Twitter has committed to a specific timeline for rolling out changes to its Safety features, and announced new policies, including a ban on hateful display names, and improvements for second-hand “witness reporting” of abuse. By January, Twitter plans to have implemented all the abuse changes outlined in the internal email published by Wired earlier this week, as well as the new… Read More
An effort to make a 3D animated sperm for a short film has ended up producing a model of unprecedented detail and considerable scientific value. If you were ever curious what goes on inside those things, this is probably the best depiction yet. Read More
I work in VC. But it wasn’t long ago that I stocked shelves, drove a truck, washed dishes, waited tables and even hauled dirt at a cemetery. This isn’t the usual route to a job in tech and VC, but it opened my eyes to a corner of the tech world I think has the chance to create the next Salesforce, Oracle or LinkedIn: software targeting those who do their jobs outside corporate offices. Read More
Adobe is hosting its MAX conference this week in Las Vegas, and even though the company has long moved to a subscription model with regular updates, it still uses the event to launch its most important updates and new products. Here is our rundown of the biggest announcements, which range from new tools for designers, a completely new version of Lightroom and a few crazy experiments. Read More
When Atlassian went public at the end of 2015, it was a bit of an anomaly: a tech IPO whose numbers looked quite good with some profitability. It’s been almost two years since that IPO, and since then, the company’s valuation is at around $9 billion. The company popped 32% on its first day and hit a valuation of $5.8 billion. A lot of that is thanks to an insane run this year so… Read More
Identity is prismatic. You show different sides of yourself to different friends in your life. Now Facebook wants to let you share the niches of your interests while stealing thunder from Pinterest’s boards. Facebook is now testing a feature called Sets that lets you select several status updates, photos or videos and share them as a themed collection to everyone or specific friends. Read More
Nintendo has managed to lead the industry in video game hardware sales – by a wide margin – for September, which is a very promising sign going into the holiday shopping season. The Nintendo Switch helped this immensely, leading the industry as the top-selling console for the third straight month, and the fifth month overall since its introduction seven months ago.
Switch’s U.S. Read More
It’s been nearly two full years since the first Echo was made available to Amazon Prime subscribers. In that time, the company added six new members to the Echo family (seven if you count the Tap, which Amazon kind of, sort of does) — and in the case of the Echo Dot, did one full product refresh. Google entered the space in a big way with Home, and both Apple and Microsoft have… Read More
PayPal, the digital payments company, shared its growing financials after the bell on Thursday. Shares ticked up about 4 percent in initial after-hours trading. Read More
Stitch Fix has filed to go public, finally revealing the financial guts of the startup which will be a test of modern e-commerce businesses that are looking to hit the market — and the numbers look pretty great! Let’s start off really quick with profits: aside from the last two quarters, Stitch Fix posted a six-quarter streak of positive net income. We talk a lot about companies… Read More
New York-based MongoDB went public on the Nasdaq on Thursday, finishing the day at $32.07, up 34 percent above its IPO price of $24. This is also above the proposed range of $20 to $22, which had been increased from $18 to $20. Read More
Amidst narratives of machine learning complacency, Apple is coming to terms with the fact that not talking about innovation means innovation never happened. A detailed blog posting in the company’s machine learning journal makes public the technical effort that went into its “Hey Siri” feature — a capability so banal that I’d almost believe Apple was trying to make… Read More
When Apple announced its partnership with GE this week, it would have been easy to dismiss it as another random collaboration from a company people don’t generally associate with the enterprise. After all, Apple killed off their enterprise server product years ago. You might rightly ask, what exactly do they have to do with the enterprise these days? But if you consider the notion of… Read More
A new bipartisan bill known as the Honest Ads Act is the first major attempt to regulate online platforms that sell ads with rules akin to those that apply to more traditional advertising on TV, radio and in print. The bill imposes regulations on social platforms, websites, ad networks and other online entities with more than 50 million unique users per month. Read More
Intel Capital, the investment arm of the processor giant, is today announcing its latest tranche of investments, a total of nearly $60 million going in to 15 startups that are working on solving different problems in the bigger area of big data (with a full rundown below). The investments come on the back of a big year for the group: In 2017 so far, Intel says that it’s invested $566… Read More
Bubbleproof is a new mockumentary series following the misadventures of Reputation.com founder Michael Fertik and venture capitalist David Cowan as they launch a new fund. Watch the first episode of Bubbleproof… and if you like it, good news: We’ve already published the next three episodes. Read More
Denver-based SendGrid has filed for an IPO. The company, which helps marketers send emails to customers, says in its S-1 that it has processed more than “one trillion emails.” Read More
When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it — and that’s pretty much where we’ve been for quite some time. But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years has quietly been trying to rethink how we approach documents. CEO Shishir… Read More
There’s a huge funding round from one of the top local services companies in China. Meituan-Dianping, a company formed by a multi-billion dollar merger in 2015, said today that it has raised a $4 billion Seres C round from a group of investors led by existing backer Tencent. Others involved include Sequoia, GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Trustbridge Partners, Coatue, IDG,… Read More
Facebook is finally giving developers a reason to build games for Messenger while also opening a new revenue stream for the chat app. After launching HTML5 ‘Instant Games’ inside Messenger, like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Words With Friends Frenzy in November 2016, today Facebook is allowing developers to add in-app purchases as well as interstitial and rewarded video ads. Read More