Techmeme
June 29, 2018, 12:00 AM

Top News

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Sources: Amazon acquired PillPack in a deal valued at just under $1B; PillPack had been in acquisition talks with Walmart, which was outbid by Amazon  —  A week after appointing a CEO for its healthcare joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, Amazon today announced an acquisition …
CNBC:
Amazon to acquire online pharmacy PillPack, which organizes and delivers drugs to consumers and is licensed in 50 states; PillPack has raised $117.8M in funding  —  - PillPack packages, organizes and delivers drugs.  It sends consumers packages with the specific number of medications they're supposed to take at specific times.
Chloe Aiello / CNBC:
Twitter is reorganizing its teams into groups, like engineering, instead of individual products; Kayvon Beykpour, former Periscope CEO, named head of product  —  - Ed Ho, who has been on leave since May, explained in a series of tweets his decision was based largely on an unexpected family loss.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Instagram adds the ability to add licenced songs as background music for Stories starting today in 7 countries and says it has 400M daily Stories users  —  The right music can make a boring photo or video epic, so Instagram is equipping users with a way to add popular songs to their Stories.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Niantic Labs, which helped develop Pokémon Go, says it will open the underlying AR platform, called Real World Engine, to third-party developers  —  Niantic Labs, the San Francisco-based game developer responsible for creating the massively successful augmented reality game Pokémon Go …
Inti De Ceukelaire:
Researcher: Facebook quiz maker NameTests exposed personal info of ~120M users for years, in a data leak that was fixed after the Cambridge Analytica scandal  —  Ever took a personality test on Facebook?  For years, anyone could have accessed your private information, friends, posts and photos.
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch:
Bird officially announces $300M raise led by Sequoia Capital, its second raise in just a few months  —  And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively-hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Twitter makes its Ad Transparency Center, announced before Congressional hearings in October, available to all users  —  Twitter is unveiling the Ads Transparency Center that it announced back in October.  —  This comes as Twitter and other online platforms have faced growing political scrutiny around …
Anna Hensel / VentureBeat:
Facebook rolls out a button to show ads a Page is running, even if not targeted to the user, across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger  —  Facebook today released a new tool that will allow users to see what advertisements a Page is running — whether or not all of those advertisements are targeted at that particular users.
Aaron Smith / Pew Research Center:
Survey of 4,594 US adults: 72% say it's likely social media firms censor opposing political views; 43% say firms support liberal views over conservative views  —  A majority of Republicans say technology firms support the views of liberals over conservatives and that social media platforms censor political viewpoints.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Sling TV raises core package price by $5 to $25/month, introduces free content and a la carte channel subscriptions  —  Sling TV, the first to deliver an over-the-top TV service aimed at cord cutters, is shaking up its business.  The company announced today it's raising the base price …
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Kroger, the US's largest supermarket chain, teams up with Nuro, a two-year-old self-driving startup, to launch driverless delivery service later this fall  —  Kroger is teaming up with Nuro, a startup founded by two veterans of Google's self-driving team  —  Kroger, the nation's largest …
Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss / Reuters:
Report: ICOs raised $13.7B in the first five months of 2018, up from $7B in 2017; only 30% of the 3,470 ICOs since 2013 closed successfully  —  NEW YORK (Reuters) - Digital currency sales jumped to $13.7 billion in the first five months of the year, nearly double the amount raised for the whole of 2017 …

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Nilay Patel / The Verge:
David Carnoy / CNET:
Pavel Alpeyev / Bloomberg:
Catalin Cimpanu / BleepingComputer: