Techmeme
June 28, 2018, 6:50 PM

Top News

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.
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 …
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 …
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.
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
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.
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.
Catalin Cimpanu / BleepingComputer:
Norwegian agency report: Facebook and Google manipulate users to share personal data using “dark patterns” despite GDPR; Windows 10 gets a more favorable rating  —  Despite the new GDPR regulation entering into effect across Europe, Facebook and Google are manipulating users …
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 …
David Carnoy / CNET:
Amazon introduces Show Mode in its Fire HD tablets via a software update that turns them into an Echo Show for a hands-free Alexa experience  —  Amazon wants you to think of your Fire tablet as not just a tablet but a full-fledged Alexa-enabled device — or more precisely, a slimmed down Echo Show.
Pavel Alpeyev / Bloomberg:
Chat app Line will open a crypto exchange next month in Singapore, which will be available in 15 languages to users worldwide except those in US and Japan  —  - Bitbox will open in July and handle more than 30 virtual coins  — Service will be available worldwide, except in Japan and U.S.
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Sonos Beam review: the Alexa integration works well, but music sound quality is average for a $400 device, and Google Assistant support has not yet arrived  —  Exactly what it says it'll do  —  It's extremely tempting to overthink the Sonos Beam — it's the first really new product …
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
China's Tsinghua University to launch an AI research center in collaboration with Google, Tencent, and others; Google's AI chief Jeff Dean is an advisor  —  Today at Google's AI Symposium in Beijing, Tsinghua University revealed plans to open a center for artificial intelligence research and development in China.
David Henry / Reuters:
JP Morgan Chase launches Finn by Chase, a mobile only bank account with an app for iOS and an Android version coming by the end of the year  —  NEW YORK (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) said on Thursday that it is now offering a digital bank account for smartphones nationally after testing …

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