This Week In Tech – Nov 15, 2020

This week Apple held a hardware event, Spotify acquired podcasting tech company Megaphone and, Trudeau Promises To Connect 98% of Canadians To High-Speed Internet By 2026. Also, the EU sues Amazon for anti-trust, there’s an update in the Epic/Apple case and. more in the Other News section.

96% of Canadians may have high-speed internet by 2026

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a news conference announcing the commitment. During the news conference he announced that the government is launching the $1.75 billion universal broadband fund. About $150 million will be put toward projects to be completed by next fall. They also announced that they reached a $600 million deal with TelCast for satellite capacity.


Apple event

On Tuesday, Apple held another hardware event. At the event they announced details about their first Apple Silicon processor. They also announced the first set of Macs running said processor. You can read more about the event see my full length article about it.


Spotify buys Megaphone

On Tuesday, Spotify announced that they acquired podcast hosting company Megaphone. In the acquisition Spotify gets all the podcasts distributed by Megaphone and Megaphone customers get access to Spotify’s ad tech.

EU sues Amazon for anti-trust

On Tuesday, the EU announced that they are suing Amazon for anti-trust over their alleged use of “data that Amazon has and that are obtained from third party sellers”. Anti-trust works a little differently in Europe than it does in North America in Europe its based on abuse of a dominant position not conduct of the company like in the US. I think that this case is stupid and not an act of a monopoly. Those actions are similar to what every big box store does.


Other News

Also this week, Google announced that uploads to Google Photos will stop being free next June, Virgin Hyperloop runs first passenger test (and as far as I know it was successful), Walmart and GM’s Cruise team up for autonomous-car grocery delivery and, the CEO of Waze announced that he’s leaving the company. Also as of writing of this article the SpaceX Crew-1 mission successfully launched.

Link Dump

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Now for a couple of site updates:

  • the first episode of my podcast will be coming next week
  • This coming week the first article from our new space reporter will be posted
  • the site’s Patreon page is back up (it was taken down due to inactivity so please donate so it doesn’t get taken down again).
  • I might be posting an essay on effects of automation on work I wrote for school (let me know if you’re interested).