10 things in tech you need to know today, September 20

Jeff Bezos is reportedly
thinking about opening thousands of Amazon brick-and-mortar
stores by 2021.
Alex Wong / Getty
Images

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this
Thursday.

1.
Amazon is thinking about opening 3,000 cashierless
brick-and-mortar stores by 2021, Bloomberg reports.
Jeff Bezos is experimenting with different formats for “Amazon
Go” according to people familiar with the
matter.

2.
The new Apple Watch reviews are in, and its features may be
overshadowed by its steep price tag. The new
Apple Watch models go on sale on Friday, the first major
redesign of the product since Apple first released it in 2015.

3.
The EU is now going after Amazon after slapping Google and Apple
with giant fines. The European Union’s
competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said on Wednesday
that the EU had started a preliminary investigation into Amazon
over potential antitrust violations.

4.
Apple will log how many “phone calls or emails you send and
receive” to give “trust scores” to your
devices. Apple is going to start using phone
call and email metadata in an attempt to combat fraud.

5.
Sony announced the launch of a $100 mini version of the original
PlayStation. Sony is releasing the console — which
is 45% smaller than its original counterpart — in December.

6.
Jack Ma said Trump’s trade war with China will wreck Alibaba’s
plans to help create 1 million US jobs. The
comment, made in an interview with Chinese media outlet Xinhua,
comes two days after Trump announced a fresh set of tariffs on
$200 billion worth of Chinese goods.

7.
A Drug Enforcement Agency plane collided with a Tesla Model X as
it crash-landed on a Texas street. A Drug
Enforcement Agency plane crash-landed in the Sugar Land, Texas,
area on Wednesday, injuring one of the three special agents on
board.

8.
Salesforce’s newest AI product Einstein Voice is like Amazon’s
Alexa for the workforce. Einstein Voice
includes an assistant tool, which can interpret voice memos and
enter data from what it hears, as well as surface critical data
from Salesforce using only voice commands.

9.

Mark Zuckerberg’s money manager invested $100 million in a hot
startup, and it shows how Microsoft’s $7.5 billion GitHub
acquisition is sending shockwaves through Silicon
Valley. GitLab has raised $100 million in a round
led by Iconiq Capital, with the deal valuing the startup at $1.1
billion.

10.
The Lyft app will now tell you the fastest way to get anywhere,
even if it means taking public transit instead of a Lyft
ride. Lyft and a company called Trafi are
partnering to add additional transportation methods like public
transit to Lyft’s in-app routing system.

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