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Reuters : Investigation: apparent global Iranian influence project bigger than previously known; Facebook says it has taken down more accounts linked to Iran   —  LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An apparent Iranian influence operation targeting internet users worldwide is significantly bigger than previously identified …

New York Times : Sources: 100+ Facebook employees form an online group to create space for ideological debate after an internal post challenging its “intolerant” liberal culture   —  SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook's internal message board last week.

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk : Morgan Creek and Bitwise partner to create the Digital Asset Index Fund, a cryptocurrency fund offering the top 10 digital assets for institutional investors   —  Morgan Creek Digital and crypto index provider Bitwise are teaming up to launch a new index fund aimed at institutional investors looking to enter the digital asset market.

Jon Russell / TechCrunch : Google says it's rebranding Tez, its payments app for India, as Google Pay, will expand it to cover micro-loans and add Tez features to Google Pay worldwide   —  Google launched its Tez paymen app in India a year ago, and now the company is giving the service major push into retail as it prepares …

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat : Puls, a startup matching consumers with on-demand freelance technicians in 50+ US cities to fix common electronic devices, raises $50M Series C led by Temasek   —  Puls Technologies has raised $50 million to expand its business of providing on-the-go technicians to do tech support in your home.

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet : Microsoft to add AI-powered audio and video transcription, file recommendations, and content-sharing tools to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint later in 2018   —  Microsoft is adding automated audio and video transcription, file recommendations and new content-sharing options to its OneDrive …

Abner Li / 9to5Google : YouTube adding “Time watched” stats and Digital Wellbeing options like “Remind me to take a break” to its Android and iOS apps   —  Announced at I/O 2018, YouTube was one of the first products that launched Digital Wellbeing features like break reminders and notification management.

Reuters : VMware to acquire Boston-based CloudHealth, sources say for about $500M, to help enterprises manage deployments across their own datacenters and public clouds   —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - VMware Inc will acquire CloudHealth Technologies as part of the information technology company's continued push …

Sean O'Neill / Skift : Evolve Vacation Rental Network raises $80M to expand its rental properties management service, bringing total capital raised to $103M   —  Vacation rental management is becoming professionalized, and the gold rush is on.  —  The vacation rental tech sector continues to produce outsized funding rounds …

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google : Bloomberg: Google Pixel 3 to launch on October 9th at NYC event   —  Thanks to a flood of recent leaks, the hype is real leading up to Google's next Pixel launch.  Now, according to a new report, that launch might end up just a little bit later than we thought...

Cecilia Kang / New York Times : Tech companies are lobbying for a federal privacy law that would overrule the California law and give them wide leeway over how personal information is handled   —  WASHINGTON — Technology companies have taken plenty of hits on privacy this year.  In May, Europe began enforcing a sweeping …

Hadas Gold / CNNMoney : Facebook says it was “too slow” to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” in Myanmar via its site   —  How controversy changed Facebook's mission  —  Facebook has banned 20 organizations and individuals in Myanmar, including a senior military commander …

Dylan Martin / CRN : Q&A with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster on the company's bet on 7nm instead of 10nm as Intel's chips face delays, plans to win market share in the server space, more   —  AMD CTO Mark Papermaster tells CRN why the company now has a “razor's edge” to compete against Intel and how it plans to win more market share in the server space.

Hans Tung Contributor Hans Tung is a managing partner at GGV Capital . More posts by this contributor Consumer internet startups go mainstream outside of Silicon Valley Beyond Amazon and Alibaba: what’s next for e-commerce? Zara Zhang Contributor Share on Twitter Zara Zhang is an investment analyst with GGV Capital and a blogger about China, tech, and food. On August 16, Xiaomi celebrated the seventh anniversary of the release of its first phone, and the eighth anniversary of MIUI’s launch. As an early investor in Xiaomi in spring 2010 and a former board member of the company, I attended Xiaomi’s IPO in Hong Kong on July 9. I felt nostalgic and grateful, and marveled at how much Xiaomi — which seemed like a crazy idea to many back in January 2010 — has achieved over the past eight years. Xiaomi’s business model is not the easiest to appreciate if you have never tried its products. Its holistic value proposition doesn’t have an easy equivalent in the US. I frequently get asked questions about how the company works and what justifies its valuation for each round over the years. Here’s my take on the five most asked questions: Why is Xiaomi an “Internet company”? Isn’t it just a manufacturer of cheap smartphones with really low margin? At first glance Xiaomi may seem like a hardware company, which traditionally has lower gross margins.

Fifty-nine startups took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2 , and among the highlights were a company that helps developers manage in-app subscriptions; a service that lets you create animojis from real photos; and a surplus medical equipment-reselling platform. Oh… and there was also a company that’s developed an entirely new kind of life form using e coli bacteria. So yeah, that’s happening. Based on some investor buzz and what caught TechCrunch’s eye, these are our top picks from the second day of Y Combinator’s presentations. You can find the full list of companies that presented on Day 1 here , and our top picks from Day 1 here.  64-x With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute),  64-x  is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries. Basically they’ve engineered a new life form that they want to use for novel kinds of bio-manufacturing. Why we liked it:  These geniuses invented a new life form. CB Therapeutics Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of 10 and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market. Why we liked it:  Using manufacturing processes to make industrial quantities of what looks like nature’s best painkiller at scale is not a bad idea. RevenueCat RevenueCat  helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform