Category: Tech news

 Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash App — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending cash… Read More

 For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. “It’s a challenge, it’s a goal and there’s certainly reason to believe that it’s possible,” High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Read More

 Sonos One users in Canada can now join their peers south of the border in yelling requests at their connected speakers – a free update issued today enables Amazon Alexa on the Sonos One. The One launched with Alexa support in the U.S., but while the speaker has been available to Canadian buyers since late last year, Alexa voice commands are new with the update. That means Canadians will… Read More

 With Nest’s first smart video doorbell right around the corner, Amazon is busy buying up the competition. After acquiring Blink just two months ago, Amazon is now acquiring Ring, makers of the self-titled Ring doorbell (plus a bunch of other security gear, like solar security cameras, floodlight cams and an in-home alarm system). Read More

 Apple will apparently have every kind of show from anyone with any kind of name working in Hollywood when it launches its updated approach to original video content: The latest original on its slate is a 10-episode, half-hour thriller series order that will be executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, who is also going to direct the first installment (via Variety). The thriller is being written… Read More

A fake story about a Parkland student started on the right, but outrage-tweeting on the left propelled it into the mainstream.

 Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) has introduced legislation to reverse the FCC’s recently published order and reestablish 2015’s net neutrality rules. Although the bill has little chance of reaching the president’s desk, let alone being signed into law, it’s an important step in the long-term battle over how the internet is to be regulated. Read More

 Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same. Sprint’s first 5G networks will go live in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Houston. T-Mobile will fire up 5G in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas first. Read More

 Frances Frei, who joined Uber last June as the company’s first-ever SVP of leadership and strategy, is leaving the company, Recode first reported. Frei’s plan is to remain as an advisor at Uber while moving on to create a new leadership development program for people of color and women at other companies. Read More

 Netflix’s original content ramp is showing no signs of slowing own – in fact, if anything, it’s speeding up. Netflix CFO David Wells says that the streaming company wants to have somewhere around 700 original shows and movies on the service in 2018, using that previously revealed budget of around $8 billion earmarked for original content. Wells, speaking at Morgan… Read More

 Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the convention center. It’s a bit like the smartphone farm system, the company’s hoping it can gin up enough awareness to rise above the din of news from the world’s… Read More

 BMW wants to bring personal assistants to the car, but it doesn’t want to build its own. Instead, it wants to work with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others to bring the best features of their platforms to its cars. “We don’t want Alexa to drive our car. That’s not a good fit,” Dieter May, BMW’s senior VP for digital products and services, told me during… Read More

 Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help 10 to 15 U.S.-based metropolitan news organizations gain more digital subscribers both on and off Facebook. Read More

 The FTC announced today it has settled with PayPal over a complaint about the company’s handling of privacy disclosures in its peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, its lack of disclosure over the speed with which customers could access funds, as well as other issues related to the security and privacy of customer transactions. News that the Federal Trade Commission was looking into… Read More

 Israel-based BrainQ is a new neurotech startup hoping to take on brain-computer interface (BCI) companies Kernel and Neuralink. But it’s early days in this industry, including for BrainQ, which plans to use a non-surgically embedded EEG machine to gather data and help improve outcomes for stroke and spinal cord patients. Read More