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August 7, 2018, 12:10 PM
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Top News

Donie O'Sullivan / CNNMoney:
West Virginia to introduce mobile phone voting in the midterm elections via Voatz's blockchain-based platform, mainly for troops serving abroad  —  Why voting in the US is so hard  —  West Virginians serving overseas will be the first in the country to cast federal election ballots using a smartphone app …
Instapaper:
Instapaper returns to EU users after being unavailable since May 24 for GDPR compliance and relaunches Instapaper Premium subscription for $2.99/month  —  This year Instapaper celebrated its tenth birthday and, now that we are an independent company, we've been thinking a lot about the next ten years of Instapaper and beyond.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Video streaming startup NewTV, led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, raises $1B round with Disney, Alibaba, NBCUniversal, Viacom, and others participating  —  Backers include Disney, Fox, Sony, Lionsgate, MGM, NBCU, Viacom, WarnerMedia, Alibaba, Liberty Global, Madrone Capital
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Ahead of OIG report expected to reveal no evidence of a DDoS attack on FCC comment system in May 2017, Ajit Pai says former CIO gave him inaccurate information  —  The FCC has come clean on the fact that a purported hack of its comment system last year never actually took place …
Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg:
Sources: SoftBank's Vision Fund plans to lead an investment of $3B-$5B in Alibaba's food delivery service Ele.me  —  - Masayoshi Son's fund is said to be heading up investor talks  — The round marks a much-needed boost in a costly subsidies war  —  SoftBank Group Corp.'s monster Vision Fund plans …
Priya Anand / The Information:
Sources: Amazon's sold ~50M Alexa devices, and only 2% of those owners have used Alexa to make a purchase in 2018; source: 90% of those haven't tried again  —  Amazon and Google both tout voice shopping—the ability to make purchases and check on the status of orders with verbal commands …
CNBC:
Twitter says accounts for Alex Jones and Infowars do not violate its policies, and it will leave them live for now  —  - Apple, Facebook and Google-owned YouTube removed videos, pages and podcasts posted by the controversial radio host.  — Jones took to Twitter and its wholly owned …
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Facebook bans Infowars and 3 other pages run by Alex Jones for “repeated violations of Community Standards”; Spotify removes all episodes of The Alex Jones Show
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Overview of how AI has continued its fundraising tear in 2018, led by SenseTime Group's ~$620M funding and UiPath's $153M Series B  —  In late May, Chinese facial recognition technology developer SenseTime Group announced it had raised $620 million in a second round of funding.
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Google says it will add ARCore support to its education-focused Chromebook Tab 10 tablet alongside other improvements to its Classroom software  —  Google today announced a bunch of updates are now rolling out to its Google for Education suite.  Some of these upgrades were first unveiled …
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Android 9, called Pie, is coming to Google Pixel phones today, but some key features won't officially ship until fall, like “slices” app search functionality  —  Google today revealed Android P stands for Android Pie, succeeding Android Oreo, and pushed the latest source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

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From Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Paramount has offered $15M to settle with Trump; Trump's team wants more than $25M, is seeking an apology from CBS News, and threatened another lawsuit

Ben Johansen / Politico:
Sources: all 800 full-time VOA staff are expected to receive reduction-in-force notices this week, after ~600 VOA contractors were dismissed earlier in May

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Memo: David Leavy, who became CNN's COO in 2023, is leaving; sources say the longtime key lieutenant of David Zaslav is returning to Warner Bros. Discovery

More News

Earlier Picks

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Amazon is rolling out an Alexa feature called Answer Update that will notify users when Alexa learns the answer to a question it didn't know when first asked
Brad Sams / Thurrott.com:
After pushback from users, Microsoft says it will not end support for “classic” Skype 7.0 in Sept. but does not provide a new timeline for phasing it out
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook calls WSJ report incorrect, says it's not asking banks for CC transaction data nor making a dedicated banking feature but is aiming to improve chatbots
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