Spotify has long been linked with going public in the U.S. — it is speculated to be preparing for an IPO-less listing next year — but it has emerged that the company rebuffed the opportunity to sell to a major tech name earlier this year: Tencent, the Chinese internet giant valued at $380 billion. Tencent is said to have approached Spotify with a view to acquiring the company to… Read More
Oh, Bodega. The newly launched startup’s insensitivity hit some pretty tender nerves during a time when cultural and societal tensions are high. The first article published about Bodega read almost like a Silicon Valley parody. Read More
There’s no shortage of angst in Silicon Valley. Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and author of a new book, “WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us,” thinks a lot of problems could be solved if big tech would focus less on profits and more on enabling other companies to be built atop of, or in partnership, with their platforms.… Read More
As AI creeps deeper into each and every industry vertical, demand for experienced technical talent continues to increase. Now online education tools like Udacity and Coursera are being thrust into the spotlight as potential solutions to the problem. But Fortune 2000 companies are still paying an unsustainable premium for data scientists. We’re excited to showcase this ecosystem at… Read More
This is one of the minor dangers of owning an Amazon Echo. Most anyone can activate the device by just saying the wake word, including Cartman. And in the season opener of South Park, that’s exactly what happened. Read More
Face ID is easily the most hot-button topic to come out of Apple’s iPhone event this week, notch be damned. As people have parsed just how serious Apple is about it, questions have rightly begun to be raised about its effectiveness, security and creation. To get some answers, I hopped on the phone with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi. Read More
American Vandal takes the investigative approach of shows like Making a Murderer and applies it to something a little less serious — not a murder, but the spraypainting of dicks on teachers’ cars at a fictional California high school. Yes, it’s a Netflix parody of a Netflix show (among other things). The snake eats its own tail! American Vandal was created by Tony Yacenda… Read More
Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, has just held Demo Day for its eighth London cohort, seeing 14 newly-formed startups pitch their wares onstage to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene. What’s particularly interesting about EF is that it backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that, as… Read More
Tesla is still exploring options to make swapping vehicle battery packs easier and faster. This patent filed in May reveals one option that would allow technicians to change out packs in less than 15 minutes. This isn’t the first of such ideas. Back in 2014 Tesla briefly played with an automated system that swapped Model S battery packs in less than 90 seconds. That idea seemed to be… Read More
The tech community and students need each other to thrive and compete and fuel innovation in this country. That’s why it is more important than ever to invest in America’s youth, and that starts with education and building opportunities for students and young grads across the U.S. At Disrupt SF, we’re hosting a conversation with one of the country’s most… Read More
Credit Karma said it will add Equifax to its credit monitoring service as part of its free product, which proactively notifies members of significant changes to their credit report. Read More
Hulu is spending around $2.5 billion on content this year, according to a report from Variety, citing remarks made by Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins at an event this week at the Paley Center for Media in New York. The streaming service, which has now earned its first Emmy nods with over a dozen nominations for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” will also launch seven new original series, arriving… Read More
Data scientist Michael Roytman and his statistician friend Jesse Berns were working on a project together for the United Nations in Iraq that required a lot of the data to be in a central place and analyzed on the fly. But like a lot of countries in the developing world, Wi-Fi was spotty and they didn’t have a lot of the tech available to make that possible. Many of these operations rely… Read More
The U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) has voted to seek public views on whether there should be a change to the rules for political ads that extends disclaimer requirements to ads shown on digital platforms, such as Facebook and Google. Read More
Time is giving its celeb and entertainment-filled streaming service a new name. Launched last year as the blandly and cumbersome “People/Entertainment Weekly Network,” the newly rebranded service is now being called just “PeopleTV.” Though Entertainment Weekly’s brand has been dropped from the name, Time asserts that EW will still “contribute… Read More
There is always a tension inside companies about whether to build or to buy, whatever the need. A few years ago Dropbox decided it was going to move the majority of its infrastructure requirements from AWS into its own data centers. As you can imagine, it took a monumental effort, but the company believed that the advantages of controlling its own destiny would be worth all of the challenges… Read More
One of the most annoying things about surfing today’s web – besides all those ads, of course – is landing on a site and getting blasted by a video that starts playing automatically. Not only does the experience surprise and annoy web users, it can also consume power and use data – which is concerning for mobile users, in particular. Now Google says it will do… Read More
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital themed podcast that we are bringing live to Disrupt SF next Wednesday. All the cool kids will be there to chat numbers and heckle. This week Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and myself — Alex Wilhelm — were joined by Accel’s Jake Flomenberg to dig through the biggest news of the week. And news there was. We… Read More
The European Commission is preparing a list of legal options on how to make digital multinationals such as Amazon, Facebook and Google pay more tax, Reuters reports. Read More
Automattic, the company behind the popular open source web publishing software WordPress, has said it will be pulling away from using Facebook’s React javaScript library over concerns about a patent clause in Facebook’s open source license. Read More
