Top tech startup news stories you need to know this Friday, May 25

Good morning! Here are some of the top tech startup news stories for today, Friday, May 25.

Google teams up with Danish edtech startup to bring VR into classrooms. Danish startup Labster has teamed up with Google to offer VR-powered science education. The news about the partnership was made public at this year’s Google IO 2018. Labster is used by professors and students at more than 150 institutions across the globe. Labster was founded in 2012 by Mads Tvillingaard Bonde and Michael Bodekaer. Labster is an internationally focused company dedicated to the development of pioneering online tools for teaching science globally. The company launched its first simulation in 2013 and now offers more than 70 labs to choose from within chemistry, physics, engineering, and biology soon also scaling to medicine.

Snapchat’s parent company plans to invest $1.5 million in media startups. Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, announced a new accelerator program dedicated to companies focused on creative “mobile storytelling.” Snap will kick off its inaugural Yellow program this September, through which it will invest $150,000 in each of a maximum of 10 media startups in exchange for an unspecified amount of equity. Snap is accepting applications for its first cohort through July 8. The program is slated to run Sept. 10 through Dec. 7, 2018.

Kroger to acquire Home Chef meal kit delivery startup. Kroger has agreed to acquire Home Chef, a Chicago-based meal kit delivery company. The initial transaction price is $200 million, and future earnout payments of up to $500 million over five years are contingent on achieving milestones, including growth of in-store and online meal kit sales, Kroger said. As part of the deal, Kroger will make Home Chef meal kits available both on its web site and in its stores.

India-based startup invented drone for tea delivery. An India-based startup, Tech Eagle, is taking food delivery to a new level by inventing a drone that can deliver tea in a six miles radius. Tech Eagle was started in 2015 by an IIT Kanpur alumnus and his friends. The startup aims at delivering tea at customer’s doorstep through drones. The drone can carry a weight of 4.4 pounds and travel up to 6 miles.

Apple wins $539 million jury award from Samsung in iPhone patent battle. After seven years of legal battle, a US court has finally asked Samsung to pay $539 million in damage to Apple for copying patented iPhone designs. This is a big victory for Apple after a federal jury reached their decision Thursday. The jury’s decision in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., also increases the amount that Samsung previously was ordered to pay Apple for the patents under dispute from $399 million to $539 million. Under the US patent law, infringement of a design patent can result in a plaintiff receiving total profits made through the sales of the product. In 2015, Samsung’s lawyers appealed the case at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, bringing down the compensation of $1 billion to $400 million.

FBI seized a key domain used by the malware that infected 500,000 home routers, declares partial victory and Russian attribution.  The FBI is reportedly to have seized the domain, ToKnowAll.com, used by the VPNFilter worm that infected 500,000 home routers. VPNFilter is a virulent, sophisticated, multistage worm that has successfully infected 500,000 home routers, leaving them vulnerable to both surveillance (the malware snoops network traffic for passwords) and region-wide internet shutdowns (VPNFilter can brick the routers it infects, and an attacker could shut down most or all of the home/small business internet access in a region by triggering this). The story was first reported by DailyBeast.

Federal investigators: Uber’s self-driving car saw the woman it killed. It turns out that Uber’s self-driving car turned off Volvo’s braking technology. That’s according to the preliminary report from the federal investigators examining Uber’s fatal self-driving crash in March. The report lays out the facts of the collision that killed a woman walking her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, and said that the self-driving Uber car in fatal crash saw pedestrian but didn’t brake. Uber says it was depending on its human supervisor to prevent the fatal Tempe, Arizona crash.

U.S. websites go dark in Europe as GDPR data rules kick in. Europe’s new privacy law takes effect today, Friday, causing major U.S. news websites to suspend access across the region as data-protection regulators prepare to put their new enforcement powers into action. One of the major news media sites that went dark is L.A.Times. Its site went dark in Europe after  it fails the GDPR privacy rules.