A new report from Bloomberg appears to indicate that the Federal Trade Commission ramping up an investigation into Amazon over its marketplace.

Attorneys and at least one economist have been conducting lengthy, in-depth interviews with small businesses that sell their products through Amazon, three of the merchants interviewed told Bloomberg.

They were specifically asked how much of their revenue comes from Amazon sales as opposed to other e-commerce sites including Walmart and eBay, and the interviews lasted roughly 90 minutes.

Vox reported in June that the FTC had started speaking to the company's competitors to gain some insight into its business practices. It did not name who these competitors were, and noted that these talks did not necessarily mean a full-blown investigation was underway.

Read more: Big tech warned by top regulator: We will break you up if we have to

Experts told Bloomberg, however, that its report suggests the FTC could indeed be in the early stages of an official probe, given the duration of the interviews and the resources devoted to the operation.

"Early in an investigation, that's a sign of staff doing a serious job," said ex-FTC official Michael Kades. "They're spending lots of time with witnesses and trying to really understand what they're saying." Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst Jennifer Rie said the questioning had the hallmarks of the "background phase" of an investigation.

Both Amazon and the FTC declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg, and neither were immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Amazon is far from the only tech company to be put under an antitrust microscope.

The FTC opened an investigation into Facebook in June, and earlier this week 50 state attorneys general announced a probe into Google. Amazon is also already the subject of an antitrust investigation by the EU, officially announced in July.

A year after the European Union rolled out the privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation, the location-data firm Factual is getting ready to expand in Europe.

The location-data firm is one of a handful of advertising and marketing tech firms that shut down part of their European business ahead of the data-collection law being enforced. GDPR requires businesses to explicitly get internet users' consent before collecting their data for ad targeting. Data firms that use location stats from smartphones have been a particular target of scrutiny under the law.

Read more: We got the pitch deck Foursquare is using to sell advertisers location data — even as regulation and privacy concerns mount

Factual scrapped its European database and stopped offering advertisers its targeting, measurement, and insight products. Developers and publishers send location data from apps to Factual that advertisers then use to create audience segments for targeting and measuring campaigns. The firm said it cut more than half of the providers it worked with (which it didn't name) and was relaunching its products in Europe.

To spearhead the expansion, Factual hired Ross Webster as managing director of Europe. Webster was previously the EMEA head of data partnerships at IBM's Watson Advertising.

The company has a small office in London with seven employees, and Ross said that by the first quarter of 2020 Factual would sell all of its products to European advertisers and operate in a handful of markets in continental Europe.

"There's a pent-up desire for quality location data within Europe," he said.

Factual slashed its data partners

The firm has also put together a GDPR compliance program for partners, including an auditing process and new terms and agreements in contracts. Before a partner supplies location data to Factual, the company's privacy team vets a partner's process of collecting data to make sure that it meets GDPR's requirements. Partners also undergo audits on an ongoing basis, though Factual did not provide further details about the timing of audits.

"We feel like we're in a position where we can make available these three products within Europe built off of a pool of responsibly-sourced data," said Brian Czarny, the chief marketing officer of Factual. "We'll continue to add additional suppliers as we feel like there are others in the market that are ready to do that."

Scale is often a challenge for marketers with location-based advertising, but Czarny said that wiping its European database to build it again from scratch put a bigger focus on collecting high-quality data.

"We don't expect for the scale to reach pre-GDPR volume," he said.

Factual is trying to get ahead of US privacy regulation

Factual said it hoped that its work over the past year would help it prepare for the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act that is set to take effect in January, when it will put similar restrictions to those of GDPR on how marketers collect and use data.

A crop of privacy-minded firms are helping marketers comply with CCPA.

While CCPA and GDPR aren't identical, both require marketers to show consumers what data they collect and delete it if a consumer requests for it to be deleted.

"What we're doing with GDPR gives us a solid foundation to be ready for upcoming regulation like CCPA," Czarny said.

CUPERTINO, California — Apple just unveiled an updated version of the Apple Watch that comes with a new always-on display, a built-in compass, and new titanium and ceramic finishes. The new watch, called the Series 5, starts at $400 and will be launching on September 20.

That always-on display is important for the Apple Watch because it makes it much better at its most basic job: functioning as a wristwatch. Now that the Apple Watch has an always-on display, you can just glance down at your wrist to see the time and other information without having to move your wrist to turn on the screen.

