Technology

Google Cloud announced today that its new data center in Salt Lake City has opened, making it the 22nd such center the company has opened to date.

This Salt Lake City data center marks the third in the western region, joining LA and The Dalles, Oregon with the goal of providing lower latency compute power across the region.

&We&re committed to building the most secure, high-performance and scalable public cloud, and we continue to make critical infrastructure investments that deliver our cloud services closer to customers that need them the most,& said Jennifer Chason, director of Google Cloud Enterprise for the Western States and Southern California said in a statement.

Cloud vendors in general are trying to open more locations closer to potential customers. This is a similar approach taken by AWS when it announced its LA local zone at AWS re:Invent last year. The idea is to reduce latency by moving compute resources closer to the companies that need them, or to spread workloads across a set of regional resources.

Google also announced that PayPal, a company that was already a customer, has signed a multi-year contract, and will be moving parts of its payment systems into the western region. Itworth noting that Salt Lake City is also home to a thriving startup scene that could benefit from having a data center located close by.

Google Cloudparent company Alphabet recently shared the cloud divisionquarterly earnings for the first time, indicating that it was on a run rate of more than $10 billion. While it still has a long way to go to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon, as it expands its reach in this fashion, it could help grow that market share.

Xbox-maker Microsoft announced today that it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, highlighting concerns surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

The company made the announcement on its Game Stack Blog:

After a close review of guidance by global health authorities and out of an abundance of caution, we&ve made the difficult decision to withdraw from participating at Game Developers Conference 2020 in San Francisco.

Instead of holding a physical event at the conference, Microsoft says it will be holding an online-only event that week.

Microsoft is just the latest company to pull out from the conference, which is being held March 16-20. Other companies backing out include Facebook, Unity and Sony. Epic Games announced it would also be pulling out of the event Thursday.

Earlier this week, city officials in San Francisco declared a state of emergency.

The COVID-19 outbreak has already affected several large industry conference. Facebook also announced Thursday morning that it would be canceling its F8 conference. With such major players exiting GDC, one wonder whether the conference could face a similar fate to GSMAMobile World Congress which eventually had to cancel the mobile event outright after its major exhibitors all bowed out.

We&ve reached out to the folks behind GDC for comment.

Facebook has confirmed that it has canceled its annual F8 developers conference over growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

More specifically, the company says itcanceling the &in-person component,& which would have been held in San Jose, Calif. There may still be video presentations, along with live-streamed and local events, under the F8 umbrella.

&Celebrating our global developer community at F8 each year is incredibly important to us at Facebook, but we won&t sacrifice the health and safety of our community to do so,& said Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebookdirector of developer platforms and programs, in a statement. &Out of concerns around COVID-19, we&re cancelling the in-person component of F8, but we look forward to connecting with our developer partners through local events, video and live streamed content.&

The move follows the recent cancellation of the Mobile World Congress event, which was scheduled to happen this week in Barcelona. Meanwhile, a number of companies have pulled out of next monthGame Developers Conference, although organizers said yesterday that the event will be &moving forward as planned.&

&We explored other ways to keep the in-person part of F8, but itimportant to us to host an inclusive event and it didn&t feel right to have F8 without our international developers in attendance,& Papamiltiadis added in a blog post.

The official site notes that it will share additional details on the event &in the coming weeks.&

In order to mitigate the impact of the cancellation, Papamiltiadis said Facebook will be donating $500,000 (double the normal amount) to organizations working to make the tech industry more diverse, &and will prioritize organizations serving local San Jose residents.& He also noted that Facebook normally hosts local students as part of F8, so this year it will be providing them with &an F8-inspired experience& instead.

It remains to be seen what the fears around the disease will mean for other large tech events throughout the year; italready affecting the stock marketing and tech earnings. There have been more than 82,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 47 countries, according to the World Health Organization, resulting in around 2,800 deaths so far.

Update: Both Google and Microsoft are also scheduled to host their annual developer conferences in May. We have asked both companies for statements. &Yes, Google I/O is still planned for May 12 & 14 at Shoreline and there&smore specific info here for people planning to attend,& Google tells us. &We&ll continue to monitor developments around COVID-19 and follow the best practices laid out by the CDC, WHO, and other relevant entities.&

From Microsoft: &Our plans to host Build 2020 remain unchanged. The safety of our employees is a top priority and we will evaluate the situation and adjust plans as necessary.&

Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff, DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public. The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve.

The move to announceits private filing is more interesting and could be related to prepping demand for its shares, providing some PR-cover for backer SoftBank, which could use the assist, or, perhaps, to dampen investor excitement for rival companies, in the face of DoorDashimplied success and maturity.

Whatever the reasons behind the timing — some of which must deal with the capital requirements of long-running cash burn — the filing is a new milestone for the on-demand and gig economies. And how well DoorDashfiling is received, predicated in no small part on its recent financial performance, will help set sentiment for a number of other, richly backed startups.

So letremind ourselves of what we know about DoorDashfinancial history. This will give us a workable foundation heading into its eventual S-1, and, we presume, old-fashioned IPO. (Ithard to imagine the cash-fired engine that is DoorDash looking toward a direct listing.) We&ll dig through its fundraising, unearth what we know about its revenue over time and turn over some data concerning its hiring efforts in recent months to better understand its IPO prep.

History

DoorDashfundraising history is well-known but worth recalling sequentially.

While Spotify currently dominates the globe on the music streaming front, the Swedish company has made it clear it wants to overtake Apple and conquer the realm of podcasts too, and its latest money move has arrived in the form of new Spotify Original and Exclusive podcasts for Australia.

This time last year, the streaming giant dropped US$200