Facebook is facing new criticism — including at a Congressional hearing Tuesday — from publishers, politicians and pundits for over-correcting itself in handling allegations of bias against conservatives.
Why it matters: The company takes regular flak from the right for censoring conservative voices. Now critics on the left — along with some non-partisan experts —are saying Facebook is bending too far in addressing conservative complaints. Facebook, which has promised to improve the quality of new on its platform, is stuck in the middle.
Zoox Inc., committed to building an entire self-driving car from scratch, has raised $500 million in new funding led by Atlassian co-founder Michael Cannon-Brookes and Fred Hu of China-based Primavera Capital, at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation.
Why it matters: The self-driving car race continues as a growing number of players, including tech companies like Alphabet and Uber, as well as automakers, rush to build autonomous vehicles.
Two-thirds of global AI investment today goes to China, ballooning the value of China’s AI market by 67% from 2016 to 2017 and threatening to rob the U.S. of its tenuous AI lead, according to a new study from China’s Tsinghua University.
Why it matters: The U.S. and China are jockeying to be an AI superpower, as private investors and governments pour money into research in both countries. The U.S. has a serious talent edge over China for now, but China’s funding advantage keeps it in the running, as top universities like Tsinghua turn out high-quality researchers.
Amazon's Prime Day got off to a terrible start for the retailer, with customers seeing cute dog pictures instead of deals. The problems persisted into Monday evening for some customers.
The bottom line: Analysts are still trying to calculate how much revenue Amazon lost from its Prime Day site problems. But, in reality, there are a few different costs to consider.
Here’s President Trump’s defense for his NATO and Russia meetings that resulted in pushback for his demands to European allies as well as concerns over his behavior in a press conference with Putin:
"I had a great meeting with NATO. They have paid $33 Billion more and will pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars more in the future, only because of me. NATO was weak, but now it is strong again (bad for Russia). The media only says I was rude to leaders, never mentions the money! ... While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia. Sadly, it is not being reported that way - the Fake News is going Crazy
Netflix's stock was down nearly 14% in after-hours trading Monday after the company missed expectations on revenue and subscriber growth. Stocks for almost every other tech company in the streaming business, like Roku, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook and Google, were also down following the news.
Why it matters: Netflix's miss is reigniting debate around whether the new tech economy, where companies are highly valued despite being barely or far from profitable, is sustainable long-term.
Snapchat is launching a news partnership initiative with the goal of helping journalists and news organizations better mine the billions of public videos and photos shared daily on Snapchat for news and information.
Why it matters: People are overwhelmingly turning to social media and messaging for news, adversely impacting traditional publishers' bottom lines. As a result, platforms are under increased pressure to create symbiotic relationships with publishers and journalists.
Today’s tech startups have largely stayed out of the debate over whether antitrust law should be used to humble — and possibly break up — giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Why it matters: Startups are often in position to lead the antitrust charge against major competitors. But entrepreneurs face a dilemma: If they go running to regulators, they have to admit they’re in danger and tick off a powerful player in their world. If they do nothing, they risk bleeding out.