That brings the Apple Watch up to speed with rivals like Fitbit, which just announced the Versa 2, another smartwatch with an always-on screen. Samsung's Galaxy Watch also has a screen that can stay on to show the time and other bits of information, even if you're not looking directly at it.

I spent a few minutes trying out the new Apple Watch Series 5 after Apple's press event. Here's a preview of what it's like to use.

Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday that he's interested in buying The Onion.

"I'd love to," Musk said when asked if he was purchasing the publication.

G/O Media, which owns The Onion, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Daily Beast reported in 2018 that Musk considered buying The Onion in 2014 and hired several former staff members for a satirical startup, Thud, which folded in May after Musk stopped funding it. Rather than publish content on a single website, Thud created satirical projects in a variety of formats, including fake products and services.

Read more: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Marissa Mayer reportedly attended an elite private dinner with Jeffrey Epstein just 2 years after he served a prison sentence for soliciting sex from a 14-year-old girl

But Musk became concerned about how Thud's projects might reflect on him after a tumultuous 2018 that featured a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange commission over tweets about taking Tesla private and an interview with Joe Rogan in which Musk was filmed smoking marijuana, The Verge reported in in March.

Musk sometimes tweets links to Onion articles and has emailed the publication's writers and editors about their work, according to The Daily Beast's report.

Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Even in a time of widespread overvaluation and non-tech companies masquerading as tech companies, WeWork has always struck me as a concerning outlier. This concern became much more personal a couple years ago when the We family aggressively tried to acquire one of our portfolio companies.

At the time, WeWork was flying high post-Softbank investment. They had grown to impressive scale with an equally impressive ambition to growth further. They were wisely going around leveraging their overvalued stock to acquire interesting companies. Adam and his team worked hard to sell a vision of unifying the world under the "We" platform as they put down an offer that involved a fair amount of WeWork stock. I was cornered by Adam 1-on-1 for a couple hours; as the lead investor and board member, I was responsible for helping the company make the decision. They gave our company the option of taking cash, but the cash amount wasn't interesting enough to justify selling the business and WeWork didn't have much more cash.

Read more: The CEO of coworking startup Convene is worried bad press around WeWork's model could taint the entire flex-office industry

So the question for all of us was: how much will WeWork stock be worth if/when it goes public? Adam told us Goldman bankers had put together analysis that showed the company would be worth $90B within two years (it sounds like the most recent presentation had Goldman pitching $65B to Softbank management), that the We platform would dominate the world, and so on.

For a while, our company's management team was rather enamored by the idea of working at WeWork's scale and seeing 4X appreciation on the amount of stock being offered. Understandably so! WeWork has created a category and is touching companies large and small around the world. That kind of reach provides enticing synergies for any startup.

But synergies need to be valued correctly - the deal has to be right and WeWork's stock as a currency was not as strong as they wanted it to be. With the markets speaking truth, it's clear now that the decision not to sell was the right one. WeWork could certainly still be a successful business but at a much reduced scale/growth and certainly a reduced valuation; the path to even a 2X from where they were two years ago will take a very long time if it ever comes to fruition. It could also go to a 0. I feel sorry for the founders who did end up selling their companies for WeWork stock at that valuation; they sold their dreams for depreciating common stock of a company that has a massive preference stack.

Read more: We got a peek at WeWork's top landlords. Here's who is most exposed to the fast-growing, but money-losing, coworking company as it prepares to IPO.

M&A is challenging for any company in any industry. Rarely is it value-accretive. But it can be particularly complex for early-stage companies that have management teams with no experience in the craft. Having investors or advisors who have experience in M&A and the capital markets can be a powerful advantage. We try our best to help our companies be thoughtful and data-driven on the buy-side (rolling up or merging with other startups) and on the sell-side if necessary!

I am intellectually very curious to see where WeWork goes from here. They have a phenomenal team of bankers from my alma mater JPMorgan helping them. My instinct is they should have allocated more cash toward buying true tech companies rather than toward long-term leases; getting out of being a real estate company was their only chance to get the valuation multiples they aspire to.

Krishna Gupta is the founder and managing partner of early stage venture firm Romulus Capital.

CUPERTINO, California — Apple just unveiled its new trio of iPhones: the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max. All three phones are available to order starting September 13 ahead of their official launch on September 20.

