More career moves in the world of European VC. This time it’s the turn of David Buttress, ex-CEO of Just Eat, who is joining 83North as a General Partner where he’ll be based in the VC firm’s London office. Read More
Urtasun joins Uber in a senior role at Uber’s ATG, at a time when the organizational unit, which drives most of Uber’s work on autonomous driving, is in need of more stability at the top.
Urtasun’s work on self-driving technology in general, and specifically with perception algorithms that help autonomous vehicles take better measure of their surroundings, have made her an… Read More
There’s good news for foreigners living in, or visiting, China after Didi Chuxing — the local ride-sharing leader — added support for English language and overseas credit cards to its service for the first time.
Didi, which processes more 20 million rides a day across its various services, has always been a tricky one for non-Mandarin speakers and visitors. Personally… Read More
Seedrs, the U.K.-based equity crowdfunding platform that lets anybody invest in startups, is announcing plans to launch a secondary market later this Summer. Read More
“It’s a VR play. That’s the frothiest space in the Valley right now. Nobody understands it but everyone wants in. Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters ‘V’ and ‘R’, and VC’s would hurl bricks of cash at them. By the time they find out it’s vaporware, it’s too late.”
T.J. Miller’s Erlich Bachman… Read More
Garena, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest tech startups, has picked up $550 million in new funding and changed its name. The Singapore-headquartered consumer Internet company told Bloomberg that it is now called Sea Ltd. to reflect is global expansion plans (and also because SEA is an acronym for Southeast Asia). Its new valuation was undisclosed. Read More
The year was off to a good start for technology acquisitions, according to data provided by PwC and Thomson Reuters. There were 486 U.S. tech deals announced in the first quarter totaling $42.8 billion. In terms of both number of deals and value of deals, it was the best start of the year for U.S. tech M&A since 2014. There were 28% more deals than the same period last year, although… Read More
Every major campaign brings its set of changes. Barack Obama used big data and micro-targeting in his 2008 campaign. Then social networks became a great way to address messages to voters directly. But the political campaigns of 2016 and 2017 have been something different altogether.
The internet has become so big that trolls started to have a significant influence on the results of the elections. Read More
Thursday night, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, I sat down with Confide cofounder and president Jon Brod to talk with him about his decidedly topsy turvy 2017. Though his three-year-old messaging app was the belle of the ball at the start of the year — Wired, the Washington Post, and Axios were among others to note it was a hit with frustrated White House staffers —… Read More
Most at-home lab testing devices like Scanadu and Cor are still waiting for FDA approval, but simple lab testing can still be done in the confines of your own home and then shipped to a lab and that’s led to a handful of new startups offering services like STD or food allergy tests. Everlywell, an Austin-based at-home lab testing startup (and a Disrupt Battlefield company), aims to make… Read More
Last week hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest what they saw as the evisceration of environmental legislation and a rollback of US efforts to stem the tide of climate change. Protests in Washington, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and other American cities coincided with the culmination of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days. Over… Read More
Richard Clarke has been watching the world for decades. The cybersecurity czar for the Bush and Clinton administrations, Clarke has been thinking and writing about threats – real-world and cyber – for years, culminating in his latest book, Warnings, a forthcoming title co-written with R.P. Eddy. Warnings looks at seven past Cassandras – people with so-called… Read More
The whole on-demand space has faced a lot of scrutiny in the past few years as questions about whether they are viable businesses balloon and the periodic down round leaks out. Then Instacart raised a massive round at a $3.4 billion valuation, and while the terms aren’t exactly clear, the funding environment for that space may be softening a bit. That’s offered an opportunity for… Read More
People really seem to want a smaller, lighter dock for the Nintendo Switch. One that’ll let you hook a Switch up to a TV while on the road without wasting suitcase real estate with the brick-sized, mostly-air-inside dock that comes in the box. Last week I wrote about a travel dock one DIYer made for himself by gutting and rebuilding the original dock, and the number of people that wrote… Read More
People tend to think in terms of what they want but don’t have, as opposed to what they have and don’t need. This is poignantly clear in the world of video streaming services. Outright cutting the cord hasn’t trended as quickly as pundits predicted; instead, Netflix, Hulu, HBONow, Amazon Prime and the rest seem to be something that many buyers view as supplementary. But… Read More
Technology has many societal impacts, but perhaps one of its most visibly evident is how the tools we use change how we communicate with each other — so, literally, how technology rewrites language itself. Read More
When Snap went public earlier this year, it revealed a break-neck level of growth in its nascent advertising business — and a dramatic burn rate along with it. But while it’ll be important for Snap to continue growing that business and get its costs in check, it’ll be nearly as important to convince Madison Ave. that it can be a mainstay ad buy alongside the big two (Facebook… Read More
There was once a time when everyone knew in their hearts that the tech industry was super white and male-dominated, but didn’t have the stats to back it up. Now that the likes of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netflix and most recently, Uber, have released their reports, the stats are out there. What a lot of people thought about the industry’s lack of diversity turned… Read More
Did you know Cambodia has its own BuzzFeed? Well, now you do! (And, yes, do note that I’m assuming you know of Cambodia and where it is located in the world.) In a country renowned for world-famous temples and fresh, spicy food — not to mention communist politics and one of history’s most atrocious genocides — lives Mediaload, a six-year-old online media company… Read More
We live in dark and darkly hilarious times. Our world has grown so bewildering and complicated, in no small part because of the finger jammed on technology’s fast-forward button, that many people have given up trying to make sense of it — or to make sense at all. That’s honestly my only explanation for some of the craziness out in the tech world these days.
I once saw Cory… Read More
