Techmeme
- Wag founders Jonathan and Joshua Viner, who left the dog-walking startup last year, announce $37M funding for their new electric bike-sharing startup Wheels (Megan Rose Dickey/TechCrunch)
- Amazon Go, now one year old, is sparking cashierless imitators from startups like Mighty AI, and also established companies like Walmart, Kroger, and Microsoft (Bloomberg)
- Sources: Apple laid off 200+ employees this week from a Project Titan; Apple acknowledges it has restructured its autonomous systems tech team (CNBC)
- Twitter is testing an "Original Tweeter" tag to make it easier to see who started a thread; test has rolled out to "a small percentage" of iOS and Android users (Lucas Matney/TechCrunch)
- China appears to block Microsoft's Bing, despite the company's self-censorship of its search results in the country (New York Times)
- Inside Google's 27-person in-house counterespionage team, the Threat Analysis Group, which tracks 200+ hacker groups, many of which are linked to US adversaries (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)
- Cision, a public relations software company, has agreed to buy AI-powered analytics company TrendKite for $225M as it continues to invest in software automation (Nate Lanxon/Bloomberg)
- Sequoia India announces Surge, an accelerator focused on fledging startups in India and Southeast Asia, says it will offer selected companies a $1.5M investment (Jon Russell/TechCrunch)
- Sources: Microsoft's Bing has been blocked in China following a government order, removing the last major foreign search engine left in the country (Yuan Yang/Financial Times)
- In a video posted online, Xiaomi teases a working prototype of a phone with a double-folding display and a more symmetrical design than Samsung's foldable phone (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)
- Spain-based Sherpa.ai, which makes a Spanish language voice assistant, expands Series A by $8.5M to $15M as it passes 5M users (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
- The UK's Financial Conduct Authority publishes draft guidelines on cryptoassets and how they fit within the UK's current regulatory framework (Yogita Khatri/CoinDesk)
- Source: SoftBank is investing $100M in Globality, a marketplace for large companies to find and manage service providers, at a ~$1B valuation (Tomio Geron/Wall Street Journal)
- Federal prosecutors and US court in Seattle agree to publish info on warrantless surveillance requests, will disclose case numbers and crime being investigated (Aaron Mackey/Electronic Frontier ...)
- Facebook to launch Page Quality tab for admins, showing when content is removed for policy violations and when post distribution is reduced due to fact-checking (Facebook)
TechCrunch
Silicon Alley Insider
- Apple laid off 200 people from its self-driving car unit Project Titan
- 10 things in tech you need to know today
- How the Internet of Things will transform consumerism, enterprises, and governments over the next five years
- Microsoft's president says tech's bruising 2018 has left scars that will result in US federal regulation as early as this year
- This device will be the next smartphone
- Share your opinion ? become a BI Insider!
- Trust is the main barrier to smart speaker adoption ? here's what companies can do about that
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls artificial intelligence a 'new human right' (CRM)
- BuzzFeed is cutting 15% of its staff
- BIG TECH IN HEALTHCARE: How Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are shaking up healthcare ? and what it means for the future of the industry (GOOGL, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT)
- I attended Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway's 5-hour, $165 creativity workshop that people have called a 'scam.' Here's what it was like inside (FB)
- Three untapped opportunities wearables present to health insurers, providers, and employers
- Ex-Tesla employees describe the abrupt way they were laid off and say questions linger (TSLA)
- Take a look at the $60 million private jets that fly business leaders to Davos for the World Economic Forum
- IBM dazzled investors with its first annual growth in 7 years, but some doubters aren't buying the comeback story (IBM)
- THE EDGE COMPUTING REPORT: How advances in edge computing will address key problems in the healthcare, telecommunications, and automotive sectors
- 'People are developing subscription fatigue': Viacom explains why it bought Pluto TV for $340 million instead of trying to build the next Netflix
- I flew on one of the 'worst airlines in America'. Here's why I'd do it again.
- An MIT researcher who analyzed facial recognition software found eliminating bias in AI is a matter of priorities
- The startup that?s challenging Amazon?s cloud with a controversial new software license is now worth $2.5 billion (AMZN)
Mashable