The cameras on Apple's newly launched iPhones are undoubtedly the main attraction. The $700 iPhone 11 features a two-lens camera setup, while the pricier $1,000 iPhone 11 Pro and $1,100 Pro Max include triple-lens cameras.

I spent a few minutes with Apple's new iPhones after the company's press event. Here's a brief look at the features and characteristics that stood out to me the most.

Peloton, the buzzy maker of expensive internet-connected stationary bikes and treadmills, is sprinting towards an IPO that would award it a rich, $8 billion valuation — double what the money-losing company was valued at just one year ago.

The offering, expected in the coming weeks, would allow Peloton to raise as much as $1.3 billion, according to its latest S-1 document, filed with the SEC on Tuesday.

Peloton's ambitious IPO plans come at a time when another high-profile company — office sharing company WeWork — has faced brutal scrutiny after launching its IPO process and has reportedly had to slash the price it expects its shares to fetch.

The two New York-based companies have a lot of similarities, including controversial capital structures that concentrate the voting control among insiders as well as spiraling losses. Peloton has posted a net loss every year since its founding in 2012, though its $539 million in cumulative red ink is significantly below the nearly $2 billion that WeWork lost in just the last year alone.

Peloton plans to sell 40 million shares of its Class A stock to public investors, priced somewhere between $26 a share and $29 a share. The company said the underwriters of the IPO would have the right to purchase an additional 6 million Class A shares.

The IPO would value Peloton somewhere between $7 billion and $8 billion, depending on where the shares price. That's a significant step up from Peloton's last valuation in the private markets in 2018, when venture investors pegged its worth at $4 billion.

According to Bloomberg, the company and its bankers could kick off the roadshow on Wednesday to pitch the offering to investors.

Peloton also disclosed that it had entered into a new employment agreement with founder and CEO John Foley on Monday, doubling his annual salary from $500,000 to $1 million. Foley will also be eligible for annual bonus equal to up to 100% of his $1 million salary.

After the IPO, Foley will have 6% voting power at the company, based on his 15 million shares of Class B stock, which have 20 votes per share. Existing Peloton investors Tiger Global Management will control 19.6% of the voting power after the IPO, while True Ventures will have 11.9% voting power.

Public market investors who buy Class A shares in the IPO will be entitled to one vote per share.

Founded in New York in 2012, Peloton sells $2,000 internet-connected stationary bikes, as well as pricey treadmills. Customers also pay anywhere between $19 and $40 month for access to specially produced live exercise classes. The company describes itself as both a media company and a global technology platform.

Peloton boasts that its "churn rate," the portion of subscribers who cancel service, is extremely low. But according to customer-retention experts that Business Insider has spoken to, Peloton's reported churn metrics are significantly understated.

Peloton, which lost roughly $246 million in fiscal 2019 despite fast growing revenue, plans to trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the "PTON" ticker.

At it's iPhone launch event on Tuesday, Apple debuted a moving video of real-life users whose lives have been impacted by the Apple Watch.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said on stage that he hears from users every day who say the heart rate monitoring feature on the Apple Watch saved their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. Apple interviewed several such people on camera, who said the watch helped them avoid health disasters.

One man said he was wearing his Apple Watch when he fell during a run. The watch automatically called 911, as well as his wife. He reflected on how the watch saved his life: "When I think about what happened and what could've happened ..."

Others in the video had similar reactions. A new mother said that at 32 weeks pregnant, "My heart rate was spiking, and it was causing the baby's heart rate to get lower and lower. So, emergency C-section and she was born." She showed her goosebumps to the camera, then asked her baby daughter to wave.

Read more: Apple just announced a new Apple Watch with an always-on display

In another useful feature for parents, a man with hearing impairment explained how his watch notifies him when his son wakes up in his crib. Another dad explained how he uses the watch the help his son, who is on the autism spectrum, compete in cross-country races without distraction.

Users were full of praise for ways the Apple Watch improved their lives, both big and small. A man who nearly had a heart attack said, "It's not something you think of, your watch saving your life," while a woman tracking her health on her watch said, "It's this little reminder, you could do a little better today."

You can watch the full video below:

The Apple Watch Series 5, which was announced Tuesday, comes with 18-hour battery life and an always-on Retina display. All cellular models also now have international emergency calling capability worldwide, even without your iPhone.

The new watch is available for preorder beginning Tuesday, and they will be available in stores starting September 20. Series 5 GPS models start at $399, and cellular models start at $499. The Series 3 will be available at a new price of $199.

