Sources: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his scheduled appearance at CES after receiving death threats
The threats have intensified following an FCC vote to repeal net neutrality rules. — Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his scheduled appearance …
Apple says all Mac, iOS devices affected by Meltdown and Spectre; Meltdown defense added in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2; Spectre patch for Safari coming within days
After more than a day of silence, Apple confirmed Thursday that the Mac, iPhone and iPad are all affected by the recently disclosed massive chip vulnerability.
Sources: Jimmy Iovine to leave Apple Music in August, a time believed to coincide with the full vesting of his Apple stock
His planned departure is likely timed to his shares fully vesting, sources tell Billboard. — Look for Jimmy Iovine to leave Apple Music in August.
App Store customers spent $300M worldwide on New Year's Day and spent over $890M in the week starting Dec. 24; developers earned $26.5B in 2017, up 30%+ YoY
New Year's Day Sets Record With $300 Million in Purchases — Cupertino, California — App Store customers around the world …
What to expect at CES 2018: from energy efficient laptops, high-end TVs, and self-driving car tech to AR/VR gaming, robots, and smart home tech
It's January, which means that Las Vegas, or the bit that pretends not to be Las Vegas for tax reasons, will play host to CES.
Sources: Kalanick plans to sell ~29% of his 10% Uber stake, worth about $1.4B, to SoftBank consortium after offering 50%, the maximum allowed for board members
Former Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, who has long boasted that he's never sold any shares …
FCC releases final text of the order overturning net neutrality and statements from Pai, O'Rielly and Carr in support and Rosenworcel and Clyburn in opposition
Tony Romm / Recode :
Intel begins issuing patches to combat Spectre and Meltdown flaws, with plans to release updates for 90% of chips from past five years this week
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat :
Sources: GoPro is cutting 200-300 jobs, largely impacting its Karma drone division
GoPro is in the process of laying off around 200-300 employees this week, TechCrunch has learned from sources close to the company. The hits to the company were largely concentrated in its aerial div...
Spotify's Chief Content Officer Stefan Blom is leaving ahead of its IPO; the company hasn't named a successor yet
Stefan Blom's departure may raise questions. — Spotify's top content executive is leaving, just ahead of the streaming music company's planned public offering.
Amazon announces Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit for wearables and Alexa Premium Voice Development Kit to improve far-field voice reception in third-party hardware
Amazon wants to bring Alexa to more devices than smart speakers, Fire TV and various other consumer electronics for the home, like alarm clocks.
Calls for Twitter to ban President Trump are misguided and counterproductive; the biggest threat posed by @realDonaldTrump is to Trump's own presidency
An evening newsletter about Facebook, social networks, and democracy. Valentin GRAFF / France 24 : From the US to North Korea, the myth of the ‘nuclear button’ Ians / Firstpost : Here's why Twitter di...
Reports suggest India's Aadhaar national ID database was breached, exposing information of ~1.2B Indians and allowing creation of admin accounts by other admins
> https://youtu.be/... Nikhil Pahwa / @nixxin : All those people who have Aadhaar... How often do you make payments authenticated using biometrics? Arun jaitley said in parliament: there were 20 cases...
Spotify says it has 70M paying subscribers, up from 60M in late July 2017, as the company prepares for an IPO
Juli Clover / MacRumors :
Google invests undisclosed sum in Chinese game streaming service Chushou, which has now raised $120M+; Chushou claims ~8M streamers and 250K live streams a day
BEIJING (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google has joined an investment in Chinese live-stream mobile game platform Chushou …
Google Cloud announces Preemptible GPUs in beta at 50% discount, says they can only be used for 24 hours and may be shut down with no more than a 30-sec warning
Google Cloud today announced the launch of preemptible GPUs. Like Google's preemptible VMs (and AWS's comparable spot instances) …
Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen reportedly owns 5.19B XRP tokens and a 17% stake in the company, valued at ~$59.9B after 36,000% increase in XRP value
New York Times: TwoBitIdiot : I See You, $XRP. — I started blogging about bitcoin back in 2013. San Francisco Chronicle : Nintendo Switch's big sales; pay-what-you-like cafe closes; Ripple riches Va...
TiVo's new cloud-based service lets TV providers add recommendations, voice control, more to set-top boxes; the service supports mobile and streaming devices
and cable Cody Lee / iDownloadBlog.com : Tivo to combine cable and streaming content with ‘Next-Gen Platform’ Eric Abent / SlashGear : TiVo in the cloud is a cord-cutter's dream iClarified : Tivo Anno...
Apple quietly joined the Alliance for Open Media, focused on video compression tech, which counts Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook as members
Stephen Shankland / CNET :
Hungary-based AImotive raises $38M Series C for its autonomous driving tech, led by B Capital Group and Prime Ventures with Cisco, Samsung, Bosch participating
Europe's AImotive has raised $38 million in a third round of funding for its software for autonomous cars.
Mark Zuckerberg says his 2018 personal challenge will be addressing issues like interference by nation states, abuse, quality of time spent on platform
Johnson Controls unveils $319 Cortana-powered thermostat called GLAS, which runs Windows 10 IoT Core; available now for preorder, ships in March
Tom Warren / The Verge :
Instagram confirms it's testing a feature that allows cross-posting of Stories to WhatsApp as a Status
MoneyLion, which originates loans and personalized advice based on spending to people who connect their bank account data, raises $42M Series B
Wealthfront raises $75M led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Benchmark, Greylock, Index Ventures, more, and says it has $9B+ under management
Canalys predicts worldwide smart speakers sales will reach 56.3M in 2018, with 38.4M sales in the US, outpacing AR, VR, and wearables
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch :
Alibaba, Tencent, and investors such as SoftBank and Naspers have emerged as the biggest allies of India's most-valued internet companies in recent years
Madhav Chanchani / The Economic Times : Tweets: @vtoubiana Tweets: Vincent Toubiana / @vtoubiana : “Each of India's four most-valued internet companies are more than 40% owned by Chinese corporations...
Fitbit invests $6M in Sano, a company that makes a coin-sized patch to track blood sugar; this is Fitbit's first startup investment
Christina Farr / CNBC :
Gaming hardware company Mad Catz, bought by a Chinese firm after March 2017 bankruptcy, says it will start making products again
White House says it has banned guests and employees from using personal cell phones in the West Wing, will only allow use of government-issued devices
WordPress host WP Engine raises $250M from Silver Lake to fund international expansion, says it has $100M in annual revenue and 75K users, up 30% YoY
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Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.