Nearly 1 in 4 links shared by social media users in France in the days leading up to elections contained fake news, according to a new study published by U.K.-based firm Bakamo on Wednesday.
Winners: Much of it favored anti-E.U. candidates — both on the far right and far left — and revealed hints of Russian influence.
This sounds familiar: The trend exhibits the powerful role that fake news can play on public opinion ahead of elections, and harkens back to Russian meddling in the US election.
Getaround, an eight-year-old startup that lets people rent out their car to others (basically a P2P Zipcar), has raised $45 million in Series C funding, with Toyota and the venture capital investment arm of Shanghai Automotive participating. San Francisco-based Getaround reports nearly half a million users and operates in 13 cities across the U.S.
Toyota's ambitions: Like its peers, the Japanese automaker is quietly partnering with startups challenging the traditional car ownership model. Last May, Toyota inked a partnership and invested an undisclosed sum in ride-hailing giant Uber (which also has its own partnership with Getaround).
The deal: Braemar Energy Ventures led this latest funding round, with existing investors Menlo Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners, among others, also participating.
Futuristic technology took the stage on the second day of F8, Facebook's annual developer conference in Silicon Valley.
Why it matters: Facebook has been working on Internet connectivity tech and AI for years, but its new interests in technology for reading brain waves and mixed reality that barely exist today shows that it wants to compete with companies like Google when it comes to tech "moonshots."
I covered our overall impressions of Samsung's phone in my review on Tuesday, but I wanted to dive deeper into one of the more important features of any smartphone purchase: the camera.
What's great: The pictures themselves. There are options to take a picture using just a phrase like "cheese." Also, Samsung built in Snapchat-like stickers so even old folks like me can get in on the act.
What's not: The rear camera hardware is largely unchanged from last year, though the front camera got an upgrade. Neither the Galaxy S8 nor the S8+ have a secondary camera, as does the iPhone, for doing things like creating a naturally blurred background.
Facebook kicked off its annual development conference Tuesday amid a fresh controversy over its Live video service, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg was solely focused on Fast and Furious jokes and augmented reality.
Main takeaway: Virtual reality may someday be the next big thing, but for the foreseeable future, using devices like smartphones to decorate, distort, animate, or annotate the world around us is Facebook's next frontier. And with Snapchat already calling dibs on the "camera company" slogan and whimsical lenses, augmented reality will also be the battleground from these two social media companies.
