Tier one auto industry supplier Bosch is investing heavily in where the market is headed, with a newly-announced $1.1 billion facility that will produce semiconductors uses in self-driving cars, smart homes and smart city infrastructure. The new Dresden-based chip fab is set to start producing silicon commercially in 2021, and construction should wrap up in 2019.
The greatly expanded chip… Read More
The tech used in making cars drivereless can also be very well suited to building HD maps of roads and cities, which are then in turn used to make driverless cars better. So it isn’t surprising when companies working on autonomous tech also focus on building their own high-definition maps, which go beyond regular maps by fusing LiDAR, radar and visual information for a very accurate… Read More
After Anders Holch Povlsen and his firm Brightfolk bought up a stake of at least $225 million in Klarna earlier this month, today the profitable Swedish payments startup, now valued at over $2.25 billion, is stepping up its game. Klarna has announced that it has picked up a full banking license from Finansinspektionen, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. The license will give… Read More
Hong Kong is one of the world’s premier financial hubs, but can it be a destination for tech startups? That was the question put to a panel of experts at the TechCrunch China event in Shenzhen today. The answer, largely, was yes but it may need a little time.
“Hong Kong is becoming a global innovation center, but it needs companies to look up to,” Blake Larsen, head of… Read More
Amazon is the tech giant most likely to become a dominant player in fintech, predicted James Lloyd, Ernst & Young’s fintech leader, when speaking on stage at TechCrunch and TechNode’s event in Shenzhen, China on Monday. Lloyd told TechCrunch that he expects Amazon to expand further into payments, lending and credit scoring. “They’ll get into everything that… Read More
Disrupt Berlin 2017 is a few short months away, and we’re thrilled to begin announcing this year’s crop of extraordinary speakers. Chiaro CEO Tania Boler started the company out of a belief that advances in sensor technology and connected devices can help break down stigma and change the lives of women everywhere. Chiaro’s first product, the Elvie Kegel exercise tracker,… Read More
The Mode Media story refuses to end — following its abrupt shut down last year, the company’s assets have been acquired by wedding-focused advertising company BrideClick.
Mode previously operated lifestyle sites including Glam and Foodie, plus a larger ad network that it said reached 144 million unique visitors each month.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but… Read More
Elon Musk says that he’s had “promising conversations” with L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, regarding the potential of a network of tunnels underneath the city that would allow for a high-speed transit network unburdened by surface traffic. That’s the vision Musk’s recently founded Boring Company hopes to make a reality, as illustrated by a concept video debuted by Musk… Read More
Today, more than ever, it’s open source projects that are leading the charge in how modern software is developed, deployed and managed. There’s Kubernetes for containers and OpenStack for running enterprise-grade infrastructure, for example. But over the course of the last few years, another platform — Cloud Foundry — has changed the way enterprises are developing… Read More
The conversation around diversity in tech persists. One effect of this has been the creation of executive positions designed to oversee a company’s approach to inclusion. That’s great. However, it has also resulted in the dilution of the word “diversity” and subsequent backlash in Silicon Valley and beyond. And yet, the tech industry is primed to not only model… Read More
Some fathers do these things. Some fathers go to the Columbus Public Library used book sale in about 1980 and buy five big boxes of books on every topic. They place those books in a playroom and they result in a consistently relevant personal library for his kids. Every year they learn something new out of that room. Some fathers take their sons and daughters to Computer Express, a small… Read More
Yesterday, Amazon and Whole Foods ruined a perfectly slow news day on a Friday in June with the announcement that Amazon intends to buy Whole Foods for almost $14 billion.
The most obvious victim of the deal was Instacart, in which Whole Foods invested and with whom Whole Foods has a five-year contract.
But after talking to a few Instacart investors and other sources close to the company… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, June 16, 2017. The Gang finally talks coins and chains, and too much of nothing is revealed.
@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @kteare, @fradice, DenisPombriant
@tinagillmor
+ G3: Wholistic with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Halley Suitt Tucker, Kristie Wells, and Tina Chase Gillmor Read More
Automattic, MIT Center for Civic Media, and The Mash-Up Americans have been working together to have honest dialogues, build empathy, and help make the world a more inclusive and compassionate place. So far, we’ve laid out the problem and explored our assumptions. In this, our third Design and Exclusion conversation, it’s time to talk about how we engage with one another online.… Read More
You would think at least one AI-powered humanoid bot would have a properly nerdy name. Maybe a Poindexter or Hildegarde to add some natural language processing to your customer chat app? No such luck. Instead, it sounds like the cool kids are in charge at most digital assistant and bot startups. Think short, peppy names that top the popular baby name lists. There’s Aiden and Riley putting… Read More
It takes a lot of money to launch stuff into space — even by NASA terms. The cost ranges from around $9,000 to more than $40,000 per pound. With that sort of price tag, weight and space are at a major premium with shuttle missions, causing NASA to look for innovative new ways to create more compact payloads. A team at Georgia Institute of Technology is exploring a method that uses 3D… Read More
“The competition for talent at the moment is absolutely ferocious,” agrees Professor Andrew Blake, whose computer vision PhD was obtained in 1983, but who is now, among other things, a scientific advisor to UK-based autonomous vehicle software startup, FiveAI, which is aiming to trial driverless cars on London’s roads in 2019… Read More
Uber apologized to some former riders in New York City and in other markets via email on Friday, saying that the company is aware it has “fallen short” and failed to prioritize the needs of its riders, drivers and employees, Business Insider reports. But throughout this entire fiasco, Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer who accused the company of sexual harassment, has… Read More
I’ve been visiting Central Europe almost every year and almost every year my buddy Jack Deneut has been setting up PragueCrunch, our kind-of-semi-annual celebration of Czech startups. And it’s happening again this year! The event is on July 13, 2017 at Riegrovy Sady Beer Garden. You can RSVP here. We’ll have free Kozel and Gambrinus beer all night and traditional Czech pub… Read More
Probably the last thing Uber needs right now is to have anyone recount their recent setbacks, but the company’s quick, Icarus-like fall from grace tells us much about how tech companies going through hyper growth can go wrong.
By 2016, the ride-sharing tech firm was a segment leader, present in 570 cities worldwide and with 12,000 employees. Yet just since the beginning of the year… Read More
