IF YOU SAY you saw this coming, I don’t believe you. In 2018, electric scooter-share stole the mobility show. They arrived unannounced in cities. They provoked fierce council meetings and protests. They launched debates about who owns sidewalks, anyway, and what role regulators play in bossing around big business. They sucked up VC dollars, mountains of them, as upstarts crowed about the revenue generated per scoot. They got damaged and fixed, they launched their own new gig economy jobs.
Category: News and Views
Twitter releases 2018 Transparency Report including policy violation stats for the first time | Mashable
Twitter released its biannual Transparency Report on Thursday outlining current trends in government information requests, content removal requests, and other privacy matters regarding the network.
This year’s report marks the thirteenth time in the company’s history that Twitter has expounded on its privacy practices in such tremendous detail. The new report also expands on the type of data Twitter is making publicly available.
Viral crowdfunding campaigns took on new meaning in 2018 | Mashable
When James Shaw Jr. decided to launch a GoFundMe in honor of victims of a deadly shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville earlier this year, he set a modest goal of $15,000.
Shaw, however, had just become famous as the “Waffle House hero” after tackling and disarming the alleged gunman. The GoFundMe he launched with a few of his friends quickly went viral, and it ultimately raised $241,000.
“I was doing it just to help out, ’cause I know losing a child in that kind of way, and you have to plan that funeral, as young as they were, they probably didn’t have insurance,” says Shaw. “It was just my way of trying to ease the pain.”
Toys and electronics lift Amazon | CNN
Retailers are battling hard over toys, flat-screen TVs and new tech gadgets this holiday season, and Amazon appears to be in a strong position.
The company said on Tuesday that it sold 18 million toys between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Amazon did not disclose toy sales from last year, but it has been stockpiling toys since Toys “R” Us’ closed its stores in June.
Amazon (AMZN) expanded its toy efforts in the run-up to the holidays. It mailed out a 70-page toy catalog with top items and deals, and even began selling toys at Whole Foods. Last week, Amazon offered discounts on Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, and Lego.
Amazon HQ2 resistance in Virginia, Nashville, and New York | Fast Company
It’s been just over month since Amazon announced the end of its the protracted search for its second headquarters and announced it would be expanding to Long Island City, New York, and Crystal City, Virginia, and adding an “operations hub” in Nashville. But rather than acclimating to the idea of Amazon in their midst, organizers in the three cities are doubling down on resisting it.
Theresa May survives confidence vote of Tory MPs | BBC News
Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.
After securing 63% of the total vote, she is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.
Speaking in Downing Street, she vowed to deliver the Brexit “people voted for” but said she had listened to the concerns of MPs who voted against her.
Her supporters urged the party to move on but critics said losing the support of a third of MPs was “devastating”.
Congress Blew Its Hearing With Google CEO Sundar Pichai | WIRED
ON TUESDAY, THE House Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to question one of the most powerful people on the planet—Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company that filters all the world’s information. And they blew it.
Over the course of three and a half hours, the members of the committee staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle over whether Google search and other products are biased against conservatives. Republican members largely criticized the company for burying conservative websites in search results and amplifying criticism of conservative policies—accusations that Google has repeatedly denied. Democrats only poured fuel on the fire by spending their allotted five minutes helping Pichai shoot down those trumped-up claims, which are hard to prove either way thanks to the company’s black box algorithms. The rhetorical tennis match left precious little time for committee members to explore in any detail the urgent questions around Google’s interest in building a censored search engine for China, the company’s bulk data collection practices, its recent security breaches, or issues related to competition and antitrust regulation.
Here’s how Lyft envisions self-driving cars communicating with pedestrians | TechCrunch
The question of how self-driving cars will interact and communicate with humans is one that has come up before, but the answer is still up in the air. Google has been looking into this at least since 2012, and earlier this year, Uber filed a patent for using flashing lights and sounds to talk to pedestrians. Now, the United States Patent Office has granted Lyft with a patent for what it describes as an autonomous vehicle notification system.
Lyft’s solution entails developing a predetermined message to display on the most visible car window. In one example, each window includes a projector, a see-through screen or another display device to communicate the message.
Google to kill Google+ early after exposing personal data of more than 50 million | Mashable
Google will end the consumer version of its ill-fated social network Google+ in April, four months earlier than expected, after finding another security issue impacting more than 50 million people.
In a blog post Monday, Google said that a November software update caused the Google+ API to inadvertently make users’ personal information viewable to developers, even if they had opted to keep their details private. The bug was addressed after six days, and users’ passwords and financial data were not impacted, according to the company.
10,400 Verizon workers quit their jobs. That’s a good sign for the economy | CNN
A lot of people want to quit their jobs at Verizon, and that’s a really good sign for the economy.
In a drive to cut costs and shift investments as it rolls out 5G service, the company announced on Monday that 10,400 management employees had accepted voluntary buyout deals, out of 44,000 who were eligible.
That might have been partially due to the fact that the terms of severance were generous, at three weeks of pay for each year of service, capped at 60 weeks.
But it’s likely there’s a larger factor at play: The unemployment rate is now 3.7%, compared to 5.8% when Verizon last offered buyouts, meaning those workers figure they have a good chance of taking the money and finding another job.
Dispatches From The Front 