Seeking to rise to increased competition, Uber has inked its first payments deal in Southeast Asia after it announced a partnership with Vietnam-based mobile wallet service Momo.
Momo, which raised $28 million led by Standard Chartered last year, will become a payment option inside the Uber app in Vietnam, alongside cash and credit cards. The app is the country’s top mobile payment… Read More
SoftBank Group has confirmed that it has found likely sellers for the tender offer for Uber’s shares, which launched tonight. These are the shares from existing shareholders that will be sold at more than a 30% discount to Uber’s last private round. The Japanese investment firm provided us with the following statement. “SoftBank and Dragoneer have received indications… Read More
It happened. One bitcoin is now worth $10,000. The milestone was hit on international exchanges earlier in the day (where prices are normally a few percent higher) and was just crossed on U.S exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini a few minutes ago. This comes two days after bitcoin hit $9k, and eight days after it crossed $8k. This $10,000 marks a bull rally essentially never before seen in… Read More
A Canadian citizen has pleaded guilty to aiding Russian intelligence officers in a 2014 hack of Yahoo that exposed as many as 500 million accounts. The defendant, 22-year-old Karim Baratov, is the only arrest to come out of the Yahoo hack as the three other individuals facing charges live in Russia, which obviously has no interest in extraditing them to the United States. Read More
It’s true that Bixby didn’t have the most auspicious of debuts when it rolled out on the Galaxy S8 earlier this year, but Samsung’s clearly got big plans for its smart assistant. Late last year, the company picked up Viv, the new assistant from the folks behind Siri — an acquisition that occurred too late to have a major impact on Bixby ahead of release. The consumer… Read More
There are plenty of reasons desktop 3D printing never really took off with consumers. Speed isn’t the main one, but it’s certainly up there. Mind you, this research is still probably a few years away from production, but a team of engineers at MIT have shown off a 3D printer capable of creating builds up to 10 times the speed of their consumer counterparts. Read More
When Shonda Rhimes, the creator of network hits like Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, announced her new contract with Netflix, it marked yet another win for the digital media world. TechCrunch recently sat down with Rhimes to hear what we can expect to see from her on Netflix, the importance of diversity and inclusion and media, and more. Read More
It’s not just SoftBank and Dragoneer that are looking to buy Uber shares from the employees and other shareholders when the tender offer launches, likely later today. Sources tell us that Sequoia Capital is looking to increase its stake in Uber this way. The other investors on the list include Tencent and TPG. Read More
FCC Chairman and net neutrality eliminator-in-chief Ajit Pai has thrown Twitter and other online services under the bus in order to show that it’s not just broadband providers that can exert control over internet content. “When it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem,” he explained. “The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to… Read More
As part of its victory lap extravaganza in Las Vegas as the dominant web hosting platform, Amazon Web Services today launched a new service, AppSync, which allows applications hosted on the service to work even if they’re offline. Read More
Looks like this past Cyber Monday was a hit across the board. Earlier today, Amazon noted that the Black Friday weekend was its strongest yet, and now eBay’s one-upping the site by announcing that yesterday was the biggest sales day in the site’s 22-year history — a stat that includes both retail sales and auctions. Read More
In the latest edition of “uh-oh, we left that just sitting out in the open,” a batch of NSA and Army files were discovered on a cloud storage server with no password protection, accessible to anyone with the URL. Chris Vickery of security firm UpGuard found the files on an unlisted Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage server belonging to the United States Army Intelligence and… Read More
In light of Uber failing to report the massive data breach that affected potentially 57 million passengers and drivers worldwide, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a multimillion-dollar consumer protection lawsuit against the transportation company. Read More
Just in time for the holiday season, a group of prominent Los Angeles entertainment and technology executives have come together to back the new startup, Enjoius, which aims to make it easier for hosts to plan their perfect party. Read More
Lynk & Co. aims to be a different kind of car brand, with a focus on a simplified buying experience and a focus on connected an app-powered mobility experiences, and it’s now officially selling its first vehicle via stores in China. The 01 SUV is now available at around 150 dedicated brand stores and boutiques located across China. The 01 comes in four different options, which are… Read More
New research out of the University of Chicago shows a trio of rhesus monkeys controlling robotic arms with their mind. Each of the three primates are amputees, having had limbs removed after suffering injuries between four and 10 years ago. The monkeys learned to grasp a ball using the robotic limb through trial and error, and were rewarded with juice for their efforts. As cool as the… Read More
Remember Ello? I recently wrote about this social networking site’s comeback. Since then, a handful of you have pinged me about its spam bot problem. Just yesterday, another person came forward to tell me he was getting “flooded with naked people” adding him on the site. Read More
The number of VR headsets out there may not be reaching the stratospheric estimates that were first predicted, but they’re still growing, at least. According to a report from Canalys, in Q3 of 2017, Sony shipped 490,000 PlayStation VR headsets, Oculus shipped 210,000 Rift headsets and HTC shipped 160,000 Vive units. Read More
Instagram has tweaked a couple of its direct messaging features to make them a bit more flexible and interactive. You can now automatically capture and remix photos sent to you in replies back to friends, and allow photo and video replays to be replayed more than once. The remix feature lets you capture the original photo message and incorporate it into your reply, complete with the option… Read More
