The FTC has now put out a statement regarding the Uber data breach which the company concealed for the best part of a year before finally disclosing it, under new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, on Tuesday by passing details to Bloomberg. Read More
In another example of Starling Bank jumping on the Open Banking/PSD2 train before legislation in the U.K. and Europe next year will force banks to do so, it is launching its latest API partnership: this time with Yoyo Wallet, the U.K.-based mobile payment and loyalty platform. Read More
Portea Medical, one of India’s biggest platforms for home healthcare visits, has raised $26 million in Series C funding to expand its service range. The round was led by Sabre Partners and MEMG CDC, with participation from returning investors Accel (which led Portea’s Series B two years ago), the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation and Qualcomm Ventures. Read More
Today’s stories: Uber’s big data breach, Facebook to single out election trolls, Apple’s self-driving car research and FCC issues final draft of plan to kill net neutrality. That’s it for this week. Tito’s back on Monday. A very Happy Thanksgiving to everyone attempting to explain net neutrality and bitcoin to their loved ones this holiday. Read More
Ahead of Amazon’s big AWS division Re:invent conference next week, the company has announced two developments in the area of artificial intelligence. AWS is opening a machine learning lab, ML Solutions Lab, to pair Amazon machine learning experts with customers. And it’s releasing new features within Amazon Rekognition, Amazon’s deep learning-based image recognition platform. Read More
YouTube, that strange stew of the best and worst content on the web, is cracking down on abuse and error relating to kid-focused video. Jokers and questionably ethical creators who targeted kids or used them in their videos will have a harder time getting viewers and getting money. Read More
Every few years efforts to redefine the IPO emerge, and as night follows day, investors get hurt and calls for tighter regulatory reform echo in legislative chambers and cable TV studios. The last significant “re-invention” emerged in the height of the dot-com boom when online brokers started selling newly issued shares directly to retail customers. We all know how that ended. Read More
Every year, Apple airs a new ad in the U.S. for Thanksgiving. Compared to other Apple ads, this is less about showing product features and more like a greeting card. This year is no different — you still see a lot of AirPods. Apple’s new ad is called “Sway” and takes place in the streets of Prague. A woman starts playing Sam Smith’s “Palace” on her… Read More
Business Insider recently reported that numerous families have grown frustrated with the education their children are receiving at AltSchool, an ambitious San Francisco-based edtech company that four years ago began opening physical grade schools and promising a personalized learning approach that would far surpass the standardized education most kids receive. Read More
French startup Snips is now helping you build a custom voice assistant for your device. Snips doesn’t use Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service or Google Assistant SDK — the company is building its own voice assistant so that you can embed it on your devices. And the best part is that it doesn’t send anything to the cloud as it works offline. If you want to understand how a… Read More
On December 14, the FCC will vote on whether or not to roll back Obama-era policies protecting a free and open internet. In fact, during yesterday’s announcement of the upcoming vote, the FCC neglected to mention the historic 22 million comments on the issue, the majority of which were opposed to its rollback. Read More
The FCC yesterday announced a December 14 vote on “Restoring Internet Freedom,” an order that, far from restoring freedom to the internet, would allow it to be restricted in new and harmful ways. Actually, when you think of it as restoring internet freedom to ISPs and cable companies, it makes a lot more sense. At any rate the Commission has released the text of the order, as promised. Read More
Facebook is building out a tool to show which Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency election troll farm you Liked or followed. Launching by the end of the year as part of the Facebook Help Center, the tool will show a list of all the IRA accounts you followed. Read More
Apple has a new paper published in Cornell’s arXiv open directory of scientific research, describing a method for using machine learning to translate the raw point cloud data gathered by LiDAR arrays into results that include detection of 3D objects, including bicycles and pedestrians, with no additional sensor data required. The paper is one of the clearest looks yet we’ve had… Read More
When you go through a big life event — say a milestone birthday for a parent or a wedding — there are probably going to be a lot of mini-events that happen before and after the big one. But you might not think to hire a professional photographer for them and stick with a couple phone cameras because it can be tough to find those photographers. So Minted, a company that’s… Read More
Ho hum, Salesforce announced its quarterly earnings yesterday and the news was all good once again with revenue up 25 percent to $2.68 billion. The company has blown through its $10 billion yearly revenue goal and has boldly set one for $20 billion by FY2022. I wouldn’t put it passed them.
The company also announced some big executive moves. More on that later
Salesforce is the anti-IBM. Read More
Since blockchain technologies appeared people have been trying to figure out how to put traditional assets like currencies, bonds and other financial instruments onto it in a way which has regulatory compliance and is secure. If you could do that you could sell securities in a legitimate way, thus disrupting large swathes of the asset management industry. In case you didn’t happen to… Read More
With the UK government continuing to face down criticism over how it is handling plans to remove the UK from the European Union, today the country’s Chancellor Philip Hammond delivered an annual Autumn Budget that underscored its continuing push to win over the tech world. In a wide-ranging speech laying out proposals for investment and taxes for individuals and businesses, the… Read More
Following the news yesterday morning that the FCC will be voting on the proposal to kill net neutrality come December 14, officials and advocacy organizations have been issuing statements left and right decrying the impending upending of the internet as we know it. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) is among them, but took a moment to talk with TechCrunch about his misgivings in a bit more detail. Read More
All good things, as they say, must come to an end. That definitely holds true for early-bird pricing on Disrupt Berlin tickets. In just a few short hours — at midnight tonight, local Berlin time to be precise — the general admission ticket price increases 30 percent. Read More
