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1. Lyft pulls e-bikes in light of apparent battery fires

Lyft recently won the right to launch its pedal-assist bikes in San Francisco, but now it’s pulling those bikes from the city and other parts of the Bay Area after two of those bikes experienced apparent battery fires.

A spokesperson told us, “Out of an abundance of caution, we are temporarily making the ebike fleet unavailable to riders while we investigate and update our battery technology.”

2. For the next month, the Impossible Whopper will be available at Burger Kings across the country

The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations, testing demand for the meaty tasting meatless patty.

3. With the acquisition closed, IBM goes all in on Red Hat

These announcements further IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud — which was the reason IBM acquired Red Hat in the first place.

4. Asana launches Workload to help prevent burnout

Workload provides a central view of how much more work any given team can currently handle. Team members can customize their own workload based on criteria like points or hours, and even set capacity limits.

5. Amazon-backed food delivery startup Deliveroo acquires Edinburgh software studio Cultivate

Cultivate is a software development and user experience design house that has worked with a number of big names, including Deliveroo itself.

6. Smartphone sales expected to drop 2.5% globally this year

New numbers from Gartner forecast a drop of 2.5%, down to 1.5 billion, with the biggest hits to the industry in Japan, Western Europe and North America.

7. The Exit: The acquisition charting Salesforce’s future

With Salesforce’s $15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau closing, we talked to investor Scott Sandell of NEA. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

The FCC is taking measures to make the launches of small satellites (but not large constellations) easier on the growing private space industry. The new licensing process should be simpler, easier, and more likely to yield a green light from the agency.

Approved unanimously at today’s open FCC meeting, the new item essentially creates an express lane for anyone looking to launch less than ten satellites weighing under 180 kilograms (about 400 pounds) each. There’s a new fee structure that should make it cheaper for these folks to apply, and should provide more certainty to them that their application will succeed.

This is an increasingly important segment of the satellite market, as startups, universities, and aerospace companies send up experiments or prototypes on the growing number of cheap orbital launch services. It’s fundamentally different from the launch environment of the preceding few decades and the beginning of an entirely new market.

Many inside the new space industry have told me that regulation is one of their biggest worries, mainly because it’s complicated and time-consuming. A good regulator should know when to step in and when to get out of the way, and the FCC has clearly opted for the latter today.

Unanimous support is a rare thing when the agency so often divides down party lines on other proposals and rules. It’s not often you hear Commissioner Rosenworcel, who bitterly opposes many of Chairman Ajit Pai’s policies, enthuse about a rule, but in the statement accompanying her vote she says: “Count me as excited that the Chairman has brought this decision before us today. It has my full support.”

The Commissioners noted that this is only one small improvement among many that need to happen in order to better promote space activity in the country.

Stemming the growing problem of orbital debris is one thing, and part of the new satellite licensing process requires applicants to minimize the debris they create. That’s a start, but entirely new rules are in the works as well.

Another, more FCC-native step to take is addressing the question of spectrum in space — that is, which slices of radio frequency should be assigned to orbital purposes, and what kind of restrictions should be placed on those purposes. With constellations of over 10,000 satellites planned, the sky is going to get mighty noisy if we’re not careful.

For now, smaller organizations looking to make it to orbit will be breathing a sigh of relief that at least one part of the red tape has been yanked out from between them and their goal.

The rules as proposed last year before the comment period and revision can be found here, but the final rules should be on the FCC’s site soon.

Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Dedicated Host, a new cloud service that will allow you to run your virtual machines on single-tenant physical services. That means you’re not sharing any resources on that server with anybody else and you’ll get full control over everything that’s running on that machine.

Previously, Azure already offered isolated Virtual Machine sizes for two very large virtual machine types. Those are still available, but their use cases are comparably limited to these new hosts, which offer far more flexibility.

With this move, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS, which also offers Dedicated Hosts with very similar capabilities. Google Cloud, too, offers what it calls ‘sole-tenant nodes.’

Azure Dedicated Host will support Windows, Linux and SQL Server virtual machines and pricing is per host, independent of the number of virtual machines you end up running on them. You can currently opt for machines with up to 144 physical cores and prices start at $4.039 per hour.

To do this, Microsoft is offering two different processors to power these machines. Type 1 is based on the 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 with up to 3.5 gigahertz of clock speed, while Type 2 features the Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 with single-core clock speeds of up to 3.7 gigahertz. The available memory ranges from 32GiB to 448GiB. You can find more details here.

As Microsoft notes, these new dedicated hosts can help companies reach their compliance requirements for physical security, data integrity and monitoring. The dedicated hosts still share the same underlying infrastructure as any other host in the Azure data centers, but users have full control over any maintenance window that could impact their servers.

