Hacking Humanity

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Wattpad’s free storytelling and fan fiction app, now with 60M monthly users, adds a $6/month ad-free plan  —  Wattpad, the company

Alex Konrad / Forbes: Automile raises $34M Series B led by Insight Venture Partners for its vehicle fleet tracking and management service  —  Jens Nylander’s

Jon Evans / TechCrunch: Unlike the Internet and smartphones, new technology waves like AI and self-driving cars tend to favor cash-flush data-rich tech incumbents rather

Dieter Bohn / The Verge: Google ‘actively investigating’ reports of Pixel 2 XL screen burn-in  —  Bad to worse  —  Over the weekend, people with

Financial Times: Chinese online lender Qudian raised $900M in US IPO, closed up 22% on its first day of trading on Wednesday  —  Qudian, one

Jon Fingas / Engadget: UK regulators order 450+ sites to remove casino games allegedly targeting the under-18 crowd, following an investigation by The Times  — 

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Hiya, a Whitepages spinout, raises $18M Series A for its smart caller ID technology  —  Hiya came to life a year

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: Essential Phone price drops $200 to $499, a few months after its debut; current US customers get online credit toward other

Raj Mukherjee / Indeed Blog: Survey of 1,011 US tech workers: 43% worry about losing their job due to age, 87% say diversity possibly or

Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: Google says it plans to take a percentage of fees for subscriptions publishers get via its upcoming subscriber targeting tools