Techmeme: An in-depth review of Android 9 Pie, which comes with a lot of useful user-facing changes and, maybe, improved battery life, but the gestures remain a mess (Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica)
Techmeme: Profile of Procore, a cloud-based platform for the $1T US construction industry that has raised $200M+ and is thinking about IPO after barely surviving in 2008 (Alex Konrad/Forbes)
Techmeme: HYP3R, a location-based marketing platform, has raised $17M Series A; HYP3R says it has geofenced ~300K hotels worldwide for extremely accurate location data (Kimberly Collins/ClickZ)
Facebook engagement for sites identified as publishing fake news dropped by 50%+ between 2016 election and July 2018, while shares on Twitter kept rising (Will Oremus/Slate)
Techmeme: Tencent-backed content aggregator Qutoutiao closes up 128% after raising $84M in its IPO, the biggest first-day increase of a significant US IPO in 2018 (Alex Barinka/Bloomberg)
European website finds that a free app is exposing the exact locations of Grindr’s 3.6M+ active users via unauthorized access to Grindr’s private API (Nicole Nguyen/BuzzFeed News)
Techmeme: Anaplan, which makes cloud-based business planning software, has filed for IPO, one week after its CFO joined the company from Tesla, where he was for one month (Ari Levy/CNBC)
North Korean operatives are evading US sanctions and earning millions by using fake identities on services like Github, Slack, and Paypal (Wall Street Journal)
prototypes of Google’s Dragonfly search engine for China link the search app on users’ Android devices to their phone numbers (Ryan Gallagher/The Intercept)
Techmeme: Mercedes-Benz to integrate SoundHound’s AI voice assistant in A-Class cars soon; the AI assistant is also coming to Kia and Hyundai cars in 2019 (Matt Burns/TechCrunch)
Airware, a drone startup that has raised $118M from Andreessen Horowitz, Google’s GV, Kleiner Perkins, and others, is shutting down (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)
Techmeme: Google says it will shut down Fabric, the mobile app development tool it acquired in 2017 from Twitter, in mid-2019 after it migrates Fabric’s users to Firebase (Emil Protalinski/VentureBeat
Techmeme: Nasdaq to buy Cinnober, a Sweden-based exchange and real-time clearing technology provider, for ~$190M (Philip Stafford/Financial Times)
Techmeme: Apple’s Sept. 2018 keynote had half-baked diversity, using women and non-white people as background dressing while every male Apple employee on stage was white (Jessica Conditt/Engadget)
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