Eric Niiler / Wired: Profile of BlueDot, which uses AI to sift through news reports in 65 languages to detect and warn about infectious disease outbreaks like Wuhan Virus — The BlueDot algorithm scours news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases like those linked to the flu outbreak in China.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Broadcom signs 2 new multi-year agreements with Apple, says it expects to generate $15B by supplying wireless chips for Apple devices released through mid-2023 — – Broadcom put its RF chip business up for sale last year — Chipmaker to supply components for Apple devices into 2023
Jared Newman / Fast Company: Since rollout of iOS 13, which warns users of apps tracking their location, marketers have collected 68% less background and 24% less foreground location data — Spare a thought, if you will, for the digital advertisers who have grown dependent on knowing your exact whereabouts at any instant.
Max Weinbach / XDA Developers: Source: Samsung is working on Quick Share, an AirDrop-like feature to allow sharing of files between enabled Galaxy phones, likely launching with Galaxy S20 — Competition is huge in the phone industry, as we all know. Previously, the competition used to be restricted to hardware …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: Twitter is rolling out a pop-up feature that lets users add an emoji reaction to a Direct Message, similar to a feature in iMessage — Twitter is taking a page out of Apple’s playbook with its latest messaging feature. The social network announced today that it is rolling out support …
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News: Austin-based Vapor IO, an edge computing startup, raised $90M from Berkshire Partners and wireless infrastructure giant Crown Castle, says total raise $100M+ — Edge computing startup Vapor IO announced today the close of its $90 million Series C from private equity firm Berkshire Partners …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat: Outlier, which uses machine learning to spot anomalies in business data, raises $22.1M Series B led by Emergence, bringing its total raised to $30M+ — Machine learning algorithms aren’t just technological novelties relegated to tasks like picking out faces in crowded places.
Politico: Interview with David Cicilline, the chairman of the House subcommittee on antitrust, on his approach to investigation of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon — Practically everybody in Washington is mad at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. David Cicilline might actually do something about it.
Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: Google says it found five separate flaws in Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention tool for Safari that lets users’ browsing behavior be tracked — Google researchers have exposed details of multiple security flaws in its rival Apple’s Safari web browser that allowed users’ browsing behaviour …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet: Microsoft will forcibly install the Bing extension in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users starting mid-February, to change the default search engine to Bing — Microsoft will change the default search engine in Chrome from Google to Bing for its Office 365 ProPlus customers starting mid-February.
Alex Weprin / Hollywood Reporter: Disney sold its FoxNext video game unit, which it acquired with 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, to Scopely, a Culver City-based mobile game developer — The company is selling the FoxNext video game development studio to the Culver City-based mobile game developer.
William D. Cohan / Fast Company: Interview with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr., on his $10M smartphone forensics lab and balancing public safety while working under Apple and Google’s rules — The Trump administration wants Apple to create a backdoor into the iPhone. District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. has spent millions trying to find other ways in.