Microsoft just hired Justin Chando, CEO of classroom collaboration platform Chalkup. Chando is joining the company’s Education Product team, ZDNet reports. “By joining Microsoft, Justin will bring the best of the Chalkup features, like its original rubrics system to make it easier to assess and grade student assignments, into Microsoft Teams,” a Microsoft spokesperson tells ZDNet.

Technologist Aviv Ovadya tells Buzzfeed that emerging technologies like augmented reality are going to undermine the public’s trust in objective reality. “We are so screwed it’s beyond what most of us can imagine,” Ovadya warns. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we're even more screwed now … And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”

Amazon is laying off hundreds of corporate employees, which The Seattle Times calls “a rare cutback for a company that has spent most of the last few years in a frantic growth spurt.” Citing sources, the newspaper notes the "layoffs are primarily focused on Amazon’s consumer retail businesses.”

Wired does a deep dive into Facebook’s mounting troubles, from facilitating the spread of hateful and misleading information to the public’s growing distrust of technology. After speaking with 51 current or former Facebook employees, Wired finds it safe to describe it as a “company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill.”  

Going forward, Apple is rethinking its software release schedule, Bloomberg reports. “Instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule and cramming features into a single update, Apple will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and iPad operating system,” it writes.  

Having set its sights on Secret’s engineering team, Snap reportedly tried to buy the now-defunct anonymous sharing app. “In the fall of 2014, a source says a mutual friend introduced Spiegel to Secret CEO David Byttow,” TechCrunch reports. “Spiegel quietly met with Secret at its Bay Area offices, and later during the smaller company’s retreat to Las Vegas.”  

Google just entered into a licensing deal with Getty Images, Venture Beat reports. Ironically, “Getty has been furious with Google for years, accusing the company of essentially stealing its images for its search engine,” VB notes. “In April 2016, Getty filed an antitrust lawsuit saying that when Google started displaying high-resolution photos in its search results, it was diverting traffic away from Getty’s own site.”

Facing off against the United Parcel Service and FedEx, Amazon is reportedly readying a delivery service for businesses. “Dubbed ‘Shipping with Amazon,’ or SWA, the new service will entail the tech giant picking up packages from businesses and shipping them to consumers,” The Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources.

WhatsApp is testing a payments feature in India, TechCrunch reports. “The feature is currently in beta … but hasn’t been publicly announced because it’s not widely available at this time,” it writes. “The company has been working on support for a payments feature for some time, which would take advantage of UPI (Unified Payments Interface).”

For a fee, Scribd is once again offering what it’s calling “unlimited” access to its library of ebooks and audiobooks. “Subscribers who pay for the $8.99 monthly subscription no longer need credits to access any book that they want, and the Scribd Select program that offered unlimited books and audiobooks is going away,” The Verge reports. The service currently boasts about 700,000 subscribers, per The Verge.