These dedicated hosts can also be grouped into larger host groups in a given Azure region, allowing you to build clusters of your own physical servers inside the Azure data center. Since you’re actually renting a physical machine, any hardware issue on that machine will impact the virtual machines you are running on them, so chances are you’ll want to have multiple dedicated hosts for your failover strategy anyway.

The original Versa was precisely the hit a stumbling Fitbit needed. The device was a simple and affordable Apple Watch alternative, helping the company finally break into the one bright spot in the wearable field. According to yesterday’s earnings, the Versa Lite has so far failed to recapture the Versa’s success by offering a fewer features at a discounted price.

The good news for Fitbit, however, is that a new Versa is already on the way. Spotted by perennial leaker, Evan Blass, the device brings some hardware upgrades to the 2018’s device. The screen gets an update from LCD to AMOLED, along with a case refresh, which the Verge rightly notes makes the squircle design even more Apple Watch-esque.

Honestly, however, the biggest news about the device is probably smart assistant support. Wearables are among the key applications for voice interactions, so it certainly makes sense here. But what’s a poor wearable maker to do when the competition has Siri and Google Assistant? Simple: partner with Amazon.

No specifics on how Alexa will be used here, but the addition is a no-brainer for Fitbit. After all the money it pumped into acquisitions to create the Ionic and Versa, a proprietary smart assistant is probably a bridge too far at this point (and Samsung’s Bixby expenditures point to how difficult that growth can be). So the company enlisted an already extremely popular assistant with little wearable market share to show for it.

In light of a so-far successful electric scooter pilot program in San Francisco, the city has opened up the application process for service providers to deploy their respective scooters as part of a more permanent program. However, the permits will only be valid for about one year, “reflecting the rapid pace at which the scooter industry continues to involve,” the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wrote on its blog.

That means starting in October 2019, we may see electric scooters from more than just Skip and Scoot. Skip and Scoot’s current permits expire on Oct. 14, 2019.

As part of the permitting program, the SFMTA plans to issue permits to “a limited number” of applicants, the agency said. The city also plans to maintain a cap on the number of scooters to be deployed at any one time, likely somewhere between 1,000 to 2,500 scooters per company. Currently, Skip is authorized to operate 800 scooters, while Scoot is authorized to operate up to 625.

The application requires companies to integrate locking mechanisms to all of its scooters, implement stricter policies to ensure people don’t ride on sidewalks as well as pilot adaptive scooters to ensure people with disabilities are not left out from this new form of transportation. This comes shortly after Lyft began testing adaptive bike share for riders in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.

The deadline to apply is Aug. 21, 2019, which gives the likes of Bird (proud new owner of Scoot), Skip, Lime, Uber/JUMP, Lyft, Spin and the many others a fair amount of time to get their things in order. All of those companies mentioned above applied for permits to operate as part of SF’s pilot program, but were denied. Some companies took it worse than others, while others decided to focus their efforts on other markets for the time being.

What we can expect is yet another battle among the electric scooter providers to deploy their vehicles in the highly-coveted market of San Francisco. Last time, there were about one dozen applicants for the city’s pilot program.

On average, scooter riders took about 3,400 trips per day in San Francisco in May. Scoot has had a pretty drama-free existence in San Francisco, minus the whole theft and vandalism issue that forced the company to add a locking mechanism to its scooters. Skip, on the other hand, had to pull its scooters off the streets after one caught on fire in Washington, D.C.

It would be odd if the SFMTA didn’t consider that as it looks over all of the applications this time around. Meanwhile, given that a couple of Lyft’s electric bikes recently caught on fire due to apparent issues with the batteries, Lyft has likely given the SFMTA some pause around the company’s abilities to safely deploy electric vehicles.

AWS is already the clear market leader in the cloud infrastructure market, but it’s never been an organization that rests on its past successes. Whether it’s a flurry of new product announcements and enhancements every year, or making strategic acquisitions.

When it bought Israeli storage startup E8 yesterday, it might have felt like a minor move on its face, but AWS was looking, as it always does, to find an edge and reduce the costs of operations in its data centers. It was also very likely looking forward to the next phase of cloud computing. Reports have pegged the deal at between $50 and $60 million.

What E8 gives AWS for relatively cheap money is highly advanced storage capabilities, says Steve McDowell, senior storage analyst at Moor Research and Strategy. “E8 built a system that delivers extremely high-performance/low-latency flash (and Optane) in a shared-storage environment,” McDowell told TechCrunch.

The somewhat zany mash-up of Ikea and Sonos ended up providing great results, in the form of the Symfonisk line of wireless speakers, including the $99 Symfonisk shelf speakers and the $179 Symfonisk table lamp speaker. The speakers are both on sale today, starting at retail stores first, with online availability to follow later.

