Mobile publishers tend to struggle to optimise ad revenue and fill their mobile inventory, despite the abundance of options. What’s required is a one-stop solution for ad revenue optimisation that is simple to integrate and manage. That’s the potential prospect with the acquisition today of French founded company AdinCube, in a deal claimed to be worth $20m. This is an… Read More
If you have to do a nearly 18-hour live engine test, why not do something fun? Boeing clearly likes fun because for the last 14 hours a 787 Dreamliner has been tracing the outline of a plane above the United States. By my count, this outline hits 17 states and spans from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the tip of Texas. As of this post’s writing, the outline is nearly complete. The… Read More
Tesloop is a company that saw great potential in the Model X from Tesla – not as a consumer vehicle, but as a means of providing city to city fleet passenger transport, similar to a train or bus with added comfort and style, and with all the benefits of sustainable electric transit. Tesloop just completed its first novel use of the Tesla Model X in another capacity: As a freight… Read More
Savings app Qapital wants people to make more conscious decisions around their money. While to date that meant helping its users build up savings, now Qapital will help manage their day-to-day spending through a new checking account and debit card. Read More
Codecademy has spent the last several years building a large community of learners with free lessons aimed at teaching its users the basics of how to code. But now it’s betting that many of them will be willing to pay for more intensive courses. Read More
Hendra Kwik is hoping to tap into the excitement of on-demand companies like Uber and distributed workforces — except instead of ridesharing, he’s hoping it will work for banking. That’s the theory behind PAYFAZZ, which coordinates with banks to create a distributed network of bank agents that can operate from wherever — even their own homes. Once that person is… Read More
The arrival of the Z2 is a moment of truth for the Moto Z line — and modular phones in general. The product’s novelty was enough to generate plenty of interest for the first generation, but a year after its release is the perfect time to reassess what the inclusion of swappable Moto Mods actually brings to the product. Read More
Xiaomi’s good run has continued after a research firm found that the Chinese firm has ranked top for sales of wearable devices worldwide for the first. Sales of Fitbit devices, meanwhile, plunged by 40 percent Coming off the back of Xiaomi’s reentry into the world’s top five smartphone sellers, a new Strategy Analytics report found that it leapfrogged Apple and Fitbit to… Read More
Assuming you haven’t been living in a cave — in which case this news wouldn’t interest you anyway — you know there’s a solar eclipse happening on August 21st. It’s the first solar eclipse to cross the United States since 1918 and the last one before 2045, so people are quite excited about this one. Science teachers are also getting ready to turn this into… Read More
Last November, GE acquired the AI-centric startup Wise.io to bolster its machine learning capabilities. While Wise.io’s core competency was in machine learning, its main product focused on helping enterprises manage customer service requests. GE has now spun out Wise.io in a new company, SmartAssist.io, which will continue to expand the service and work with existing customers. Read More
China’s Ofo and Mobike may be the Uber of bike-sharing thanks an early head start and more than $1 billion in cumulative funding that’s financing aggressive international expansions, but that isn’t deterring smaller players.
Hong Kong’s Gobee Bike, one such upstart — which literally operates in the shadow of those two Chinese giants — just announced a $9… Read More
Facebook will become the suggester of perspective to avoid being the “arbiter of truth”. It’s rolling out “Related Articles” that appear below news links to stories lots of people are posting about on Facebook, or that are suspected to be false news and have been externally fact checked by Facebook’s partners. Appearing before someone reads, Related… Read More
Kabbage, a company with some 115,000 customers and $3.5 billion in loans that has built an automated platform for lending money to small businesses and individuals using a large set of data points to determine a customer’s credit score, is announcing some big cabbage of its own today. SoftBank Group is investing $250 million in Kabbage — funding that Rob Frohwein, the co-founder… Read More
Yinglan Tan, a long-time Sequoia venture partner based out of Singapore, has left the firm following a five-year stint and is now launching his own fund. Both Tan and Sequoia confirmed that he departed earlier this year. Tan, who joined Sequoia in 2012 from Singapore’s National Research Fund and is the author of two books on tech and investment, has been a central part of… Read More
Personio, a German startup that offers a HR management and recruiting platform, has closed $12 million in Series A funding. European VC Northzone led the round, with participation from existing investors, such as Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Picus Capital. Read More
Less than 24 hours after a leak seemingly confirmed that Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note 8 will pack a gigantic screen, LG has confirmed long-standing rumors that its next smartphone will feature an OLED screen. The Korean firm detailed some details of its next device, believed to be the the V30, including its “plastic OLED FullVision display.” The six-inch screen will be… Read More
MKBHD get first look at the RED Hydrogen, CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technology is used to wipe out a genetically inherited heart mutation in embryos, Instagram Stories turns one year old, UK IKEA is now selling solar and more. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
Oren Peli, who wrote and directed the enormously successful film Paranormal Activity, is launching a new iOS and Android app designed to help users create, find, and join local events. Spot‘s launch might be doubly surprising — not only is Peli launching an app, but it seems like an odd idea to come from someone best known for horror movies (he also produced the Paranormal… Read More
Activist and writer Ijeoma Oluo is the latest to suffer for Facebook’s inability — or perhaps unwillingness — to improve its reporting and moderation infrastructure. After receiving hundreds of racist and threatening messages in response to a joke made on Twitter, Oluo began posting screenshots when it was clear that reporting did nothing. Facebook’s response was to… Read More
Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings today, which means a bunch of Wall Street analysts jumped on the phone to probe the ever-quotable Elon Musk — including, believe it or not, about SpaceX. To be sure, it wasn’t specifically about space or flight — it was whether some of the innovations happening at SpaceX can be applied to Tesla. Musk runs both companies, which… Read More
