee discussed the “appalling” attitude of Republican politicians seeking to roll back net neutrality protections, how his own legacy intersects with the great Alan Turing’s, and the astonishing progress of the web since he launched the very first website on 1 August 1991."

Tim Berners-Lee: 'Privacy is not a partisan thing' | Technology | The Guardian

Amazon launches Amazon Cash, a way to shop its site without a bank card | TechCrunch

Evidently not a late April Fool's initiative

"Like PayPal, Amazon Cash is also meant to appeal to the same general demographic who may not yet be shopping online – those who get paid in cash, don’t have a bank account or debit card, and who don’t use credit cards. This “cash customer” (the unbanked or “underbanked) accounts for around 27 percent of consumers, said a 2015 report from the FDIC.

While they may have money to spend online at times, there isn’t an easy way to do so. Until today, they would have to buy an Amazon Gift Card in a designated amount or add cash to prepaid payment cards, to be used at checkout.

More broadly, the service could appeal to anyone who just wants to deposit some cash in their Amazon.com account, without hassle."

Amazon launches Amazon Cash, a way to shop its site without a bank card | TechCrunch

Verizon Announces New Name Brand for AOL and Yahoo: Oath - The New York Times

Another branding coup

"Oath? Oof.

That was largely the reaction on Monday to the news that Verizon plans to house two giants of the early days of the internet, AOL and Yahoo, under the new name Oath.

Tim Armstrong, the head of Verizon’s AOL division, announced Oath in a Twitter post on Monday afternoon: “Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.”"

Verizon Announces New Name Brand for AOL and Yahoo: Oath - The New York Times

Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain | WIRED

A different kind of data mining

"The immediate aim of Kernel and, apparently, Neurolink is to work with devices along the same lines. Such devices would not only send signals to the brain as a means of treatment, but also gather data about the nature of these maladies. As Johnson explains, those devices could also help gather far more data about how the brain works in general—and ultimately, could feed all sorts of other neuroscience research. “If you have much higher quality neural data from more regions of the brain, it will inform all sorts of other possibilities,” Johnson says. “We just haven’t had the right tools to acquire these datasets.”

As Eagleman explains, this could not just fix unhealthy brains, but get more out of healthy ones too. “In these situations where you have reasons to open the head anyway,” he says, “then you can look for ways of improving the brain.”"

Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain | WIRED

Facebook introduces personal fundraising tools, donate buttons in Facebook Live for Pages | TechCrunch

Also see Facebook's fundraisers now help you raise money for yourself and friends (Mashable)

"Facebook today announced it’s expanding its set of online fundraising tools to include its own GoFundMe competitor, with the added support for personal online fundraisers, starting first in the U.S. The new tool will allow Facebook users to raise money for personal crises and other campaigns — like school or medical expenses, emergency situations, funerals and more. In addition, the company is adding the ability for Facebook Pages to add a “donate” button to their live broadcasts on the network.

This is not the first time Facebook has stepped into the fundraising space. In 2015, it debuted a Kickstarter-like feature aimed at nonprofits that allowed them to set up a campaign page, explain their goals and collect cash. Last year, the company expanded its fundraising tools to allow individuals to collect funds on behalf of nonprofit organizations, as well."

Facebook introduces personal fundraising tools, donate buttons in Facebook Live for Pages | TechCrunch

Amazon and Walmart are in an all-out price war that is terrifying America’s biggest brands - Recode

Also see Amazon Wants Cheerios, Oreos and Other Brands to Bypass Wal-Mart (Bloomberg)

"Walmart wants to have the lowest price on 80 percent of its sales, according to a presentation the company made at the summit, which Recode reviewed.

To accomplish that, the brands that sell their goods through Walmart would have to cut their wholesale prices or make other cost adjustments to shave at least 15 percent off. In some cases, vendors say they would lose money on each sale if they met Walmart’s demands.

Brands that agree to play ball with Walmart could expect better distribution and more strategic help from the giant retailer. And to those that didn’t? Walmart said it would limit their distribution and create its own branded products to directly challenge its own suppliers."

Amazon and Walmart are in an all-out price war that is terrifying America’s biggest brands - Recode

Ford Hires 400 BlackBerry Employees for Connected Cars Work - Bloomberg

In other northern news, see Google bets on AI in Canada with Google Brain Toronto and Vector Institute investment (TechCrunch)

"Ford Motor Co. agreed to hire 400 employees from BlackBerry Ltd. to help develop wireless technology at the automaker, deepening an ongoing partnership between the two companies involving in-car connectivity.

The shift doubles the number of connected-car engineers at Ford and will help the U.S. company build its own wireless products in-house, said BlackBerry spokeswoman Sarah McKinney. At the same time, it helps the Canadian tech company pare costs as it completes a shift to selling software instead of phones.

“The move enables us to focus all our resources on the new strategy,” McKinney said."

Ford Hires 400 BlackBerry Employees for Connected Cars Work - Bloomberg