Facebook has reportedly upped its estimate of how much content was produced by Russian-backed actors during the election and how widely that content was seen. According to prepared remarks due to be presented tomorrow but acquired by The Wall Street Journal today, the company estimates 80,000 pieces of content may have been viewed by a total of 126 million people. Read More
It’s understandable when things change as fast as they do these days that it takes a bit for our ideas of how things work to catch up to how they actually work. One misunderstanding worth clearing up is the suggestion that Apple (or Google, or whoever) is somewhere maintaining a special folder in which all your naughty pics are kept. You’re right to be suspicious, but that’s… Read More
GrubHub was back in court today for closing arguments around the trial involving Raef Lawson, a former delivery driver for GrubHub, who is seeking a small, estimated sum of $586.56. This trial, Lawson vs. GrubHub, is looking to determine whether Lawson, an ex-GrubHub driver who was fired, was misclassified as an independent contractor while delivering food for GrubHub. Those who work as… Read More
Sprint-owner SoftBank Group may be getting cold feet when it comes to the proposed T-Mobile U.S. merger. Sprint shares fell 9 percent following a report from the Nikkei that Softbank might be backing off from a potential agreement; T-Mobile shares fell 5 percent. According to the report, SoftBank is expected to approach Deutsche Telekom, the owner of T-Mobile as soon as Tuesday… Read More
Netflix announced today that House of Cards will end after its next season. The news comes after actor Anthony Rapp told BuzzFeed that House of Cards star Kevin Spacey made a sexual advance toward him when Rapp was only 14. However, TVLine reports that the decision was not a response to Rapp’s allegations, and in fact was made months ago. After Rapp went public, Spacey responded,… Read More
SpaceX just successfully launched its 16th Falcon 9 rocket this year, for client KT SAT, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission is to deliver the company’s Koreasat-5A satellite, which will provide broadband communications services to KT SAT’s customers. As part of the launch, SpaceX also successfully recovered its Falcon 9 first stage, which landed aboard… Read More
Former Rothenberg Ventures CFO David Haase has won his case against the firm’s founder, Mike Rothenberg. The ruling came down in favor of Haase in the Superior Court of California last week. Rothenberg must now pay Haase $166,000 for expenses and losses incurred during his employment at the firm, plus legal fees for the suit and services related to an SEC investigation of the firm. Read More
SpaceX is launching a commercial communications satellite for client KT SAT, South Korea’s lone satellite service provider, today at 3:34 PM EDT (12:34 PM PDT). The window extends for two hours and twenty-four minutes, so the launch could take place anytime between then and 5:58 PM EDT, depending on conditions. The launch will aim to put the Koreasat-5A satellite into geostationary… Read More
Silicon Valley is a land of ideation and thinkfluence and Qi drinks with tapioca mushroom protein. In this fourth episode of Bubbleproof, an original mockumentary series on the influence and ignorance of Silicon Valley, we get a closer look at the evolving/devolving relationship between startup founder guru Michael Fertik and venture capitalist David Cowan. Read More
Amazon today announced plans to expand its TV and movie division, Amazon Studios, which includes relocating to a new location in Culver City, California. The physical move coincides with Amazon’s plans to increase hiring across new roles in creative, technical, marketing and legal, the company said. According to Amazon’s website, there are currently 84 openings in Santa Monica… Read More
There’s a corkboard in the office of The Mighty, the social network for people with chronic illnesses, mental health disorders and disabilities, which has pictures and letters from many of the site’s contributors and readers who have benefited from the stories the site shares. It’s there to remind staffers of the faces behind the work they do and the impact the site has. Read More
Former media chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. is starting a venture firm called Waverley Capital with longtime investor Daniel Leff, reports Bloomberg, which says the two are looking to raise up to $100 million. The idea: to target media investments. Read More
Amazon-owned game streaming site Twitch is continuing to see solid growth, according to a new report from Streamlabs, which found that Twitch increased its numbers of concurrent streamers on the platform by 67 percent in the third quarter of 2017. That growth is being attributed, in part, to Twitch’s newer initiatives focused on allowing smaller streamers to generate revenue from… Read More
Square is expanding its hardware lineup with a new point-of-sale device called the Square Register. Square’s Head of Hardware Jesse Dorogusker explained that while the company’s existing products incorporate existing hardware (the Square Stand, for example, turns an iPad into a POS stand), the Square Register is “totally integrated — our hardware, our software, all in… Read More
Instagram Stories is doing so well, the app wants to ensure you don’t just scroll by its Snapchat clone. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it has redesigned its mid-feed re-engagement box for Stories to show preview tiles of people’s slideshows that are twice as big as the Stories bar atop the feed. The box appears slotted between traditional permanent posts part way down the feed. Read More
AWS’s domination of the Infrastructure as a Service market continues unabated this quarter. Yes, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and others continue to grow much faster than AWS, but that has not had a significant impact on AWS’s command over the IaaS market. For starters, AWS had a monster quarter posting $4.57 billion in revenue. That was higher than the $4.51 billion that was expected… Read More
Far and away the question I get asked the most when I’m wearing a pair of AirPods is: do they stay in? It’s a fair question, and for the answer is, yes, but probably not for everyone. I like the wireless earbuds quite a bit, but they suffer the same issue as practically every Apple headphone before them — the hard plastic design is a bit unforgiving for different sized ears.… Read More
There’s no doubt that the competition to develop self-driving cars is hotting up. There are over 1 billion cars, trucks and buses on the planet, and that’s not even including off-road vehicles or heavy construction equipment, many of which could be turned into ‘ground drones’ in the future. This is a subject we’ll be turning to at Techcrunch Disrupt Berlin,… Read More
Ford has a robotic butt it actually calls ‘Robutt’ (via MIT Technology Review) that it uses to test its car seats, helping to make sure they’re durable enough to withstand numerous backside encounters over their long useful lifetime. It’s not that surprising – car manufacturers use plenty of robots to mimic repeated stresses on car parts to make sure they can last… Read More
While its name still implies a focus on the Linux kernel, the Linux Foundation has long become a service organization that helps other open source groups run their own foundations and projects (think Cloud Foundry, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the Node.js Foundation, etc.). Today, the group is adding a new project to its stable: the Acumos project, which was started by AT&T and… Read More
