PayPal acquires the Square of Europe, LocationSmart has a not-smart location leak and Amazon picks up a new show about confronting Nazis. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for May 18, 2018. 1. PayPal confirms that it is buying payments startup iZettle for $2.2B in an all-cash deal iZettle is commonly referred to as the "Square of Europe." PayPal said CEO Jacob de Geer and other members of the iZettle team will remain on-board to run the business, which is supposed to become a "center of excellence" for in-store and offline payments in Europe. This is PayPal's biggest-ever acquisition. 2. LocationSmart didn't just sell mobile phone locations, it leaked them All four major U.S. carriers have said they require customer consent or law enforcement requests to share location data, but using LocationSmart's tool, phones could be located without that consent on each carrier. 3. Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller is an inspiring example of inclusive design It's essentially a pair of gigantic programmable buttons and an oversized directional pad; 3.5mm ports on the back let a huge variety of assistive devices like blow tubes, pedals and Microsoft-made accessories plug in. 4. Facebook Stories reveals 150M daily viewers and here come ads Facebook Stories has started testing its first ads in the United States, Mexico and Brazil. 5. Amazon picks up Nazi-hunting series produced by Jordan Peele Along with The Man in The High Castle, this should make Amazon the place to go to get your Nazi-fighting fix. 6. Augmented reality display maker DigiLens nabs $25 million DigiLens manufactures "waveguide displays," which have been in use for a while but are pretty much the best technology available for making AR headset displays. Hardware manufacturers interested in making headsets that aren't incredibly ugly have had to rely on them. 7. Elon Musk details his plan to rid LA of traffic with $1 rides on the Boring Co. 'Loop' Musk theorizes that the Loop could take Los Angeles residents from downtown LA to any terminal at the LAX airport within 8 minutes for about $1. |