Read more of Business Insider's iPhone event coverage:

Now tell us what you think!

Your iPad's messaging app works just like an iPhone's messaging app, though your device will need to be connected to Wi-Fi for you to send or receive messages (unless you have an iPad with cellular capabilities).

And just like with iPhone messages, you can easily delete iPad messages.

Whether you want to erase iPad messages for privacy purposes or to free up space on your device (messages containing images, videos, or other files can take up a lot of space) the process is quick and easy.

Here's how to do it.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPad (From $329.99 at Best Buy)

iPhone Xs (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

How to delete messages on your iPad

1. Launch the Messages app and tap the conversation from which you wish to delete a message.

2. Hold your finger down on the specific message or image you want to delete.

3. Tap "More…" on the popup window that appears at the bottom of the screen.

4. Tap the circle beside the item you want to delete, then tap the trash can icon at the bottom of the screen, and then hit "Delete Message" to confirm.

Select the message(s) you want to delete and tap the trash can icon. Steven John/Business Insider

How to delete a conversation on your iPad

You can also quickly wipe an entire conversation - including all of its messages and attachments - off your iPad.

1. Launch the iPad Messages app.

2. Hold a finger on the thread to be deleted, then swipe left.

Swipe left on the conversation and press Delete. Steven John/Business Insider

3. Tap "Delete," and then hit "Delete" again on the pop-up box to confirm your choice.

When you delete messages on your iPad, you will no longer be able to access them on your device — but they may still appear on connected devices, and they will still exist on the recipient's device.

Apple announced the new iPhone 11 on Tuesday, and Twitter is having a field day making fun of the phone's camera-heavy design.

The iPhone 11 has two cameras stacked atop one another, and the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max both sport three cameras, arranged in a triangle. Given Apple's history of making sleek, elegant gadgets, the new phones struck many people as looking decidedly clunky. Some joked that the design was reminiscent of unglamorous objects, from stoves and spiders to bowling balls and... Pikachu.

The iPhone 11 is the first iPhone to be announced since since the departure of longtime Apple design chief Jony Ive in July.

Check out 13 comparisons Twitter has for the iPhone 11 camera design:

Lyft and other rideshare services are all about ease of us, so it only makes sense that the app makes it easy to cancel a ride.

If you suddenly change your mind and decide to walk, learn you have to leave your home or office a bit later, or if your plans change for any other reason, you can cancel your Lyft ride with just a few taps in the Lyft app for iPhone or Android.

But be quick — you have only two minutes to cancel a Lyft after you request a ride before you're charged a fee, which is $10 in most locations but varies by region.

And speaking of changed plans, if you scheduled a Lyft in advance, you need to cancel before you're matched with a driver, or else you'll be hit with that same fee.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone Xs (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

Google Pixel 3 (From $799.99 at Best Buy)

How to cancel a Lyft ride you just booked

1. As soon as you decide to cancel the trip, tap "Edit ride" at the bottom left corner of the screen.

2. Tap "Cancel ride."

Tap "Cancel ride" within two minutes of ordering the ride to avoid a fee. Steven John/Business Insider

3. Confirm the cancellation by clicking the red words "Cancel ride."

Confirm that you want to cancel your ride. Steven John/Business Insider

How to cancel a scheduled Lyft trip

1. Tap the calendar icon on the top right corner of the Lyft app homepage.

2. Tap the "x" above "Cancel ride."

3. Hit "Cancel" in the purple window to confirm the cancellation.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks transformed New York City and its skyline.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, smoke filled the air, casting a grey film over the city's Financial District. As the smog began to lift, New Yorkers were confronted with the glaring disappearance of the Twin Towers, a structural duo that had become synonymous with the city itself. Movies and television shows scrambled to replace or eliminate scenes of the buildings, and video games and animated features changed their storylines to reflect their absence.

By 2002, construction began on 7 World Trade Center — one of seven new buildings at the original World Trade Center site. In the coming years, the skyline made way for cranes and steel columns as builders laid the foundation for the complex. By the end of 2014, three buildings in the site's master plan were standing. The fourth building, 3 World Trade Center, opened on June 11, 2018.

The most iconic of these renovated structures, One World Trade Center, is now the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. At 1,776 feet high, the tower is a glaring reminder of the city's reconstruction and rebirth.