In case you missed it, our review found that these connected speakers, which work with all of Sonos’ other offerings, are a great value for people new to the Sonos system, or for anyone looking to build out their existing audio setup. The shelf speakers make great, affordable rears for surround sound setups, and offer audio that isn’t quite up to par with the Sonos One, but that definitely won’t disappoint, especially if you pick up two and pair them for stereo sound.

The Symfonisk lamp is on par with the Sonos One when it comes to sound, and can offer smart lighting, too, when paired with Ikea’s Tradfri connected light bulbs. It’s a good-looking lamp in its own right, two, with a fabric cover and both light and dark finishes depending on your decor preferences.

Featured snippets are surely one of the most useful features that Google added to its search engine in recent years. Today, the company announced that it has recently updated the algorithm that powers these snippets to prioritize more recent information.

In Google’s example, the search engine would previously regularly feature outdated data because it didn’t fully understand what a user was actually looking for. Understanding the actual intent of a search query is hard, after all.

“At the core of Search is language understanding, and our systems don’t understand language the same way humans do,” writes Pandu Nayak, Google’s VP for Search. “This is why we’re constantly developing new ways to better understand your searches and provide relevant results, especially in cases where there is useful context that is implied, like whether freshness matters.”

In Google’s examples, that means a search for ‘upcoming school holidays’ will now highlight the 2019/2020 holidays, not the 2018/2019 ones.

Similarly, when you look for information about upcoming events, this new algorithm will try to give you freshers and hence more accurate information. The example Google gives here is the premiere of Stranger Things 3. If you were looking for that before the update and before the lackluster third season hit Netflix, the algorithm would’ve highlighted an older post from 2018 with an unspecific date. After the update, it would’ve given you the exact date as soon as possible.

High-priced, handmade boutique sports cars typically make their debut where the well-heeled and the media gather. Pagani took a different approach this time around.

The Italian supercar manufacturer unveiled its new nearly $3.5 million Huayra Roadster BC in CSR2, the mobile game produced by Zynga .

The physical car will eventually get its moment. Pagani will show off the hypercar to the public next month at the Monterey Car Show. In the meantime, Zynga rebuilt the Pagani Huayra Roadster BC in CSR2, giving users a chance to “drive” the supercar.

“When Horacio Pagani first began designing cars 44 years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine that a car like the Roadster BC would ever be unveiled to the world in a mobile game,” said Michael Staskin, managing director of Pagani Automobili America, said in a statement. “We chose to partner with CSR2 on the reveal of the Roadster BC because we are both leaders in our respective industries, we both show incredible attention to design and detail and we both continue to disrupt what is considered normal in the automotive industry.”

CSR2 players can enter the 80 race ladder by using a Pagani Huayra Coupé. During the game, players get the chance to add the Pagani Huayra Roadster BC to their collection. Using augmented reality, players can also park their Pagani cars in their real-world driveways and open every panel to study the details close up.

In the real world, the Pagani Huayra Roadster BC gets its power from a 6.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V12 engine built for Pagani by Mercedes-AMG. The result is an engine that produces 800 horsepower at 5900 rpm and 774 pound feet of torque. It boasts a seven-speed, single-clutch automated manual transmission and weighs 2,756 pounds, just a skosh lighter than the regular Huayra Roadster.

As one might expect, the Roadster BC is a fast can-you-handle-how-it-corners beast that accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and generate 1.9 of lateral grips through corners.

Sadly, few will get to drive this real-world version. Pagani will make only 40 of Roadster BCs.

Newsflash! President Donald Trump is planning to deport naturalized U.S. citizens, force H-1B visa holders to return to their home countries, and revoke the green cards of lawful permanent residents. He also wants to deport the Dreamers and evict millions of other immigrants from the country. Or wait — maybe he’s planning to increase visas for skilled workers, open the door to foreign-born researchers, protect DACA recipients, and — for an encore — bar himself from the United States.

Feel like you’ve got whiplash yet? Welcome to the nerve-wracking world of U.S. immigration policy — a strange place at the best of times but one made all the more confusing by the weaponization of immigration issues for political gain and the media’s continuing failure to cut through the spin.

Tech workers are better prepared than most to cope with a torrent of torrid immigration headlines, continuously amplified and distorted by Twitter rumors, Slack chatter, and credulous Facebook reposts. Still, the sheer volume of immigration news makes it hard to know what to pay attention to — and with 71 percent of Silicon Valley’s techies born outside the United States, this isn’t simply a theoretical problem. If you, your loved ones, colleagues, or staff are immigrants, then you need to learn to separate the signal from the noise.

So how can you tell the real deal from the real fake news? There’s no simple answer, but to keep you safe — and keep your heart rate in check — here are a few ground rules to help you figure out which headlines are worth taking seriously:

Whose headline is it anyway?