Despite calls from power users for an “edit” button, Twitter instead is considering how it could enable “clarifications” of tweets, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday at Goldman Sachs’ tech conference in San Francisco.
The bottom line: Twitter really, really doesn’t want to add an “edit” button. Dorsey emphasized that even the "clarification" option might never see the light of day.
Despite doubling its profits in 2018, Amazon did not pay a cent of federal income tax for the second consecutive year, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The big picture: Amazon actually received a rebate of $129 million — or an effective tax rate of -1% — thanks to tax credits and other breaks stemming from the GOP's 2017 tax cuts. The Washington Post's Chris Ingraham notes that while Amazon earned $11.2 billion in profit last year, it was able to pay a lower federal tax rate (1.5% in 2015) than the bottom 20% of American households.
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is quietly developing his first venture since being ousted from the ride-hailing company in 2017, working on a multimillion-dollar plan to build CloudKitchens, a global network of commercial kitchens that offer extra capacity and expanded reach for delivery-only restaurants, the Financial Times reports.
Details: Following the momentum of Uber Eats and similar services, CloudKitchens buys and leases real estate and develops software to help restaurants manage their back-office systems and integrate with food-delivery platforms. Last March, Kalanick acquired a $150 million controlling stake in City Storage Solutions, the Los Angeles-based parent of CloudKitchens, and began opening kitchens and recruiting early hires in California.
Researchers have broadened the controversial technology called "deepfakes" — AI-generated media that experts fear could roil coming elections by convincingly depicting people saying or doing things they never did.
Driving the news: A new computer program, created at OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab, is the latest front in deepfakes, producing remarkably human-sounding prose that opens the prospect of fake news circulated at industrial scale.
Uber has filed legal action against the city of New York over a law it passed last year capping the number of ride-hailing cars allowed on its street, fearing the city may make permanent the initial 12-month pause, according to court documents.
Apple has agreed to buy Pullstring, a San Francisco-based startup that enables the design and publishing of voice apps, Axios has learned from multiple sources.
Why it matters: This could help Siri better compete with Alexa.
Voyage, one of America's first automated taxi services, is now up-and-running in a Florida retirement community. This means trendsetting grandparents — not car-averse urban millennials — might be the early adopters of self-driving cars.
The big picture: Retirement communities may be the perfect place to launch driverless cars — slower, simpler roads are easier to master and there's an unmet need from people who can no longer drive but want to remain active in their communities.
Uber on Friday released its latest quarterly financials, likely its last before formally filing to go public, showing continued growth and investment in areas like UberEats.
The bottom line: The numbers show continued growth and investment in areas like UberEats, but still no profits.
Dan talks with Axios reporters David McCabe and Erica Pandey about Amazon's decision to abandon its planned HQ2 facility in New York's Long Island City neighborhood.
Silicon Valley has been shaken over the past two years by the recognition that Americans don't always believe big tech is making the world a better place. It was a tough epiphany for the leaders of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, who have vacillated between defensive and apologetic — working through their stages of grief.
Amazon's retreat from Queens shows us the dynamics of a new local power game — one in which giant tech companies play on the same field with governments, as equals, with equal influence over our economies and communities.
The big picture: The company's move cheered those New Yorkers who believed the deal gave Amazon too much in the way of tax breaks and financial incentives, even as it disappointed local officials who'd banked on Amazon's promise of 25,000 new jobs.
Facebook is negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission over a possible multi-billion dollar fine to settle an investigation into privacy violations by the firm, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
Why it matters: Previous FTC privacy fines levied against tech firms have been in the (low) millions, not billions. A major fine would send a message to Facebook — and other tech giants — that the commission is determined to rein in careless treatment of user privacy.
LONG ISLAND CITY, New York — On the corner of 41st Avenue and 12th Street, right in front of the Queens Library Tech Lab, people were giddy, furious and astonished at the news they heard today: Amazon, after all, will not build a gigantic new headquarters in their neighborhood, employing 25,000 people earning an average of $100,000 a year each. One emotion seemed ubiquitous: whiplash.
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