Category: Tech news

 Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, has been suspended after allegations of sexual harassment were leveled at him by Isa Hackett, one of the producers of the company’s first series, The Man in the High Castle. A potentially cozy relationship with disgraced Hollywood power broker Harvey Weinstein may also have contributed to his ouster. Read More

 Omnyway announced today that it has raised $12.75 million in Series A funding. Previously known as OmnyPay, Omnyway has built technology around what it calls “augmented digital commerce” — basically, helping retailers stay connected to consumers through their mobile phone during the in-store shopping process. Read More

 Official census forms are an invaluable source for demographic data throughout the country, but for trends that occur on the scale of weeks or months rather than years, they’re a bit lacking. But a new study shows that similar data used by Facebook to target ads could help fill in that blind spot. Read More

 Uber’s Head of Product Daniel Graf thinks that the company’s recent problems may end up being good for the ride-hailing provider’s product development in the long term; in some ways, it’s brought collaboration to the fore in a company structure that previously preferred work being done in relatively discrete silos. Read More

 Next month marks 10 years since the first Kindle debuted. It’s a virtual lifetime in consumer electronics terms, but compared to its mobile brethren, e-readers’ pace of innovation has been glacial. Why has the e-reader stagnated? Read More

 There’s a whisper-quiet rumor making the rounds that Amazon is looking to establish a second headquarters outside of its initial digs in Seattle. It’s even got a name — HQ2 — and, in reality, Amazon’s announcement was a thunderous roar. The big question is: Where? My unabashedly biased answer: St. Louis. Read More

 In a statement, Hyatt said it “has taken steps to strengthen the security of its systems, and customers can feel confident using payment cards at Hyatt hotels worldwide.” Wait, no. That’s from the statement it issued when it was hacked in late 2015. The new statement reads: “we have resolved the issue and implemented additional security measures to strengthen the… Read More

 “I make money from Facebook for my fake content in order to pay Facebook to promote my fake stories,” said Professor Chaos in one of the most brutal and succinct criticisms of the social network to date. The latest episode of South Park pulled no punches in its take-down of the Facebook fake news scandal. Read More

 Magic Leap may be raising as much as $1 billion to fund their vision of a future filled with augmented reality glasses.
A Delaware filing dated Wednesday was provided to us by CB Insights, confirming that the secretive startup has authorized about $1 billion in new funding.  The filing authorizes over 37 million shares of Series D preferred stock at $27 per share. No details on investors yet. Read More

 Tesla is taking a “proactive measure” out of an “abundance of caution,” the company says, in handling an issue with a cable used in the adjusting of second-row seating in a small percent of Model X vehicles. The automaker has issued a voluntary recall, which will apply to 11,000 Model X vehicles it would like to inspect — though it believes only 3 percent of… Read More

 Used-car marketplace CarGurus spiked more than 72 percent during its first day of trading. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company had raised more than $150 million after pricing its IPO at $16. By the end of trading Thursday, shares had gone up more than 72 percent, closing at $27.58. Read More

 Waymo launched a campaign earlier this week alongside partners, including the National Safety Council, to help explain why it believes that its pursuit of autonomous driving is a means to safer roads. Now it’s releasing its first-ever Safety Report, which offers more detail on the procedures and technology it uses to ensure safety in deploying its autonomous fleet. Read More

 Atomic isn’t a household brand, but Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen know it fairly intimately. The two billionaire investors, along with the venture firm Felicis Ventures, were among the earliest investors in the four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup studio, which closed its debut fund with $20 million. Now Atomic is looking to raise five times that much capital for its… Read More

 Some employees at Outcome Health, which provides advertising for pharmaceutical companies in screens within doctors’ offices, allegedly misled advertisers by charging them for ad placements on more video screens than the company had installed, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Read More

 Hell did not freeze over, but something remarkable has happened: Microsoft and AWS announced they are working on a project together. Project Gluon is an open-source, deep learning project for building, deploying and managing machine learning models. AWS and Microsoft compete in the cloud market, yet here they saw it in their mutual best interest to work together instead of competing. Read More