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Recode Daily: Apple might invest billions in Toshiba’s chip business

Plus, T-Mobile buys lots of broadband spectrum, and Easter gets the Pokémon Go treatment.

Consumer Electronics Show Previews Latest Products Ethan Miller / Getty

Apple is considering investing billions of dollars into troubled Toshiba’s semiconductor unit, according to several reports. One option could reportedly include teaming up with Foxconn — Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner — and Japanese investors on a bid. Toshiba is still trying to recover from a massive accounting scandal. [Bloomberg]

Susan Fowler, the Stripe engineer who became famous for a blog post that exposed pervasive sexism and sexual harassment at Uber, launched a quarterly online publication called Increment that’s about and aimed at coders — in other words, The New Yorker for geeks. [Kara Swisher / Recode]

T-Mobile dominated yesterdays U.S. wireless spectrum auction, which shifted licenses in the 600MHz spectrum band from TV broadcasters to the broadband cellular industry. The company will spend nearly $8 billion for 45 percent of the nationwide spectrum at auction. Dish, Comcast and US Cellular also bought spectrum at auction. [Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica]

Amazon has opened the Echos microphone and voice-processing technology to third-party hardware makers, meaning its digital assistant Alexa might show up in a lot of new devices soon. The invitation-only developers’ kit also includes access to Amazon’s proprietary software for wake-word recognition, beam-forming and noise reduction. [Nat Levy / GeekWire]

FedEx is using autonomous indoor robots to replace mailroom clerks. Made by a Silicon Valley-based company called Savioke, the Relay robots work together to complete requests; at FedEx’s facility in Tennessee, they have completed tens of thousands of deliveries, and traveled more than 1,000 miles through its offices. [Mike Murphy / Quartz]

Workers from India and China received 82 percent of the U.S. H-1B visas issued last year. About 85,000 new specialty visas are issued each year; the majority go to people in computer-related professions at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. New Trump administration rules seek to constrict the visa program. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Top stories from Recode

Google is trying to turn Image Search into a shopping tool. The company wants people to think of Google as a place to start shopping searches, and to use it instead of Amazon or eBay.

More people use Instagram’s Stories feature than use Snapchat. Some 200 million use the disappearing photo and video collections that Instagram copied from Snapchat last year, up from 150 million per day in January.

How can you protect your privacy online if you’re not especially tech-savvy? On the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, digital security expert Tony Gambacorta says everything you own that connects to the internet is a potential risk.

How to be a parent in a digital world and not lose your mind. Some thoughts on staying tech-informed so you can be a good guide to your kid’s online life.

This is cool

Eggs and candy

Pokémon Go has launched a week-long augmented-reality Easter-egg hunt, which continues through April 20 and offers extra creatures who hatch from Lucky Eggs, plus double XP. Niantic makes money from this by selling virtual eggs and “egg incubators.” [Dave Thier / Forbes]


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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