| Google wants to feed you the news, Amazon wants to feed you stuff to buy and Apple wants to feed you machine learning research. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for July 19, 2017. 1. Google creates a Facebook-like News Feed without the friends Google has basically replaced Google Now with a number of features peppered throughout Android and its apps, including Google Assistant. Now, it's revamping the info feed it provides as part of its Google mobile app, with a steady stream of news based on what it knows about your interests. This looks like a genuinely useful feature, provided it surfaces stuff you really do care about. It has done that previously in my experience with Google Now, so I have high hopes. Also glad to have something that strips out the annoying friend and family posts from Facebook but leaves the salient stuff. 
2. Amazon has a new feed, too Everyone wants a feed, and Amazon has one now with Spark, a shoppable, scrollable stream of images and stories that's meant to encourage Prime members to flex those buying muscles. 3. And Apple has a blog It's kind of a feed, too – a feed of machine learning scholarship and articles. This is something Apple had said it would do a while ago, and it's a key ingredient if it hopes to attract and retain world-class machine learning talent, especially when recruiting from academia. 4. NBC now has a twice-daily Snapchat news show Do teens want news from an old network delivered on the platform they use for sharing animated hot dogs? Who knows, but NBC is willing to give it a shot regardless. 5. Nauto raises big on its double-ended self-driving data marketplace The biggest challenge facing self-driving technology development might still be one of pure volume – it takes a lot of data to teach cars to drive themselves. That's why Nauto's so appealing to investors: It sells safety improvements for human fleet drivers now, and promises big datasets for autonomous training in the future. 6. Bixby comes to America Samsung's voice assistant is finally rolling out in the U.S., months after the Galaxy S8's original launch. Samsung built a dedicated hardware button for the hyped feature, so it's got a lot riding on this working well. 7. Apple has a new Managing Director for China Greater China is a key market for Apple, and now it's assigning a Managing Director for the region for the first time. This could help it build closer ties to key government stakeholders, but I don't envy the pressure VP Isabel Ge Mahe will face in taking the reins for such a crucial part of Apple's business. Also, FYI the automated version of this newsletter is no longer going to be sending on the weekends, but if you still want TC news on the weekend you can sign up for the Week In Review or the Startups Weekly. | 
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