The following images trace the evolution of New York's skyline before the attacks, on the day of 9/11, and on every anniversary thereafter. In addition to huge structural changes, the images depict citywide tributes to the nearly 3,000 lives lost.

The viral Facebook event inviting people to storm Area 51 later this month has been canceled due to fears that it could be a "possible humanitarian disaster."

Organizers have written on the event's website that they have decided to "pull the plug," as first spotted by Buzzfeed News. At the time of writing, more than two million people had RSVPd that they're attending the Facebook event, "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us."

Although the Facebook event began as a joke, people still planned on flooding the surrounding area, booking hotel reservations and paying to stay at nearby campsites. Organizers of the Facebook event then announced they would put on a music festival called Alienstock near Area 51 for people coming to the area.

Read more: Millions of people signed up to storm Area 51 in September — here's a look at what the invaders will find when they hit the small Nevada town

The festival was planned to take place in the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, which has a population of just over 50. Last month, local authorities told Buzzfeed News they were concerned about the town's ability to host the thousands of people expected, especially because Rachel reportedly has no gas stations or grocery stores.

In recent days, the organizers of Alienstock — Matty Roberts and Frank DiMaggio — raised concerns to media outlets that the event wouldn't have the proper resources, including water, food, security, and toilets. Citing these concerns, the organizers announced this week they were pulling their support from Alienstock, saying they were concerned the event could become the next Fyre Festival — referring to the failed music festival in the Bahamas back in 2017.

"Due to the lack of infrastructure, poor planning, risk management and blatant disregard for the safety of the expected 10,000+ AlienStock attendees, we decided to pull the plug on the festival," the Alienstock website says. "We are not interested in, nor will we tolerate any involvement in a FYREFEST 2.0. We foresee a possible humanitarian disaster in the works, and we can't participate in any capacity at this point."

Instead, the Facebook event organizers are throwing Alienstock's support behind a free Area 51 celebration event taking place in downtown Las Vegas on September 19.

Nevertheless, a permit for an event was issued to the owner of a motel, called called Little A'le'Inn, in the small town of Rachel. Connie West told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that although Alienstock organizers have pulled their support from a festival in Rachel, she is still planning an event there. Alienstock organizers said West had not been transparent about adequate planning ahead of the festival, but West has said she's secured 20 bands and proper arrangements.

"So, yeah, it's going forward," West told the Review-Journal. "We're going to throw the best party that we can."

Here's what we know about what's going on inside the world of the fascinating legal cannabis industry right now, from the largest publicly traded companies, to venture-backed startups, to the rapidly shifting federal policies around the drug.

The CBD boom

Startups, venture capital and private equity

Marijuana M&A

Weed on Wall Street

Policy

Marketing

Profiles and interviews with industry leaders

Lists

Chad and Romania are two countries that rarely come up in the same sentence. That is, unless you're discussing their flags.

The two countries, situated in separate continents, share very few historical or geographical links. They don't even have an embassy in each other's country.

Aside from slight variations in color shading, their flags appear identical — an observation that Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have discovered and shared with Twitter.

According to online encyclopedia Britannica, Romania initially displayed a flag with horizontal stripes of blue, yellow, and red, before settling on its current vertical design in 1861.

Chad, meanwhile, didn't achieve independence from France until 1959, when it decided on its own flag design.

The country initially considered a green, yellow, and red design, but quickly discovered Mali had already taken the same pattern. It then swapped the green for the blue to inadvertently fly a flag that was almost identical to Romania's. The three colors; however, represent the country's rivers (blue), desert (yellow) and the blood of its independence martyrs (red).

The flag of Mali, the country Chad tried to avoid copying, is similar to Senegal's — a single green star in the middle appears to separate the two flags. Guinea's also replicates Mali's design, but is reversed.

Indonesia and Monaco both fly two horizontal stripes: red over white. Poland similarly flies white over red.

Ireland and Cote d'ivoire share the same design, but is flipped on the flagpole.

All of these similarities may have stemmed from coincidence, but other flags have a specific reason for slight variations to a theme.

Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia all sport the same colored horizontal stripes, but that's because they used to be part of the same country of Gran Colombia, which dissolved in 1822, according to Britannica.

Apple's new iPhone is set to be unveiled next week.

Apple is holding an event on September 10 at the Steve Jobs Theater on its Apple Park campus, where it's expected to make several announcements about upcoming products— the biggest of which will likely be the debut of three new iPhones.

