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Tech News Today for April 25, 2017

Tech News for Tuesday April 25, 2017

Waymo wants you! If you live in the Phoenix area you can now apply to be part of a self-driving car testing program from Waymo, which was formerly Google's driverless car program and is now under the Alphabet umbrella. In a post on Medium, Waymo CEO John Krafcik describes Ted, Candance and their four kids as happy customers of the testing program as they're ferried from school to soccer practice, to student council, to choir rehearsal and more! They have access to the service whenever they want, wherever they are, wherever they want to go within an area twice the size of San Francisco. Read more on Medium.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is tackling that pesky thing called fake news by creating Wikitribune, a crowdfunded news publication with content chosen, fact checked, and written up by unpaid community members and journalists. The new project is to be powered by Impossible, a service that was backed by Wales in 2013 and that builds tools for projects it thinks is “solving fundamental world problems.” A countdown clock on wikitribue.com indicates that the first issue should release in 29 days, with one journalist hired so far. Read more at arstechnica.com.

In today's flying car news, Uber says they'll be taking ride-hailing to the skies by 2020. That's when the company says they'll have their first public demo of a fleet of electric planes that you can hail with an app. At the Uber Elevate summit today the company said they're already in discussions with NASA and the National Air Traffic Control Association about the logistics of flying cars not crashing into each other. Read more at theverge.com.

Most big technology companies would love to penetrate the Chinese market, but its difficult, with so much Chinese government oversight and regulation over how companies are allowed to run their business inside the country. Netflix tried to open shop in China but were blocked by Chinese regulators last year. Now, Netflix says it has closed a content agreement with iQiyi, a Beijing-based video streaming service that will bring its original programming into the country for the first time. Read more at hollywoodreporter.com.

Today's TED conference is being taken over by robots, so says Axios and Recode. The conference began yesterday with a famous dancer and choreographer performing with a robot. In a talk by the CEO and founder of Boston Dynamics we learned that Spot, its dog robot is already being used to deliver packages in Boston. Meanwhile, their humanoid robot has been busy losing weight. The bot has gone from 375 lbs to 165 lbs. with what Boston Dynamics calls a more organic design paired down to only essential movements. Also, Japanese AI expert Noriko Arai said she built a robot capable of writing a 600-word essay on the rise and fall of maritime trade in Southeast Asia in the 17th century. With the essay the robot was able to apply and get accepted into several Japanese schools. Read more at axios.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand to discuss Google's announcement of its plans to tackle fake news and offensive search content. 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.

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