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Tech News Today for March 22, 2017

Tech News for Wednesday March 22, 2017

Airbnb is adopting the new name "Aibiying" in China and has doubled its investment in the country. Read more at bloomberg.com.

The saga over Google's ad algorithm continues. Today both AT&T, Verizon, and Enterprise rent-a-car have pulled their ads from Google and YouTube, even after Google apologized and said they were fixing their system to avoid ads appearing on extremist content. This will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for the company. Read more at businessinsider.com.

Elon Musk criticized President Donald Trump for touting his signing of a NASA budget authorization bill as being "about jobs." And indeed, authorization bills don't give NASA new funding or create new jobs. Funding comes from appropriations committees, as ArsTechnica pointed out in its coverage Musk's critique. What this bill did was tick off a final approval to keep things going on exisiting long running NASA projects, like the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft. Musk said in a pair of tweets: "This bill changes almost nothing about what NASA is doing. Existing programs stay in place and there is no added funding for Mars. Perhaps there will be some future bill that makes a difference for Mars, but this is not it." Read more at arstechnica.com.

Copying Snapchat is so last week. Today Instagram is adding features stolen from Yelp, OpenTable, and other services like Angie's List. You will now be able to look up reviews of different businesses and even book appointments or restaurant reservations. The fact that Instagram can now offer businesses, not just a like or a follow, but actual business is a big move for the company. The photo and video sharing tool owned by Facebook has more than 1 million monthly advertisers, which is five times what it was a year ago. Read more at theverge.com.

Nintendo says the Switch's left Joy-Con controller issue is not a hardware problem, but a "manufacturing variation." Nintendo says there are other reasons why consumers may be having wireless interference, and is encouraging customers that have issues to contact them so they can determine whether a repair is necessary. Read more at kotaku.com.

Jason Howell is out this week, so Nathan Olivarez-Giles will be joining Megan Morrone. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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