Weekly Roundup: Intel buys Mobileye for $15.3B, Uber’s navigation for drivers improves

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Image Credits: Justin Sullivan

This week four people were accused of hacking at least 500 million Yahoo accounts, Spotify partnered with Waze and Intel bought computer vision company Mobileye. These are the top stories of the week, and you can also get this post as a weekly newsletter in your inbox, if you prefer.

1. The U.S. Department of Justice accused of two Russian FSB officers and two criminal hackers of orchestrating the hack of at least 500 million Yahoo accounts. The DoJ alleges that they used unauthorized access to Yahoo’s systems to obtain unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and other providers. One of the defendants is also accused of ecommerce fraud, as he used his access to Yahoo’s network for personal financial gain.

2. Intel is bolstering its expansion into self driving tech with the acquisition of Mobileye, a leading company in computer vision and autonomous driving tech. The deal is worth $15.3 billion, and happens to be the largest acquisition of an Israeli tech company to date.

3. The driver-facing side of the Uber app got some big changes to its navigation system. Uber previously relied on external routing apps like Google Maps and Waze, but now the service has been designed specifically for drivers, offering better routing and improved pick-ups and drop-offs.

4. Watch out, Slack. Microsoft opened its Teams collaboration and communication platform to all Office 365 users. The company also announced around 150 integrations with third-party services like Asana and Zendesk. But the question may be whether Microsoft is late to the enterprise comms game.

5. No more app-switching while driving. Spotify and Waze have partnered to let you play music and navigate in a more seamless way. Now, Waze users can listen to Spotify playlists from within the app, and Spotify users can continue to get their Waze navigation instructions while in the music app.

6. Snap’s IPO may have paved the way for more 2017 public offerings to come. Yext, a New York-based company that powers location data in search results has revealed its IPO filing and will join the stock market as soon as April of this year. The offering is said to raise $100 million at this point.

7. Things are not looking good for GoPro. The camera company announced it will cut 270 more jobs. This is in addition to the 100 announced in January and 200 back in November.

8. Okta, a unicorn cloud identity management company, filed to go public. Okta reported on its S-1 that its revenue grew from $41.0 million in fiscal 2015 to $85.9 million in fiscal 2016. That’s a 109% increase.

9. WhatsApp jumped the gun when it replaced its text Status section with the new visual Snapchat-like Stories feature. Now, the chat app has revived Status – showing its quick adaptation to user feedback.

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