If you’ve ever tried to do business across borders, you know how painful it can be to send a wire transfer, wait for the payment to clear the bank and pay a set of fees along the way. Veem is a startup trying to simplify all of that for SMBs by providing a platform to ease the international transfer of funds between businesses. Today, it announced it was opening up that capability to… Read More
All of the hyper-scale cloud providers love to tout their new customer acquisitions: Google talking about Spotify; Microsoft signing up various Adobe services for Azure; or AWS working with the likes of GE. That’s a sign of how competitive this market is, despite AWS’s continuing market share leadership. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon’s cloud… Read More
Remember how VMware was supposed to be disrupted by AWS? Somewhere along the way it made a smart move. Instead of fighting the popular cloud platform, it decided to make it easier for IT to use its products on AWS. Today, at the opening of the AWS re:invent customer conference, it announced plans to expand that partnership with some new migration and disaster recovery services. As Mark… Read More
Today is #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving that always falls on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. This year Facebook is again partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to match up to $2M in donations to fundraisers held on Facebook by nonprofits. Additionally, Facebook is waiving its typical 5% fee on donations to U.S-based nonprofits all day long. It’s a big step… Read More
Here, the mapping company that powers location services in 100 million cars, is today announcing an acquisition to vastly improve how it distributes and updates its data. The company is buying Advanced Telematic Systems (ATS), a Berlin-based developer of secure over-the-air (OTA) technology, the basis for how wireless devices — including not just cars but smartphones and other… Read More
Russian software giant Yandex took its prototype self-driving taxi out for its first real-world snow test last weekend. The Prius model prototypes clocked up 300km in total during the test. Read More
Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), Richard Burr (R-NC) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), as well as Rep. Jackie Speier introduced a bill today to address revenge porn. The bill, Ending Nonconsenual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act of 2017, is designed to address the unwanted sharing of private, explicit images. The ENOUGH Act would specifically ensure the Department of Justice has tools in… Read More
StrideUp, a U.K. startup founded last year by Sakeeb Zaman and Rohan Trivedi, both formerly of Deutsche Bank, wants to make shared home ownership more readily available within the private housing sector. The company, which launched in the summer, lets you buy a portion of your home while you continue to rent the remainder. Read More
Baidu, China’s answer to Google, and Xiaomi, which has modeled itself on the success of the America’s most successful technology manufacturer in Apple, have announced a strategic partnership to tackle two emerging technologies, internet of things and artificial intelligence. Announced today at Xiaomi’s first developer conference in Beijing, the alliance is a marriage between… Read More
Update: WeWork’s chief executive officer Adam Neumann confirmed in a blog post that it will buy Meetup. Co-working space giant WeWork will acquire Meetup, according to Crunchbase News. The report says Meetup chief executive officer and co-founder Scott Heiferman shared the news with employees at a company-wide meeting on Monday. Read More
French startup Doctolib is raising money for the second time in the past twelve months. The company is building a sort of Salesforce for the healthcare industry with a big emphasis on bookings. Doctolib just raised $42 million (€35 million) from Eurazeo and existing investor Bpifrance. The startup announced another round of funding back in January 2017. If you combine those two rounds,… Read More
Founder of Tumblr David Karp is leaving the company, Barracuda Networks gets acquired for $1.6 billion by Thoma Bravo and MIT and Harvard create artificial muscle. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
A SoftBank Group-led team of investors has made an offer to buy Uber’s shares in a tender offer that would value the company at about a 30% discount to Uber’s last private valuation of nearly $70 billion, a source with knowledge of the proposed deal tells TechCrunch. We’re hearing that the proposed price per share is $32.96, which works out to under $50 billion. Bloomberg… Read More
A bit of a surprise just dropped for everyone poking around Pokémon GO this holiday season: a new legendary Pokémon, Ho-Oh. Niantic usually debuts legendary Pokémon (the massive, super strong Pokémon that require groups of up to 20 players to take down and capture) with a bit of fanfare, but this one showed up pretty much out of nowhere. If you weren’t paying attention to… Read More
No one ever says hardware is easy, and today it looks like another promising startup has hit a wall. Navdy, which made an in-car heads-up display that projected info like navigation on to your windscreen, has been sending out notices to customers and others who might have claims against the company, as part of a General Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors. Read More
Noah Heller, one of the chief architects of Hulu’s virtual reality strategy, has left the video streaming service to set up his own venture firm, 3Rodeo. Primarily focused on backing Los Angeles-based technology startups, the new fund has already committed capital to three deals, Heller confirmed. Read More
Researchers at Duke University, OSU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have solved one of the biggest problems with new forms of quantum encryption: quantum key distribution. QKD is the process of distributing keys during a transmission and in a way that will tell both sides of the conversation that someone is eavesdropping. The new system, which uses lasers to transmit multiple bits at once,… Read More
Waymo continues to press its lead in terms of actual miles driven on roads, which is potentially the most important metric out there when it comes to building successful autonomous driving technology. The Alphabet-owned company that began life as Google’s self-driving car project around a decade ago now has 4 million miles driven autonomously on roads. Read More
It’s been just ten days since Stitch Fix debuted on the stock market, and it has risen almost 54 percent since that time. It’s an astonishing feat for the fashion styling business, which got off to a rough start, but quickly turned things around as it started to gain momentum by its third day of trading and soared 24 percent today, better known as “Cyber Monday.”… Read More
Plex confirmed it’s rolling out a new feature that will allow cord cutters to skip the commercials in the TV programs recorded using its software, making the company’s lower-cost solution to streaming live TV more compelling. Unlike other commercial-skip options, Plex’s option will remove commercials from recordings automatically. Read More
