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Anne VanderMey / Bloomberg : How Jeff Beacher, owner of a Las Vegas nightclub frequented by celebs, helped build Airbnb's celebrity marketing program in 2015, making it into a luxury brand   —  For one week in the summer of 2015, consumers of celebrity gossip news couldn't escape Mariah Carey's trip to Malibu, California. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2qRWlMp

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Adobe: Black Friday online sales grew 19.6% YoY to $7.4B, as Thanksgiving sales rose 14.5%, to $4.2B; Cyber Monday sales are expected to reach $9.4B, up 18.9%   —  Following swiftly on the heels of a Thanksgiving that broke records with $4.2 billion in online sales, Black Friday also hit a new high … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/37Vyqfk

Following swiftly on the heels of a Thanksgiving that broke records with $4.2 billion in online sales, Black Friday also hit a new high, although it just fell short of predictions. According to analytics from Adobe , consumers spent $7.4 billion online yesterday buying goods online via computers, tablets and smartphones. The figures were up by $1.2 billion on Black Friday 2018 , but they actually fell short of Adobe’s prediction for the day, which was $7.5 billion. Salesforce, meanwhile, said that its checks revealed $7.2 billion in sales (even further off the forecast). Popular products included toys on the themes of Frozen 2, L.O.L Surprise, and Paw Patrol. Best selling video games included FIFA 20, Madden 20, and Nintendo Switch. And top electronics, meanwhile, included Apple Laptops, Airpods, and Samsung TVs. A full $2.9 billion of Black Friday sales happened on smartphones. These conversions are growing faster than online shopping overall, so we are now approaching a tipping po...

Ockam , a two-year-old, Bay Area-based company that’s selling tools to developers to they can establish an “architecture for trust” within their connected device applications, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding, including from Core Ventures, Okta Ventures, SGH Capital, and Future Ventures. This serverless platform for IoT development is being led by CEO Matthew Gregory and CTO Mrinal Wadhwa, two cofounders with noteworthy backgrounds. Before launching Ockam in the fall of 2017, Gregory was an “intrapreneur” at Microsoft, where he says he helped lead Azure’s pivot into open source software and container services. He also spent a couple of years at Salesforce as a product manager. As interestingly, he spent a few years as as system engineer working for Stars & Stripes, a syndicate of the yacht-racing competition America’s Cup where he says he tells us he led an engineering effort to build the customer systems of sensors, analytics software and wireless communications tools nee...

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters : EU antitrust regulators are conducting a preliminary investigation into Google's data collection practices   —  BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators are investigating Google's collection of data, the European Commission told Reuters on Saturday, suggesting the world's … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/34E5k2m

Storm Ventures , a now 19-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture firm in Menlo Park, Ca., has closed on $130.4 million, shows a new SEC filing . The outfit began its fundraising late last, according to an earlier filing. It had closed its previous fund with $180 million in 2015. Storm distinguishes itself in numerous ways, including its exclusive focus on seed and Series A stage enterprise startups, including mobile, SaaS and cloud infrastructure companies. The partners also have a penchant for helping far-flung startups grow the footprint around the blog. Tae Hea Nahm, for example, a founding managing director of the firm (and cofounder of four mobile companies before that, including Airespace and MobileIron ), was born in Seoul, he has told us in the past that he spends a considerable amount of time in South Korea to attend startup board meetings but also to visit with Samsun and others of Storm’s LPs, which includes Korea Telecom. Ryan Floyd, another of the firm’s cofounders, meanwh...

Alex Danco : How angel investing for social status is a core part of Bay Area tech ecosystem, and is critically missing from other cities trying to grow their tech scenes   —  Michael Seibel of YC posted a short video the other day about a topic that's near and dear to my heart: Why Fundraising is Different in Silicon Valley. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2rJwsOU

Facebook added a correction notice to a post by a fringe news site that Singapore’s government said contained false information. It’s the first time the government has tried to enforce a new law against ‘fake news’ outside its borders. The post by fringe news site States Times Review (STR), contained “scurrilous accusations” according to the Singapore government. The States Times Review post contained accusations about the arrest of an alleged whistleblower and election-rigging. Singapore authorities had previously ordered STR editor Alex Tan to correct the post but the Australian citizen said he would “not comply with any order from a foreign government”. Mr Tan, who was born in Singapore, said he was an Australian citizen living in Australia and was not subject to the law. In a follow-up post, he said he would “defy and resist every unjust law”. He also posted the article on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Docs and challenged the government to order corrections there as well. On t...

Since it’s a holiday week for those of us in the United States, we’ve put together an (even more) unstructured episode of the Original Content podcast . Among other things, this gives us a chance to update our initial review of “The Mandalorian” by acknowledging the Disney+ show’s breakout character, known unofficially as Baby Yoda — maybe that counts as a spoiler, but he’s all over social media already, and he’s even the subject of new Disney merchandise that seems to have been rushed into production . Beyond our “Mandalorian” catch-up, Star Wars comes up again during our discussion of things from the streaming and entertainment world that we’re thankful for. Despite some behind-the-scenes turmoil, the Disney era at Lucasfilm has brought us some delightful films, particularly “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi.” It might seem kind of redundant to praise two of the most commercially successful films of all time , but it’s also an opportunity to address the online backlash and c...

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App Store and app businesses? And which apps are everyone using? This week, we’re discussing the impact of the CFIUS investigation into TikTok, the further fallout of Apple’s vaping app ban, updates to Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass subscription-based app stores, Apple’s breaking changes that rolled out without warning (thanks, Apple!) and a shady app that reached the top of the App Store thanks to a big Kardashians-led endorsement, among other things. Headlines TikTok separates further from its Chinese parent One of the world’s most downloaded and used apps, TikTok, is under a national security review in the U.S. because of its Chinese roots. TikTok parent company, ByteDance, is a China-based operation —...