Techmeme
August 7, 2018, 9:35 AM

Top News

Donie O'Sullivan / CNNMoney:
West Virginia to introduce mobile phone voting in the midterm elections via blockchain-based Voatz platform, will limit use largely to 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 …
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 …
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).
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 …
Alex Hern / The Guardian:
Sara Salinas / CNBC:
Kif Leswing / Business Insider:
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  —  Earlier this summer, Microsoft announced that they would be ending support for version 7.0 of classic Skype in September.
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  —  Amazon confirmed it's rolling out a new feature called “Answer Update” to Alexa device users over the next week …

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Earlier Picks

Josh Constine / TechCrunch: