Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
- Peloton, the buzzy exercise-bike startup that ignited the connected-fitness craze, has filed for an IPO and revealed spiraling losses. The connected-fitness company has accumulated losses of more than $500 million.
- A former Uber and Google executive has been indicted on accusations of stealing self-driving-car tech. Anthony Levandowski pled not guilty in his arraignment hearing on Tuesday.
- SpaceX’s Starhopper rocket ship successfully launched on a 150-meter flight from South Texas. Starhopper is a test bed for a much larger vehicle, called Starship, which is being designed to send people to the moon and Mars.
- Google Cloud is shutting down Hire, the recruiting service that its former CEO Diane Greene helped create. Customers can use the service until September 1, 2020 or when their contract ends, whichever comes first, Google said.
- A review of 14,756 rides found Uber and Lyft taking a much bigger slice of drivers’ fares than they say they do. Uber and Lyft disputed the figures, saying the sample sizes were not representative of the millions of rides taken each day.
- WeWork has reportedly been bleeding HR managers in the last year, and some are pointing fingers at CEO Adam Neumann. Nearly a dozen of WeWork’s top human resources officials have left the company in the last year or are in the process of leaving, The Information reported.
- Susan Wojcicki said in a letter to creators that YouTube will remain an open platform, even if that means it will offend people along the way. Wojcicki also tried to shut down a popular theory that the company allows problematic videos to stay up on its site, as a way to bolster views and ultimately boost its business, saying, that idea “is simply not true.”
- Facebook could face increased scrutiny from EU regulators after audio data from European users was mistakenly sent to human contractors. An August 13 report from Bloomberg revealed that Facebook was sending audio data from voice chats to be transcribed in order to help the company improve its speech recognition technology.
- WeWork acquired a startup called Spacious that converts empty New York and San Francisco restaurants into coworking spaces. The acquisition comes on the heels of the We Company’s highly-anticipated IPO filing earlier this month.
- Microsoft is announcing new laptops and other gadgets at an event on October 2. The company is expected to reveal new Surface laptops and computers.
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