Apple is launching its new iPhone — as it has done every September since 2012 — at a time when the smartphone market has been in decline for seven consecutive quarters. With iPhone sales dwindling, the Cupertino, California-based technology giant has increasingly focused on other burgeoning product areas such as its services and wearables division. We're likely to hear more about what Apple has in store for those product categories as well.

Here's everything we're expecting to see from Apple CEO Tim Cook and his crew of execs at the big event, which starts at 10 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday.

Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito is not the only person tied to the organization that's facing security because of the lab's secret ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The Lab's powerful sponsors — including LinkedIn founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman — have become implicated in the cover up.

Hoffman defended Ito to author and fellow MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award jury member Anand Giridharadas in a private email, Giridharadas tweeted on Friday. "Hoffman basically hid behind bureaucracy and the old 'ongoing investigation' excuse," Giridharadas said. "He said it would be complicated to release the correspondence publicly because other names might get dragged in. Someone should tell him about redaction."

According to Giridharadas, Hoffman wrote in a second email that Giridharadas was making the situation "all about you" by threatening to resign. In the end, Giridharadas resigned.

Hoffman not only sits on the Disobedience Award's jury, but funds it personally according to the Media Lab's website. In 2017, MIT awarded Epstein and other donors "orbs" to thank them for their support, according to The Boston Globe. The orb looks similar to the trophy given to winners of the Disobedience Award.

"These elite networks protect each other above all, common good be damned," Giridharadas tweeted about the situation Friday. "MIT will investigate itself and absolve itself, is my guess." MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced in a letter to the MIT community that the university's legal counsel will initiate an independent investigation following Ito's resignation Saturday.

Ito and Hoffman have a well-documented relationship outside of their work at MIT. The pair spoke on a panel together at the WIRED25 Festival in October 2018 in San Francisco, photos of the event on Getty Images show. Hoffman also once said that Ito "makes well-networked professionals look like hermits," according to The New York Times. Before his resignation on Saturday, Ito held posts at MIT, The New York Times Company, and the MacArthur Foundation.

This is not the first time Hoffman has been connected to Epstein. A "few years ago," Epstein attended a dinner Hoffman hosted to honor an MIT neuroscientist, Vanity Fair reported in July. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were also in attendance. Both denied having had ongoing relationships with Epstein to Vanity Fair through spokespeople.

Read more: The famous connections of Jeffrey Epstein, the elite wealth manager who died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges

Epstein's work with the MIT Media Lab has tied him to other powerful business figures including Leon Black and Bill Gates, the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow reported Friday. Epstein served as a go-between Ito and the billionaires, emails published by the New Yorker show.

Microsoft, of which Hoffman is a board member, did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Hoffman's reported defense of Ito or his personal connection to Epstein.

A spokesperson for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told Business Insider that "Any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false." The contents of emails sent between Ito and the lab's former Director of Development and Strategy, Peter Cohen, contradict that statement.

Epstein was found dead after an apparent suicide August 10. At the time of his death, he'd been awaiting trial for charges of sex trafficking in a New York jail.

Microsoft and Samsung announced that they're working together to bring text messaging to Windows 10 computers for Samsung Galaxy Note 10 users.

That's fantastic. The new Galaxy Note 10 has Microsoft's "Your Phone" feature built into the phone, ready to connect with your Microsoft account. Once you set it up, you can start sending and replying text messages from the Your Phone computer app on your Windows 10 machine.

It's something that Apple users have been used to for years now, and it's understandably a factor in why Apple fans don't want to leave the Apple ecosystem.

Read more: Google has started rolling out Android 10 — here are the 10 best new features and updates to look out for

But the Your Phone app isn't just compatible with the Galaxy Note 10: Microsoft released the app last year, and it's compatible with pretty much every Android phone out there. Just download the Your Phone app on your Android phone and Windows 10 computer and set it up.

Your Phone wasn't reliable when I first tried it last year, and I stopped using it pretty quickly as a result. But it's improved, and I now feel comfortable in using it on a daily basis.

Still, it's missing a few features, like text message management. You can't delete texts in the desktop Your Phone app, it's still a little buggy here and there, and you can't make calls from your Windows 10 computer yet.

Check out Microsoft's Your Phone app, which I've been using with a Google Pixel 3 XL: