Tech News Today For February 3, 2017
Tech News for Friday February 3, 2017
The Washington Post reports that federal regulators are telling 9 companies that they can no longer participate in Lifeline, that's the program that provides low-cost Internet access to low-income Americans. This comes as a shock to companies who use the funds to partner with school districts to provide educational broadband so that poor kids can do their homework. Ajit Pai, Tom Wheeler's successor at the FCC announced the new rule today and also confirmed that he will close the inquiry into zero rating plans from T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Read more at washingtonpost.com.
A whole lot of people on the social web pledged to DeleteUber as a backlash to a number of decisions Uber has made related to the Immigration ban and President Donald Trump himself. But how much of an impact did it actually have? First, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick backed down from being an economic adviser to President Trump saying his involvement wasn't meant to be interpreted as being supportive of the Presidents agenda. As for the app itself, the New York Times says more than 200,000 people ultimately cast the app off of their phones, a small percentage of the 40 million monthly active users Uber had reported last October. Read more at mashable.com.
Re/Code says big data is creating more options for women in executive leadership roles. According to news coming out of the Global Women in Data conference, personal and financial performance metrics are helping women overcome bias. Data has the power to amplify the social impact of female leaders and help women keep their positions at the top. Studies say that women are often blamed when things go wrong at a company, even when the data from global, publicly traded companies says that companies with more women in the C-suite, perform better. Read more at recode.net.
Google’s primary launcher for Android for the past few years has been the Google Now Launcher. Anyone can install it and run their phone closer to Google’s vision in the process. But then the Pixel phones came along with their own launcher to confuse things. And now, Google is telling Google Mobile Services partners that it is discontinuing the Google Now Launcher in the near future. OEMs who’ve relied on the Google Now launcher for their devices must now integrate the Google Now panel into their own launchers using newly available tools. Read more at androidpolice.com.
Many of you know that the worst possible place for you after a breakup is Facebook. Even if you somehow manage to keep yourself from scrolling through your ex's feed or your ex's new significant other's feeds, just watching people enjoying themselves together can be painful. Facebook wants you to know that it cares, a little. According to a post on the companies Insights blog, Facebook has been snooping, I mean studying, what people do after a breakup. The company took all the data that we willingly feed it every day and used it to study the time between when a person actually breaks up and when they make their breakup official on Facebook. And what we do right after that. Lest you think Facebook compiled all this data just because they were curious about your well being, the post also includes a special section called, "What this means for marketers" showing how much stuff you can sell to people who've broken up or better yet, gotten divorced.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Sam Machkovech from ArsTechnica to talk gaming news. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.
