Tech News Today for June 21, 2017
Tech News for Wednesday June 21, 2017
Today we opened the little Uber Advent Calendar window to the news that CEO Travis Kalanick is stepping down, permanently. Last week Kalanick announced a leave of absense, but now he says he's giving up his position as the head of the ride-hailing company after pressure from investors. This is good news for Uber in their fight to shed their bro culture image. It's also hopefully good news for employees of the company, especially female engineers and other employees who've reported repeated instances of sexual harassment that was ignored by HR. It's not all bad news for Kalanick either, who will keep control of a majority of the voting power at Uber and he'll have a say in hand-picking his successor. According to sources, Kalanick was ousted as a boardroom coup, led by lead investor Bill Gurley. Read more at nytimes.com.
A software chief at Tesla is also out today, after only six months with the company. Autopilot VP Chris Lattner, former developer of Swift programming at Apple is leaving Tesla and he took to Twitter to say that it "Wasn't a good fit." Headquarters of Apple and Tesla are only a 10 mile ride in a Model X away from each other and the two companies have been poaching each other's employees for a few years now. In a statement Tesla said AI expert Andrej Karpathy will be the new Director of AI and Autopilot Vision where he will report directly to Elon Musk. As for Lattner, it looks like he'll be fine. The replies to his tweet are chock full of job offers from places ranging from TWiT Sponsor Cloudflare, to Cards Against Humanities. Read more at wsj.com.
You can pay your favorite YouTuber or your favorite Twitch Live Streamer, but if you're the number one fan of a Periscoper, you were out of luck. Until now. Today Periscope owner Twitter announces Super Hearts, a way to send micropayments to your favorite Periscoper, in order to support the creator AND to get their attention. According to the company's post on Medium, it's a bit of a challenge to send these virtual gifts and for creators to receive them. Each heart is worth a different value and you can only buy or use them in iOS or Android. Also, you can only buy Super Hearts when a Periscoper is live. Currently only US Periscope creators have the ability to cash out their gifts. The company says support in other areas is coming soon. If you can't wait and you really want to try this now, you can buy a coin package in the iOS app store or the Google Play store. Read more at medium.com/@periscope.
According to The Verge, a Russian software company will let you jailbreak your consumer drone to get past military and government enforced no-fly zones. But we don't recommend doing it. Coptersafe is making the software in response to DJI's increased flight restrictions. Read more at theverge.com.
Find out about these stories and more on Tech News Today, which streams live at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.