Airbnb is reportedly planning to distribute prototype buildings next year. Yesterday, Samara, a futures division of Airbnb meant to develop new products and services for the company, announced a new initiative called Backyard. The initiative is described in a press release as “an endeavor to design and prototype new ways of building and sharing homes,” with the first wave of test units going public in 2019. Fast Company reports: The name “Backyard” might imply that Airbnb just wants to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), those small cottages that sit behind large suburban houses and are often rented on Airbnb. [Airbnb chief product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia] clarifies that is not the case. “The project was born in a studio near Airbnb headquarters,” he says in an interview over email. “We always felt as if we were in Airbnb’s backyard — physically and conceptually — and started referring to the project as such.”

Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia’s telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. “Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time,” Gebbia says. “Backyard isn’t a house, it’s an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we’re taking a broad approach — not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things.”

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Source: Slashdot – Airbnb Will Start Designing Houses In 2019

Prosecutors in South Korea say that Samsung’s latest bendable screen technology has been stolen and sold to two Chinese companies. “The prosecutors allege that a Samsung supplier leaked blueprints of Samsung’s ‘flexible OLED edge panel 3D lamination’ to a company that it had set up,” reports CNN. “That company then sold the tech secrets to the Chinese firms for nearly $14 million, according to the prosecutors.” CNN reports: The Suwon District Prosecutor’s Office charged 11 people on Thursday with stealing tech secrets from Samsung, the office said in a statement. They did not name the people or companies involved in the theft. Samsung Display, a subsidiary of the South Korean conglomerate, said in a statement Friday that it was “surprised and appalled at the results of the investigation by prosecutors.”

Prosecutors said Samsung invested six years and some 150 billion won ($130 million) to develop the bendable screen. Investigators have not been able to track down and question two Chinese individuals believed to be involved in the case, and have asked Interpol to help find and detain them. Of the 11 people indicted, three have been detained.

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Source: Slashdot – Samsung’s Foldable Screen Tech Has Been Stolen, Sold To China

According to 9to5Google, Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020. The news shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since Google essentially stopped development on the app more than a year ago. Thankfully, there are plenty of other Google messaging apps available, such as Allo, Duo, and Android Messages. From the report: Last spring, Google announced its pivot for the Hangouts brand to enterprise use cases with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time regarding the Hangouts consumer app’s demise. Meanwhile, Google has transitioned its consumer-facing messaging efforts to RCS ‘Chat’ and Android Messages following Allo’s misadventures.

As mentioned, Hangouts as a brand will live on with G Suite’s Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, the former intended to be a team communication app comparable to Slack, and the latter a video meetings platform. Meanwhile, Google Voice calling, which was at first independent and then long integrated into Hangouts, was moved back out to its own redesigned app earlier this year. Interestingly, despite its forthcoming axing, Hangouts was one of a few apps to get early support for Android Auto’s new MMS and RCS functionality, alongside Android Messages and WhatsApp.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Hangouts For Consumers Will Be Shutting Down Sometime In 2020

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Facebook executives in recent years appeared to discuss giving access to their valuable user data to some companies that bought advertising when it was struggling to launch its mobile-ad business, according to internal emails quoted in newly unredacted court filings. In an ongoing federal court case against Facebook, the plaintiffs claim that the social media giant doled out people’s data secretly and selectively in exchange for advertising purchases or other concessions, even as others were cut off, ruining their businesses. The case was brought by one such company, Six4Three, which claims its business was destroyed in 2015 by Facebook’s actions.

In one of the exchanges from the filings, Facebook employees discussed shutting down access “in one-go to all apps that don’t spend at least $250k a year to maintain access to the data,” according to the trove. The documents reference email exchanges regarding Facebook’s relations with several large commercial partners, including Lyft, Tinder, Amazon.com, Airbnb and the Royal Bank of Canada. Facebook denies that it exchanged access to people’s data for commercial benefit. Thousands of pages of court filings, which Facebook is fighting to keep sealed — including in an emergency hearing scheduled for Friday afternoon — illustrate the shrewd strategies the social network employed as it built its advertising empire. The disclosure sheds light on allegations of anti-competitive behavior that could play into efforts by U.S. and European lawmakers to curb the power of technology giants. “The documents Six4Three gathered for this baseless case are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context,” Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, said in a statement. “We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends’ data with developers. Any short-term extensions granted during this platform transition were to prevent the changes from breaking user experience.”

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook Discussed Using People’s Data As a Bargaining Chip, Emails and Court Filings Suggest