Back in March, iRobot announced that it would be bringing Alexa functionality to its 980 Roomba, letting users with an Echo clean their home with a simple voice command. Today, that functionality expands to all WiFi connected Roombas, a list that includes a pair new additions, the Roomba 890 and Roomba 690, which lower the barrier of entry for the company’s connected robotic vacuums.… Read More
Relive, a Dutch startup that has been flying a little under the tech media radar until now, might just be onto something. Inspired by the experience of its founders during a cycling trip whilst on holiday in Tenerife early last year, the company turns activity data, combined with photos you’ve taken, into 3D animated videos. Read More
Infosys, the India-headquartered tech consulting giant, has promised to hire 10,000 American workers over the next two years. The company said today that it will accomplish this by launching four new technology hubs in the U.S., with the first set to open this August in Indiana. Read More
French startup BlaBlaCar is launching a brand new app and service today. Named BlaBlaLines, this new app is all about short distance carpooling and daily commutes so that you can leave your car at home. BlaBlaCar is going to launch this new service progressively. The app will only be available on Android at first, and it’ll only work between a handful of French cities — between… Read More
When Bitfusion launched in 2015, its focus was on helping developers speed up their applications by giving them pre-compiled libraries that made better use of GPUs, FPGAs and other co-processing technologies. That was then. Today, the hottest market for these technologies is in training deep learning models. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what Bitfusion is focusing now. Read More
Uber has launched its UberEats service in India today, where it will initially be available in Mumbai. The company said it plans to expand the reach of UberEats in India to six cities before the end of the year, but it did not disclose which cities it will hit. Mumbai is as good a place to start as any, being that it is one of India’s three business hubs and a city with an… Read More
After two years of wooing, Angie’s List has finally agreed to be acquired by IAC. After the deal closes, Angie’s List will combined with HomeAdvisor, IAC’s home services marketplace, into a new public company called ANGI Homeservices. Read More
Aurea acquires Jive for $462 million, Airbnb settles lawsuit with the City of San Francisco over unfair overregulation of short-term rentals, Theranos settles a lawsuit with one of its investors and Verizon backs Renovo. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Looks like Twitter’s streaming video news deal with Bloomberg was just the first of more than a dozen content partnerships that it’s announcing today. The company unveiled the full slate at the NewFronts, where online publishers pitch their content to advertisers. (This was the first time Twitter’s held its own NewFronts presentation.) Read More
Twitter might have killed off its Music app but now it’s working with the world’s top concert promoter. Today at the NewFronts conference in New York, Twitter announced it is partnering with Live Nation to exclusively livestream video of concerts. Artists including Train, Portugal The Man, August Alsina, and Marian Hill are slated to have shows streamed on Twitter. The first will… Read More
Facebook’s role in spreading news, especially fake news, has been in the spotlight since last year’s presidential election. Now it’s promoting Alex Hardiman to lead its news efforts on the product side. Hardiman worked at The New York Times, most recently as vice president of news products, until joining Facebook last year. Read More
Cisco has been rather acquisitive in recent years, buying 19 companies since 2015; today it announced it was acquiring cloud-based SD-WAN vendor Viptela for $610 million in cash. Viptela was founded in 2012 and had raised more than $108 million, including its most recent $75 million round just last May. The $610 million price tag appears to be a nice return for investors. Read More
In perhaps the most absurd attack on net neutrality yet attempted, a federal judge argues that the rules established in 2015 by the FCC violate the first amendment rights of… internet service providers. Fortunately, this line of reasoning is as ineffectual as it is mistaken. Read More
By this time last year, one tech company had gone public. Already this year, nine tech companies have gone public on U.S. exchanges. Needless to say, public exits are looking up.
That comparison becomes starker when you compare SecureWorks, 2016’s first IPO, to Snap, which went public in 2017. SecureWorks priced under range, and it has since fallen nearly 38 percent from its IPO price. Read More
Facebook has given its Marketplace a bit of a visual overhaul, with new colorful icons and improved search and filtering features. The Craigslist competitor is Facebook’s major entry point into local commerce. Today, the Marketplace sits in a dedicated tab at the bottom of Facebook’s app, where its ever-present red badge forces you to click through. (Or is that just me?) Read More
Equinix, an international data center company based in Redwood City, California, announced today that it has completed the purchase of 29 data centers from Verizon for $3.6 billion. The acquisition greatly expands Equinix’s footprint, including giving it access to Latin America through a data center in Bogota, Colombia, along with a new presence in Houston, Texas and Culpeper, Virginia. Read More
Awesomeness, the digital media company programming content for a young, YouTube-obsessed audience, is getting into news. The company announced a new project called Awesomeness News. The editorial brand will focus on stories aimed at the “Gen Z” audience, including those on issues they care about, like politics, social justice and the environment. Read More
Beleaguered blood diagnostics startup Theranos has reached a settlement with hedge fund management firm Partner Fund Management. Terms of the settlement are confidential, but PFM had sought to recoup its investment in the case and was also asking for damages. Read More
Between Thumbtack, Yelp, Angie’s List and Amazon, it wouldn’t appear that the world needs a new platform that matches customers with service professionals. That’s not the way Julio Vasconcellos sees it, clearly. Vasconcellos has spent the last year-plus working on a services platform called Prefer. Read More
