The MEST incubator has appointed Aaron Fu as its new Managing Director. This comes as the Accra based innovation hub scales up its presence across Africa. Founded in 2008, MEST operates as a training program and seed fund for African innovators to build successful commercial tech companies. Fu takes the helm after two years as Managing Partner at early stage VC firm Nest. He also co-founded… Read More
Dara Khosrowshahi, the recently named CEO of Uber, is leaving the New York Times Company’s board of directors. According to a government filing, Khosrowshahi notified the NYT board on Thursday that he would be resigning from the role because of his new responsibilities at Uber. The former Expedia CEO had been on the board since 2015. “Mr. Khosrowshahi’s decision to resign as… Read More
PewDiePie, the world’s most popular YouTube broadcaster with over 57 million subscribers, is back once again making racist comments. The broadcaster, real name Felix Kjellberg, lost a lucrative contract with Disney earlier this year after posting anti-Semitic content and making repeated references to Nazis in videos. This time around Kjellberg, who is known for being the best-paid… Read More
Tech writers are invited to a lot of demo days, as you might imagine. Sometimes, these presentations are very long, with many startup teams taking the stage to pitch to investors and the media. Sometimes, they’re shorter, featuring a more concentrated group of founders. But always, the pitches are concise. In fact, most incubators or accelerators take their cue from one of the… Read More
Our Disrupt SF (September 18-20) is just a week away, and we’ve made Disrupt SF more engaging and useful than ever for founders and investors alike, in addition to providing a pretty mind-blowing speaker line-up for the main stage. The latest agenda is below. But first, here are five reasons why you don’t want to miss the best Disrupt SF yet. (And here’s where you can grab… Read More
It didn’t get a lot of attention – it’s hard to compete these days with Harvey, Irma, Donald and Kim Jong Un — but the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously passed the SELF Drive Act. Read More
The kings of the alt-rock musical equivalent of a black and white photograph, The National, have a new virtual reality experience they’ve released with The New York Times. The VR documentary, “The National: Something Out of Nothing” could be an article about the secrets of the band’s success, but is actually a behind the scenes look of the five members of the band as… Read More
Hey Australian startups! What can you do in the next 24 hours to radically change the trajectory of your business? Apply for Startup Battlefield Australia! 15 early stage startups will be selected to receive expert pitching coaching from TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team, before competing on our global stage on November 16th. We’re T-minus 24 hours until applications close… Read More
Blockchain, the secure distributed ledger technology first created to track bitcoin ownership, has taken on a number of new roles in recent years tracking anything of value from diamonds to real estate deeds to contracts. The blockchain offers the promise of a trusted record that can reduce fraud. Some industry experts say that over the coming years, it could be used to control identity… Read More
In a windowless, 15th-floor courtroom in downtown San Francisco this week, GrubHub has been defending its 1099 independent contractor employment model for its delivery drivers. This specific trial is looking to determine whether or not plaintiff Raef Lawson, an ex-GrubHub driver, was misclassified as an independent contractor while delivering food for GrubHub. Read More
Subverting the 140 character limit by chaining tweets together into a cohesive “tweetstorm” takes some know-how, or you’ll screw it up. Luckily Twitter has built but not yet launched a feature for easily composing tweetstorms. Hidden inside the current Android app is a way to write out a tweetstorm and see it broken into distinct tweets, then tweet them all at once.
By… Read More
Barring Apple coming out with a delayed launch date for the next-generation iPhone, the guts of which are basically laid out on the Internet already, Apple’s shares are probably not going to see the kinds of explosive activity you might expect around something as hyped as a massive iPhone revision. Instead, Wall Street — which has spent months and months modeling Apple’s… Read More
In a recent interview at the Futurecast event at Warner Bros Studios in Hollywood Casey Wasserman, the founder and chief executive of the Los Angeles based talent agency Wasserman Media Group, elaborated on how technology is changing the Olympics and the benchmark that the 2028 games will set for future generations. Read More
So, what do we know so far? Typical of Apple leaks in recent years, we’ve heard trickles of information on just about every piece of the new device, but, as always, everything is still up in the air. The screen, the camera, the pricing — even the name has been subject to debate in recent weeks. There does seem to be a bit of clarification on the latter point, courtesy of a massive… Read More
China’s big electric vehicle push is about to get even bigger: The country is planning to end the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles entirely, with regulators working currently on a timetable of when the ban will ultimately take effect, according to Bloomberg.
China is the world’s largest auto market, with 28.03 million vehicles sold last year, a boost in demand of 13.7 percent vs. Read More
Every company is a tech company, and that’s a big problem. Or rather, either every company is a tech company but most suck at it, or most aren’t tech companies but should be. Either way, we’re gonna have a bad time. Stock photo companies oughta be making more images of hackers because that cat burglar / hoodie dude behind a computer isn’t going to cut it when sh*t hits… Read More
You wake up. Check your phone. Something happened overnight. People are upset. The actual news is uncertain, it’s too soon for context and understanding, but it’s not too soon for everyone to quickly confirm their biases. It’s never too soon for that. You shower. Get dressed. Get ready for your job. Work emails have already begin to flood into your inbox. Some automatic,… Read More
With Hurricane Irma hitting Florida’s southern islands as a category four storm, and more than 6.3 million being told to evacuate Florida, being able to stay in contact with the outside world is a high priority. As a result, smartphone apps which can help coordinate rescues and responses have become crucial to efforts. The main one that’s being talked about — and downloaded at… Read More
Tesla has pushed an over-the-air update to some of its vehicles in Florida that lets those cars go just a liiiittle bit farther, thus helping their owners get that much farther away from the devastation of Hurricane Irma. Wondering how that’s even possible? Up until a few months ago, Tesla sold a 60kWh version of its Model S and Model X vehicles — but the battery in those cars… Read More
Startup funding and exiting activity has been slow over the past few months in the U.S. Fewer companies closed rounds, IPO volumes were light, and not a lot of big M&A deals got done. But that’s to be expected, right? After all, it was summer break. Now that Labor Day’s over and we’re back at our desks, we can expect deal volumes to pick up. That seasonal explanation for… Read More
