Ford and Indian automaker and mobility company Mahindra Group have entered into a new agreement to explore a potential strategic partnership focused on a number of different areas, including mobility, electrifications, connected vehicles and transportation infrastructure and more. Ford and Mahindra’s initial cooperation period extends for three years, during which time the general idea is… Read More
Buckle up, folks! It’s going to be one helluva week. Disrupt SF is about to kick off at 9 a.m., and for those of you who didn’t make it out to Pier 48, we’re bringing the show to you. Today, we’ll be sitting down with some of the greatest minds in tech, including Google’s Heather Adkins, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin in conversation with Naval Ravikant,… Read More
Hulu made Emmys history last night by becoming the first streaming service to win an Emmy for Best Drama (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), but it was Netflix that actually took home more awards at last night’s event. That’s not surprising, given how nominations Netflix earned this year – with 91 Emmy nods, it had come close to doubling its Emmy presence from 2016,… Read More
Users of a free software tool designed to optimize system performance on Windows PCs and Android mobile devices got a nasty shock this morning when Piriform, the company which makes the CCleaner tool, revealed in a blog post that certain versions of the software had been compromised by hackers — and that malicious, data-harvesting software had piggybacked on its installer program. Read More
Keybase added to its encrypted tool kit today when it launched Keybase Teams, an open source, Slack-like communications tool with end-to-end encryption. Desktop and mobile versions are available for download now. It may seem like competing with Slack, the enormously popular enterprise communications tool would be a fool’s errand for Keybase. But by making it fully encrypted, open source… Read More
Stock imagery service Videoblocks made its name thanks to its flat-rate, unlimited video library and a marketplace that paid photographers a 100 percent commission. Over time, the service started branching out beyond video, though, and the company first announced its plans for a stock photo service earlier this year. Now — after having gathered and indexed millions of images from its… Read More
Video was the fastest-growing ad format in recent months, according to a new report from mobile ad company Smaato. Smaato says it examined the more than 1.5 trillion ad impressions that it served in the second quarter of 2017 and found that video ad spending was up 142 percent from Q1. And that’s after Q1 represented a 14 percent increase from the final quarter of last year. (Q4 tends to… Read More
Venture investing in Latin America continues to pick up the pace, with new deals in financial technology services leading the way. One example of investors’ renewed interest in regional financial services companies is the $14 million in financing that ComparaOnline just wrapped up. The company, now backed by private equity firm Bamboo Capital Partners and the International Finance Corp.,… Read More
Snap has bowed to pressure from the government of Saudi Arabia to censor a news channel operated by the Qatar-based news broadcaster, Al Jazeera, from the Snapchat Discover section of its app. Read More
Google-owned navigation app Waze announced a partnership earlier this year with music streaming service Spotify to put Spotify playlists right within the Waze app, and now the team-up is extending to iOS. The new integration is rolling out today, and adds a number of direct Spotify features within Waze and vice versa. This allows Waze users to begin navigating to their destination right inside… Read More
Seven days, 168 hours or 10,080 minutes; you can crunch the numbers any way you like, but you still have only one week left to apply for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2017. We get it; you’re busy building something great. But you seriously don’t want to miss out on Startup Battlefield — it’s one of the best ways to introduce that greatness to the rest of… Read More
It has nearly been a year since GoCardless co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi was involved in a serious road accident that left him paralysed below his chest, and unable to walk again. Based on multiple interviews, including with Takeuchi himself, we tell the story of his journey back to startup life and the many challenges faced along the way. Read More
SoftBank Group has agreed to be a cornerstone investor in the initial public offering of ZhongAn, China’s first online-only insurance agency, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today. SoftBank Group will buy a 5 percent stake in the company, or about 72 million shares, at the offer price, which is in the range of HKD $53.70 to HKD $59.70 per share. If calculated based on the… Read More
Hulu’s science-fiction series The Handmaid’s Tale won big tonight at the Primetime Emmy Awards, where it took home the awards for drama series, actress in a drama series (Elisabeth Moss), writing in a drama series (Bruce Miller), directing in a drama series (Reed Morano) and supporting actress in a drama series (Ann Dowd). The show tells the story of Offred (played by Moss), a… Read More
Slack has raised another huge new round of financing that values the company at more than $5 billion, this time led by Softbank — which seems to be investing in everyone at this point. This seems like another huge investment from a $100 billion fund that is dumping an enormous amount of money in some of the biggest deals in Silicon Valley, this time participating in a $250 million round… Read More
After several weeks of speculation and leaked details, today Google officially unveiled its first big foray into mobile payments in Asia. The Android and search giant has launched Tez, a free mobile wallet in India that will let users link up their phones to their bank accounts to pay for goods securely in physical stores and online, and for person-to-person money transfers with a new twist:… Read More
This year, it’s finally easy to live stream tonight’s Primetime Emmy Awards if you’re a cord cutter. While you could always invest in a digital antenna to watch broadcast stations, the live streaming options for this year’s Emmys are numerous, compared with the 2016 event. When the Emmys aired on ABC last year, streamers had to authenticate using their cable or satellite… Read More
This week we saw a few high-profile demonstrations of the ability to target advertising to unsavory groups generated or suggested by major internet companies. Upon being alerted of these bafflingly obvious abuses, the companies’ responses all struck the same notes: “this is against our rules, we have no idea how it happened, and it’s fixed now.” Were you as unconvinced… Read More
8Bitdo’s retro Bluetooth game controllers are among the greatest gifts you can get a gamer, since they’re so versatile and so well-designed (especially for those who remember fondly the early console days). The company’s latest controller is now up for pre-order, and it’s an homage to the SNES gamepad that can do a lot more in terms of connecting with modern devices,… Read More
There’s a shortage of women, non-binary people and men of color in the venture capital world. That’s why Pipeline Angels, an angel investing bootcamp for underrepresented people in tech, has launched a VC-in-Residence program to help people from diverse backgrounds become managing or general partners at VC firms. While there are some people of color in the VC world, it can be hard… Read More
