Tech Releases

Facebook's daily active user base in the US and Canada fell for the first time ever in Q4, dropping from 185M to 184M in the previous quarter (Recode)

Concerns grow that Bitcoin's price is being propped up by Bitfinex, the widely-used and shadowy exchange subpoenaed in December by the US CFTC (Nathaniel Popper/New York Times)

Lenovo reports Q3 $289M net loss, recorded $400M charge due to US tax reform; core PC and smart devices business group posted 8% rise in revenue to $9.25B (Reuters)

Pandora announces restructuring, shifting resources to ad tech and audience development, cutting workforce by 5% to save $45M annually, will expand in Atlanta (Todd Spangler/Variety)

eBay says it will stop using PayPal for its backend payments service by 2020 and will work with Amsterdam-based payments company Adyen instead (Jason Del Rey/Recode)

eBay reports Q4 revenue of $2.6B, with a net loss from continuing operations of $2.6B due to $3.1B tax charge, full year revenue of $9.6B (eBay Newsroom)

Qualcomm and Samsung announce patent cross-licensing agreement, with Samsung withdrawing its interventions in Qualcomm's appeal against $868M fine (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

PayPal reports Q4 revenue of $3.71B, up 24% YoY, vs. $3.63B est., processes $131B in total payments volume, up 32% YoY, and adds 8.7M customer accounts (Katie Roof/TechCrunch)

Mark Zuckerberg says showing fewer viral videos reduced the total time people spent on Facebook by ~50M hours every day, as DAUs reach 2.13B, up 14% YoY (Richard Nieva/CNET)

Qualcomm reports Q1 revenue of $6.04B, up 1% YoY, $6B tax reform charge, and 96% YoY operating profit decline as Apple and others withheld royalty payments (Eugene Kim/CNBC)

AT&T reports Q4 revenue of $41.7B, vs. $41.8B last year, 4.1M total wireless net adds, and $19B net income, vs. $2.4B last year, boosted by tax reform benefit (Roger Cheng/CNET)

Microsoft's Q2 productivity revenue up 25% YoY to $9B, Intelligent Cloud revenue up 15% YoY to $7.8B, personal computing revenue up 2% YoY to $12.2B (Emil Protalinski/VentureBeat)

Twitter now says 1.4M+ US users interacted with tweets from Russia-linked accounts during 2016 election, up from 670K previously announced, has notified them (Alex Kantrowitz/BuzzFeed)

Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Results (Facebook)

Microsoft Cloud Growth Fuels Second Quarter Results (Microsoft Investor Relations)

PitchBook: female founders received $1.9B, or ~2.2%, of $85B total invested by VCs in 2017, up from 1.9% in 2016, as male-founded firms received $66.9B, or ~79% (Valentina Zarya/Fortune)

Users around the world who infrequently log in to Facebook say it has been increasing re-engagement prompts via emails and text messages recently (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)

Windows Defender to start removing “optimizer” scareware

Venezuela's president says a pre-sale of its new "petro" cryptocurrency, with each token backed by one barrel of crude oil, will begin on February 20 (CNBC)

As jury selection begins in Waymo-Uber trial, a rundown of both sides' core arguments on trade secrets, R&D, Anthony Levandowski's role, and more (Daisuke Wakabayashi/New York Times)

Jack Dorsey says almost all Square Cash App users can now trade bitcoin on the platform; service isn't available for users in NY, Georgia, Wyoming, Hawaii (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Elon Musk’s flamethrower looks like it’s a propane torch inside an airsoft gun

Game broadcasting platform Caffeine, founded by two ex-Apple designers, raised $46M across two rounds led by Greylock in 2016 and a16z in 2017 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says its Enterprise Grid service, launched one year ago, has 150+ customers (Salvador Rodriguez/Reuters)

Uber partners with JUMP to begin piloting a bike-sharing service called Uber Bike in San Francisco starting next week (Megan Rose Dickey/TechCrunch)

Lyft opens its first European office in Munich, Germany where staff will work on localization and geometric mapping tech for autonomous vehicles (Stefan Nicola/Bloomberg)

Google Flights says it will use historical data and AI to predict when planes may be delayed (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

SoftBank buys a 51% stake in Line's MVNO service in Japan, which allows unlimited data for Line services and social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Jon Russell/TechCrunch)

Spotify is testing a separate Pandora-style music app called "Stations" on Android in Australia (Janko Roettgers/Variety)