Tech Releases

Microsoft killing off the Groove Music apps for iOS and Android

To aid discovery of Alexa skills, Amazon says it's testing an interface that lets developers say what kind of questions their skill can answer (Khari Johnson/VentureBeat)

Q&A with Melinda Gates, who is investing in women-led and minority-focused venture firms through her investment and incubation company Pivotal Ventures (Polina Marinova/Fortune)

Trilogy Education, which wants to build a bootcamp program for universities focused on teaching tech-related skills, raises $50M series B (Matthew Lynley/TechCrunch)

French startup Klaxoon, which builds SaaS tools to aid office efficiency and says it has 1M MAUs, raises $50M Series B led by Idinvest Partners (Chris O'Brien/VentureBeat)

App Annie data on iOS App Store shows over 10K apps have individually generated over $1M since 2010, with 2,293 making $1M-$10M and 564 making $10M+ in 2017 (Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat)

Researcher discovers bug in Valve's platform, present for 10 years, that exposed all 125M users to exploitation until Valve fixed it in March 2018 (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/Motherboard)

Waymo announces deal with Fiat Chrysler to add 62K minivans to its upcoming robotaxi service and begins discussions on selling self-driving cars to people (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

What to expect at Apple's WWDC next week: focus on digital health, ARKit 2.0, small changes to iOS, deeper Mac-iOS integration, and no Mac or iPad hardware (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Xiaomi clones the iPhone X for $420, adds in-display fingerprint reader

China-based imToken, which claims it's the world's largest Ethereum wallet, raises $10M Series A from IDG Capital to expand in Asia and the US (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

Toronto-based smart thermostat maker Ecobee adds additional $36M to its Series C round, bringing total funding for the round to $98M (Matt Weinberger/Business Insider)

Pinterest says it will make it possible for advertisers to show promoted videos that take up the width of the screen (Matthew Lynley/TechCrunch)

Non-profit USB Implementers Forum announces a new standard for braille displays developed in cooperation with Microsoft, Apple, and others (Swapna Krishna/Engadget)

Pew Research study of US teen internet usage finds 85% say they use YouTube, 72% use Instagram, 69% use Snapchat, while only 51% say they use Facebook (Megan Farokhmanesh/The Verge)

Indian payments startup Pine Labs, which offers point-of-sale devices, raises $125M from PayPal and Singapore's Temasek, bringing total funding to $208M (Jon Russell/TechCrunch)

Despite hype, there are some signs that interest around deep learning research has slowed inside big corporations, especially in the autonomous driving space (Filip Piekniewski/Piekniewski's blog)

Cryptocurrency startup Paxos, formerly bitcoin exchange itBit, raises $65M Series B to expand blockchain-based services and operate the exchange (Anna Irrera/Reuters)

Early data after GDPR shows Google and Facebook are drawing ad money by gathering users' consent for targeted ads at far higher rates than competing services (Wall Street Journal)

Data encryption startup Virtru raises $37M Series B led by Iconiq Capital (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)

SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2.25B into GM's Cruise self-driving program, with plans to commercialize such vehicles next year (Dan Primack/Axios)

Google launches Neighbourly, a Q&A app for sharing local community knowledge in India, available as a beta in Mumbai (Jon Russell/TechCrunch)

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov says Apple has been rejecting its app updates globally since Russia banned Telegram in April (Bradley Chambers/9to5Mac)

Profile of NewsDigest, a popular news app in Japan, which employs no journalists and uses AI and social media monitoring to generate stories and spot fake news (Shoko Oda/Bloomberg)

Xiaomi announces 6.21-inch Mi 8 Explorer Edition flagship with Snapdragon 845, 6GB RAM, 3D face scanner, transparent back, and dual-frequency GPS for ~$420 (Richard Lai/Engadget)

Full video and transcript of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Mike Schroepfer at Code, on Cambridge Analytica, fake accounts, regulation, a paid model, more (Recode)

US district judge dismisses Kaspersky Lab lawsuits objecting to the ban on US government using its products (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Cyberscoop)

Advertisers use smartphone location info to send personal injury lawyer ads during and after ER visits, target Planned Parenthood visitors with pro-life ads (Bobby Allyn/NPR)