Well-regarded tech analyst Ben Thompson posits a pretty convincing explanation for Microsoft’s agreement to buy GitHub for $7.5 billion. “Lacking a platform with sufficient users to attract developers, Microsoft has to ‘acquire’ developers directly through superior tooling and now, with GitHub, a superior cloud offering with a meaningful amount of network effects,” he writes.

With more than 100,000 paying subscribers, The Athletic appears to be redefining sports publishing, The Wall Street Journal reports. “The Athletic’s investors are wagering that people will pay for analytical sports writing that goes beyond box scores and headlines,” it writes. “The site charges $5 a month, or $60 for an annual subscription, and says it has more than 100,000 subscribers.”  

Apple’s iOS 12 Messages camera will include a variety of sticker packs, style transfers like a “comic book” filter, drawn shapes and both Animoji and the new personalized avatar Memoji, TechCrunch reports. “These effects will also be available in FaceTime, which now supports group video conversations with up to 32 people,” it writes.

A popular comment-hosting service named Disqus is apparently getting clobbered by the worst breed of trolls, BuzzFeed reports. “The alt-right and white nationalist trolls who frequent Twitter and backwater message boards have found another gathering place online: the commenting platform Disqus,” it writes. “Used by publications like Rolling Stone and TMZ, Disqus says it gets about 2 billion unique visitors each month.”  

The Wall Street Journal has the inside scoop on the ongoing disharmony between Facebook and its WhatsApp unit over business strategy. WhatsApp’s co-founders agreed to sell their brainchild to Facebook for nearly $20 billion, in 2014. Due to disagreements, however, “The creators of the popular messaging service are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table,” The Journal writes.

Twitter has broken up its live-video business unit, Variety reports. Going forward, programming deals will be handled by a content partnership team time, it writes. Writes Variety: “The move is part of a larger reorganization under Kay Madati, Twitter’s global head of content partnerships, to adopt a regional management structure rather than the previous one based on categories like news, sports and live video.”

Worldwide, smartphone sales grew by 1.3% from the first quarter of 2017 to the same period in 2018, ZDNet reports, citing new research from Gartner. “Close to 384 million smartphones were sold in the first quarter of this year, representing 84 percent of total sales,” it writes. “Sales of all kinds of mobile phones, including feature phones, reached 455 million units in Q1 2018.”

Facebook’s recently launched regulations on political advertising are hardly foolproof, The New York Times reports. “While the company has introduced several measures to improve the transparency of political ads on its platform, some groups and individuals appear to be finding ways to flout the new restrictions -- and Facebook has not been able to catch them,” The Times writes.  

Microsoft has agreed to buy code repository GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The deal “helps Microsoft, which is increasingly relying on open-source software, to add programming tools and tie up with a company that has become a key part of the way Microsoft writes its own software,” Bloomberg writes.

Amazon is now enabling Alexa to suggest voice apps. Rather than asking a specific question, “You will be able to simply tell Alexa what you want to accomplish to receive recommendations of skills to help you achieve that goal,” VentureBeat writes. “Now in beta, the CanFulfillIntentRequest interface can be used by the creators of Alexa skills in the U.S. to alert Amazon to the kinds of questions their skill may be able to answer or queries the skill is able to fulfill.”