Highlights from today’s top stories. Subscribe here to receive this rundown daily.
Jim Xiao thinks there’s still plenty of room to improve mobile hardware and software. The University of Washington grad (above) is the CEO and founder of Mason a Seattle-based mobile infrastructure as a service startup that just raised $25 million. Read more about what the company is building.
Amazon’s latest update to its Rekognition software is renewing an outcry from civil rights groups over facial recognition technology. Amazon said this week that its algorithm can now detect fear from the expression on a person’s face.
WeWork is getting ready to go public. The co-working giant, a huge player in Seattle and other tech hubs, asserts in its IPO filing that it will be able to grow during a major recession even as confidence in the economy starts to dip.
Expedia has quietly settled a lawsuit with European budget airline Ryanair. We got the scoop after spotting signs of the settlement in court filings. It’s a sign of the online travel giant’s efforts to make peace with its industry partners.
We’ll hear directly from Expedia Group CEO Mark Okerstrom about the company’s broader strategy and the future of travel as part of our lineup at the upcoming GeekWire Summit. Find out more and register here.
I read Wired’s entire Google exposé so you don’t have to. Well, you still should, because it’s excellent, but what stood out to me in this very long read wasn’t just the well-documented missteps by executives but the massive cultural shift inside the company. As Wired’s Nitasha Tiku writes, dissent at Google is no longer an internal discussion but an opportunity for employees to leverage public opinion to create change. Wired: Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech.
Bill Nye is done with Windows. The former Boeing engineer, better known as the “Science Guy,” likens the Microsoft OS to a broken-down car in a Google Chromebook promotion.
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