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Techmeme - 2019-01-19T21:31:32-05:00

Japanese hotel, trying to replace all of its staff with robots, ended up creating more work for staff and frustrated guests as robots didn't perform as expected (Wall Street Journal) - 2019-01-19T21:20:02-05:00

Strategy Robot, founded by the creators of an AI bot that beat four top professional Texas Hold 'Em players, signs a $10M two-year contract with the US Army (Tom Simonite/Wired) - 2019-01-19T19:20:01-05:00

Voicebot survey estimates that about 77M US adults use voice assistants in their cars at least monthly, compared with 45.7M using them on smart speakers (Rani Molla/Recode) - 2019-01-19T17:20:01-05:00

DaDa, a Chinese online tutoring service that helps children aged 4 to 16 learn English from native speakers, raises $255M Series D led by Warburg Pincus (Quynh Nguyen/DealStreetAsia) - 2019-01-19T15:20:04-05:00

Chainalysis: Bitcoin transactions on darknet markets rose throughout 2018 to an average of $2M/day, nearly double the activity measured at the start of the year (Anna Irrera/Reuters) - 2019-01-19T13:20:08-05:00

Report: $5.3B was invested in cybersecurity companies in 2018, up 81% from 2016, with California alone accounting for 46% of VC investments worldwide (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) - 2019-01-19T11:20:05-05:00

DNC says in court filing that it was a target of a failed spearphishing campaign after the midterms; researchers: the campaign resembled Russia-linked attacks (Nicole Perlroth/New York Times) - 2019-01-19T07:05:01-05:00

Profile of angel investor and Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi, who now manages Neo, a fund that matches talented young engineers with tech industry veterans (Biz Carson/Forbes) - 2019-01-19T02:00:16-05:00

Q&A with Hadi Partovi on starting Code.org, working on IE at Microsoft, what he is looking for in startup founders, and teaching computer science in schools (David Gelles/New York Times) - 2019-01-19T01:45:01-05:00

Report: vulnerability in Marvell's Wi-Fi SoC used in devices like PS4, Xbox One, and Surface laptops lets attackers hijack the device with no user interaction (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet) - 2019-01-19T00:30:01-05:00

The owner of Reliance Retail, India's biggest retailer, and Jio, a disruptive telecom, announces an online retail platform to compete with Flipkart and Amazon (Manish Singh/VentureBeat) - 2019-01-18T21:45:01-05:00

HyperScience, which uses AI to extract structured data from hand-filled and other business forms, raises $30M Series B, bringing its total raised to $50M (Jordan Crook/TechCrunch) - 2019-01-18T20:05:01-05:00

Sources: Snap fires security chief over secret relationship with a consultant and pushes out his boss, the head of HR, amid multiple departures in recent months (Alex Heath/Cheddar) - 2019-01-18T18:50:02-05:00

Amazon says ~200K SMBs generated $100K+ in sales via Amazon stores in 2018, 50K exceeded $500K, and the number of SMBs that sold $1M+ grew by 20% (Paul Hill/Neowin) - 2019-01-18T17:50:02-05:00

Sources: Airbnb held informal talks to buy discounted hotel booking app HotelTonight; HotelTonight was valued at $463M in a March 2017 funding round (Wall Street Journal) - 2019-01-18T16:50:02-05:00