Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman wants everyone to know that’s not going to Uber. Bloomberg and Recode had reported that she was on the short list for the CEO spot, but she took to Twitter to make it clear that it’s not happening. In a three-part tweet, she concluded that the “rumors” have “become a distraction,” so she wants everyone to know… Read More
Redfin, the real estate site based in Seattle, has finally raised its IPO. Founded in 2004, this was 13 years in the making. Despite an ugly patent lawsuit from a former co-founder over one of Redfin’s pending patent applications — one filed just this Monday — the company priced above the $12 to $14 range, at $15 per share, a number that values the company at $1.2 billion.… Read More
Purple, a Utah-based mattress startup announced today it will merge with Global Partner Acquisition Corp (GPAC) in a deal that would value the company at $1.1 billion.
Purple was already well on its way to that valuation when we got to take a sneak peek at operations at the company’s headquarters in the small town of Alpine, Utah and its giant factory an hour away in rural… Read More
Social VR app AltspaceVR is shutting down its main service after running out of cash, saying it “can’t afford to keep the virtual lights on anymore.” The app was one of the first VR social experiences to gain traction and was available across a variety of platforms. In a blog post titled “A Very Sad Goodbye,” the company detailed that the social VR community will… Read More
Facebook has announced that news sites which rely on paid subscriptions, limiting readers to a certain number of articles per week, will now be able to do so through Instant Articles. The company has spent the last two years promoting these Facebook-hosted versions of articles, which unfortunately lacked this rather critical ability. Google’s AMP and Apple News have supported it for a while. Read More
Wink — the smart home hub and platform originally incubated inside the failed connected object maker Quirky, and then acquired by Flextronics (now known as Flex) as part-payment for Quirky’s debts — has moved on to its third owner. i.am+, the “lifestyle technology company” owned by musician and entrepreneur Will.i.am, has acquired the company for an… Read More
Dropbox may be taking another step in its very slow shuffle toward an IPO, and is now working with Goldman Sachs to prepare documents that could be filed as soon as this year, according to a report by Bloomberg. The company is expected to hire Goldman Sachs as the lead advisor of the IPO process, according to the report. Read More
Amazon may be getting ever deeper into a range of virtual products like media content and cloud services, but it is also continuing to add more features to lock down the bread and butter of its business: its e-commerce marketplace and the vast logistics operation that underpins it.
Today, Amazon quietly unveiled a new service called The Hub, lockers designed to be installed in multi-tenant… Read More
Approximately 2 million people have installed the YouTube TV app, Google’s live TV service aimed at a younger generation of cord cutters, as well as those who never signed up for traditional pay TV in the first place. That download figure comes from app store analytics firms Sensor Tower and App Annie, which both also noted that installs are evenly split between iOS and Android devices. Read More
Earlier today, Apple announced that it’s finally discontinuing the iPod nano and shuffle once and for all, making the touch the last iPod standing. Instead of simply mourning the loss of the devices, let’s celebrate the rich and full existences they led before shuffling off this mortal coil into the cold, unforgiving world of eBay auctions. Read More
I’m not saying the people around me here at Black Hat are malicious, or that the threats aren’t real. I’m saying that the industry, and everyone it, is strongly incentivized to make its customers and the wider world as frightened as possible, and people tend to follow the path of most incentivization, consciously or not, reluctantly or not. The security industry is the… Read More
Amazon reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it was a bit of a whiff — and a bummer for Jeff Bezos, who is now no longer the solar system’s richest human and has been relegated to the unfortunate position of second-richest human. Read More
IPO? How about HighPO? The 43-year-old marijuana media brand High Times has found a shortcut to going public: It sold itself to an already public shell company, of which High Times share holders then got an 83 percent stake. Read More
Amazon reported its earnings today, wherein a whiff in earnings sent the stock down around 3 percent and brought CEO Jeff Bezos back to reality as the, once again, second-richest human in the known solar system. In all seriousness though, the company appears to once again be squeezing out a very small profit on top of its mammoth retail operations. Read More
Intel declared $14.8 billion in revenue this afternoon and earnings per share of 72 cents. This represents a solid beat as analysts had expected revenues of $14.41 billion and EPS of 68 cents. The company’s stock finished up 22 cents and 0.63 percent to $34.97 per share in regular trading. In the moments after the company released its earnings, Intel’s stock shot up 3.43 percent. Read More
Pack it on up, everyone — someone just won ARKit. We’ve seen lots of fun stuff made with ARKit already, but this one… this one is something special. Read More
Game developer Chip Sineni of TRIXI studios created a clever AR experiment based on A-Ha’s seminal video for Take On Me. It is pretty fun. It’s also garnering a lot of attention from some very specific folks. I have been talking to a lot of people about AR over the past few months and there is a definable excitement around it.
I’m bullish as hell about AR, which I’ve… Read More
At TechCrunch’s event in Shenzhen last month, we had a chance to test out the WT2, a clever and ambitious device from startup TimeKettle. It’s a pair of wireless earpieces; each person in a multilingual conversation wears one, and they translate what’s said into the language spoken by each participant. Essentially it’s a Babel fish, though admittedly a rough draft of one. Read More
Few technologies survive more than five years — let alone 30 — without significant change. Technologies that do not change are resigned to obsolescence. But the GIF, which celebrates its 30th birthday this summer, has endured. While its technical aspects haven’t changed, GIFs have taken on three different lives — and usage of GIFs has never been higher than it is today. Read More
Wit.ai announced this morning in a blog post that it would be sunsetting its Bot Engine. The Facebook-owned company builds developer tools for natural language processing to help engineers build speech and text chatbots faster and with less technical experience. Bot Engine launched as a beta in April of 2016. The tool let developers train their own bots using sample conversations sharing… Read More
