Facebook bans Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Louis Farrakhan, and others from Facebook and Instagram, citing dangerous individuals and orgs policy
Milo Yiannopoulos and Louis Farrakhan have been banned as well — Facebook today removed Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones …
Microsoft announces Azure SQL Database Edge, which will run on compute-constrained devices, and new AI, mixed reality, and IoT capabilities powered by Azure
A couple days ahead of Build 2019, Microsoft is showcasing some new AI, MR, IoT and blockchain capabilities powered by Azure …
Report: Facebook seeks ~$1B from financial firms and e-commerce sites to back its stablecoin as it readies its payments network and rewards system for users
- Facebook is planning to launch a full payments network (rather than just remittances) and in discussions with payment networks Visa … Source: Wall Street Journal .
Microsoft launches Azure Blockchain Service, a fully managed service meant to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
YouTube says it will make all of its original content free this fall in a strategy that its CBO says is in opposition to what other media companies are doing
- YouTube Renews Kevin Hart Comedy Series, Sets Maluma and Paris Hilton Documentaries, Lollapalooza Live-Streaming Deal
The Strong National Museum of Play announces Microsoft's Solitaire, first introduced with Windows 3.0 in 1990, will be inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame
The games in the 2019 class of The Strong's World Video Game Hall of Fame span the spectrum of gaming, with the brutality …
Spotify spotted testing “Your Daily Drive,” a personalized playlist featuring short podcast episodes mixed in with curated music, to positive initial reactions
Spotify was recently spotted testing a new personalized playlist — the first one to mix music and podcasts, customized to user's musical tastes.
Sources: Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr as it tries to steady Verizon Media Group, which has struggled to meet revenue targets
Wireless giant seeks buyer for social-media service that has lost ground to Facebook — Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking a buyer for blogging website Tumblr …
Document from May 2017 shows ICE used Palantir's software to target and arrest parents and other relatives of unaccompanied minors crossing the US-Mexico border
The data-mining firm Palantir played a key role in federal immigration efforts to target and arrest family members of children crossing …
Sources: SoftBank is considering an IPO for its $100B Vision Fund and is negotiating with the sultanate of Oman for an investment of several billion in the fund
Vision Fund staff hustles to keep up with frantic pace of deal making by CEO Masayoshi Son — SoftBank Group Corp …
Stripe says its fifth engineering hub will be remote, to situate product development closer to customers, and it will hire 100+ remote engineers in 2019
Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote.
Sources: Facebook told FTC it's ready for more privacy oversight like quarterly privacy safeguards reports approved by CEO, review of new products before launch
The concessions could accompany a multi-billion dollar fine from the Federal Trade Commission, which opened its probe last year.
Online extremism researchers face a similar toll on their mental health as content moderators, but, without anonymity, their work leaves them open to harassment
A COUPLE OF hours after the Christchurch massacre, I was on the phone with Whitney Phillips, a Syracuse professor whose research focuses …
An oral history of Amazon Prime, the internet's most successful membership program with 100M+ members worldwide and one of the main reasons behind Amazon's rise
An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever. — It's easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn't always the king of online shopping. Tweets: @peterme , @delrey , @karas...
Facebook shared info about extremist ban with some news outlets before the ban was in place, letting Alex Jones and others redirect followers to other platforms
embargoed news about banning “dangerous” people seems....not strategically sound See also Mediagazer
Microsoft unveils HoloLens 2 developer edition for $3,500, out later this year, says Unreal Engine 4 support for HoloLens 2 will be available by the end of May
Tom Warren / The Verge :
UK's tax authority to delete records of ~5M people from its Voice ID biometric voice security system because it did not have clear user consent, violating GDPR
Steve Ranger / ZDNet :
So-Young International, a Chinese online marketplace for medical aesthetic services, closes up 31% in its first day of trading after raising ~$179.4M in its IPO
Xinhua News Agency :
Dark web marketplace Wall Street Market, whose admins exit-scammed users of $14.2M+ in cryptocurrency, seized by German police and other international agencies
don't take this as something official. Catalin Cimpanu / @campuscodi : Six days after Med3l1n leaked the IP address and the login creds for the WSM backend, the server showed the following errorhttps:...
Confident Cannabis, an online platform for cannabis wholesale trading and lab testing, raises $12M Series A, bringing the total raised to $18M+
Iris Dorbian / Forbes :
Digital payments processing startup Checkout raises $230M Series A co-led by Insight Partners and DST Global at a valuation just shy of $2B
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch :
How Satya Nadella led Microsoft to have more subscribers than Netflix, more cloud computing revenue than Google, and a near-trillion-dollar market cap
Bloomberg :
Colorado-based Red Canary raises $34M led by Summit Partners, bringing its total raised to $48.9M, for its suite of cloud-based threat detection services
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat :
Alphabet tells US House panel it spends hundreds of millions annually on content review, has manually reviewed 1M+ suspected terrorist videos on YouTube in Q1
David Shepardson / Reuters :
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Zoho CRM Plus in 2025: A year of thoughtful CX improvements
2025 marked 11 years of building a customer experience platform designed to support organizations as customer expectations, channels …
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data
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.