Technology
- As AWS launches more services based on open source projects, some devs say AWS poses an existential threat by lifting others' work and renting access to it (Andrew Leonard/OneZero)
- Child stars on Instagram and YouTube aren't being protected by child labor laws, which were designed to prevent exploitation by parents and employers (Julia Carrie Wong/The Guardian)
- Critics question the willingness of the Irish Data Protection Commission, EU's lead GDPR enforcer, to crack down on tech firms that dominate Ireland's economy (Nicholas Vinocur/Politico)
- Mozilla's 2019 Internet Health Report examines machine learning bias, ways to rethink the digital ad economy, rise of smart cities, and more (Mark Surman/The Mozilla Blog)
- Microsoft report: 41% of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy, and passive listening; 52% worry their personal info or data is not secure (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- SoftBank subsidiary HAPSMobile is investing $125M in Alphabet's Loon as part of a strategic partnership to develop airborne tech for providing wireless internet (Paresh Dave/Reuters)
- Facebook admits it often confuses advocacy and commentary on racism and white complicity in anti-blackness with attacks on a protected group (Jessica Guynn/USA Today)
- Report: Amazon is testing a program to help fight utility patent infringements by matching a seller and an accused merchant with a third-party lawyer for $4,000 (Christine Fisher/Engadget)
- Sources: Slack plans to reveal by Friday its prospectus for a direct listing on the NYSE; it had already confidentially submitted its filing to regulators (Katie Roof/Wall Street Journal)
- Despite reporting that it expects a $3B-$5B fine from the FTC, Facebook's stock was up ~7.5% after hours, adding ~$40B to its market cap (BuzzFeed News)
- Facebook says Facebook Stories now has 500M daily users across Facebook and Messenger and WhatsApp's Status has 500M daily users; Snapchat has 190M daily users (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
- Slack previews new features rolling out in the coming weeks and months: responding to messages via email, new calendar integrations, universal search, and more (Tom Warren/The Verge)
- Sources: the NSA has recommended that the White House drop a once-secret US phone-surveillance program that collects info about Americans' phone calls and texts (Wall Street Journal)
- PayPal reports Q1 revenue of $4.13B, up 12% YoY, net income of $667M, up 31% YoY, and $161 billion in total payment volume, up 22% YoY (PayPal)
- PayPal says it had 277M total customer accounts at end of Q1, up 17% YoY, including 22M merchant accounts, and Venmo has surpassed 40M+ active user accounts (Kate Rooney/CNBC)
- Facebook had 2.38B MAUs in Q1, up 2.5% QoQ, as DAUs hit 1.56B, up 2.63% QoQ; EPS is $0.85 instead of $1.89 after setting aside money for potential FTC fine (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
- Microsoft reports Q3 Productivity and Business Processes revenue of $10.2B, up 14% YoY; Azure revenue was up 73% YoY, and Surface revenue rose 21% YoY (Emil Protalinski/VentureBeat)
- Facebook reports Q1 revenue of $15.08B, up 26% YoY, as advertising revenue hits $14.91B, up 26% YoY; sets aside $3B related to a forthcoming FTC settlement (Facebook)
- Microsoft reports Q3 revenue of $30.6B, up 14% YoY, as net income rose by 19% YoY to $8.8B; Intelligent Cloud revenue rose 22% YoY to $9.7B (Microsoft)
- Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg appears on Pod Save America, Deconstructed, and others, as podcast blitzing becomes a digital version of retail politics (Nicholas Quah/Nieman Lab)
- Microsoft has managed to dodge the Big Tech backlash, with its reputation improving since 2016 thanks to a methodical approach to thorny issues (Kim Hart/Axios)
- Vue.ai, maker of AI retail tools for apparel photo generation and product recognition, raises $17M Series B and says Macy's, Levi's, Tata are among customers (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- Source: Bond Capital, Mary Meeker's new growth equity VC firm that spun out from Kleiner Perkins, has secured $1.25B+ for its debut fund (Dan Primack/Axios)
- MongoDB says it will acquire Realm, an open source database platform for mobile apps, for $39M; Realm had raised $40M (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)
- Sight Machine, which helps manufacturers analyze big data, raises $29.4M Series C led by LS Group (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
- Atlanta-based FullStory, which is building an analytics platform for user experiences, raises $32M Series C led by Stripes (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
- Sources: Amazon team auditing Alexa commands has access to user location data, making finding customer addresses easy; Amazon says access is tightly controlled (Bloomberg)
- Ad-blocking browser Brave rolls out optional Brave Ads to desktop users, with users who opt in receiving 70% of the gross ad revenue in Basic Attention Tokens (Emil Protalinski/VentureBeat)
- Japanese government and financial institutions are scrambling to update their software and IT systems to align with the imperial era calendar reset on May 1 (New York Times)
- Bumble says it will soon launch Private Detector, a feature that uses AI to automatically blur incoming lewd images and present blocking and reporting options (Sara Ashley O'Brien/CNN)