GM Cruise snags Dropbox HR head to hire 1,000 engineers by the end of the year

GM Cruise plans to hire 1,000 more engineers over the next nine months, TechCrunch has learned. It’s an aggressive move by the autonomous vehicle technology company to double its size as it pushes to deploy a robotaxi service by the end of the year. Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, will leave the file-sharing and […]

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The gaming clips service, Medal has bought Donate Bot for direct donations, and payments

The Los Angeles-based video gaming clipping service, Medal, has made its first acquisition as it rolls out new features to its user base. The company has acquired the Discord -based donations and payments service Donate Bot to enable direct payments and other types of transactions directly on its site. Now, the company is rolling out […]

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Facebook won’t let you opt-out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

Users are complaining that the phone number Facebook hassled them to use to secure their account with two-factor authentication has also been associated with their user profile — which anyone can use to “look up” your profile. Worse, Facebook doesn’t give you an option to opt-out. Last year, Facebook was forced to admit that after […]

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Fortnite Season 8 is now available, and it includes pirates, cannons and volcano lava

Fortnite, the world’s most popular game right now with some 200 million players, has just announced that its much anticipated Season 8 is available. For those of you who don’t play Fortnite, the title takes on an episodic approach with new features, tools and maps released every few months. That keeps things fresh, gamers engaged […]

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Ford partners with geocoding startup what3words

Ford is partnering with what3words to give drivers access to the startup’s novel addressing system. Under the partnership, drivers will be able to connect to the free what3words app — on an iOS or Android device — to their vehicle via their SYNC 3 infotainment platform. Drivers can find the three-word address on website contact […]

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Google will bring its Assistant to Android Messages

It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, […]

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Medal.tv’s clipping service allows gamers to share the moments of their digital lives

As online gaming becomes the new social forum for living out virtual lives, a new startup called Medal.tv has raised $3.5 million for its in-game clipping service to capture and share the Kodak moments and digital memories that are increasingly happening in places like Fortnite or Apex Legends. Digital worlds like Fortnite are now far more […]

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China tells teachers to quit assigning homework through WeChat

China’s education authorities are about to take some burden off parents with school-aged children. A proposal posted last week by the Department of Education in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang said teachers should be banned from using WeChat, QQ or other mobile apps to assign homework or ask parents to grade students’ assignments. As mobile internet […]

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Spotify says it paid $340M to buy Gimlet and Anchor

Spotify doubled down on podcasts last week with a double deal to buy podcast networks Gimlet and Anchor. Those acquisitions were initially undisclosed, but Spotify has quietly confirmed that it spent €300 million, just shy of $340 million, to capture the companies. That’s according to an SEC filing — hat tip Recode’s Peter Kafka — which deals the […]

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Did New York lose anything with Amazon’s rejection? It’s complicated.

Now that Amazon has said that it’s taking its ball and going home rather than deal with mean, pushy New Yorkers, outside observers are giving off the sense that the city (and its local politicians) are losing out for their recalcitrance. They’re wrong. New York City is running at about a 4.3% unemployment rate — […]

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Manipulating an Indian politician’s tweets is worryingly easy to do

Here’s a concerning story from India, where the upcoming election is putting the use of social media in the spotlight. While the Indian government is putting Facebook, Google and other companies under pressure to prevent their digital platforms from being used for election manipulation, a journalist has demonstrated just how easy it is to control […]

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Ubisoft and Mozilla team up to develop Clever-Commit, an AI coding assistant

Game developer Ubisoft today announced that it has partnered with Mozilla to develop Clever-Commit, an AI-based coding assistant that learns from your code base’s bug and regression data to analyze and flag potential new bugs as new code is committed. Ubisoft already uses this tool internally and Mozilla says that it will deploy it to spot […]

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