George Eastman founded Kodak in 1888 in Rochester, New York. Four years later and 200 miles down the road, Thomas Edison and some pals founded General Electric. The two industrial giants chugged along for more than 100 years, but GE is still here and Kodak is (mostly) gone, flushed down the disruption pipes of late-20th-century digitization. How did GE manage to avoid the same fate? Read More
Elon Musk shows off a video about his tunnel boring company, The Boring Company, a self-driving Apple test vehicle is spotted in the wild and Cloudera and Carvana each price their IPO at $15; one does well, the other not so much. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Veteran-focused social platform Sandboxx wants to pair its community members with experts who can ease their transition back into the workforce — and hopefully even land them a job.
Global firm Betts Recruiting will join the self-described “military media and technology company” to empower vets to seek careers in the tech industry and to demonstrate their unique value to… Read More
The Rose City isn’t happy with Uber… again. After the company failed to turn over details on its deeply sketchy “Greyball” software by Portland’s deadline, the city may seek to compel Uber to hand it over with a subpoena. Those intentions, reported by the Oregonian, were articulated by Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the city’s Bureau… Read More
Earlier today, the NSA announced its intentions to limit a surveillance technique that had a nasty side effect of sweeping up communications to and from Americans. In a rare unprompted press statement, the NSA explained that it would halt “any upstream internet communications that are solely ‘about’ a foreign intelligence target,” restricting its surveillance to… Read More
Amazon announced it will be shutting down its “Underground Actually Free” program, which offers customers free versions of Android apps that would typically cost money, including those that relied on in-app purchases but were otherwise free downloads. Though it promised long-term support when it debuted back in August 2015, Amazon today says the “Actually Free” program… Read More
Jack Dorsey is at it again — after purchasing $7 million in Twitter stock back in February, the Twitter CEO bought another $9.5 million today. After making his purchase, Dorsey posted the news on Facebook Twitter, sparking a one percent gain in the company’s share price in after-hours trading. According to an SEC filing, Dorsey purchased 574,002 shares of Twitter stock… Read More
Tinder users have many motives for uploading their likeness to the dating app. But contributing a facial biometric to a downloadable data set for training convolutional neural networks probably wasn’t top of their list when they signed up to swipe. Read More
Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent will be opening a new AI research center in Seattle, according to The Information. The company has long had a core office in Palo Alto, but this will be its first major machine intelligence R&D effort in the country. Earlier this week Tencent announced that it would open its first data center in Silicon Valley. Read More
Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington published a farewell note to users on Friday, announcing they would shut down their once-popular anonymous social network this week. The app allowed people to connect with other users within a certain radius, and was widely marketed in and used on college campuses. Read More
Rubrik, a startup that provides data backup and recovery services for enterprises across both cloud and on-premises environments, has closed a $180 million round of funding that values the company at $1.3 billion. The news confirms a report we ran earlier this week noting that the company was raising between $150 million and $200 million. Read More
Carvana, the site for buying and selling cars, had a rough first day in the public markets. After pricing its IPO at $15 per share, it ended the day down 26 percent, at $11.10. Bankers typically recommend a price that would cause the shares to go up about 20 percent or so on the first day. But Carvana maximized every last dollar in its $225 million offering, at the cost of new investors. Read More
On April 13, the state of California issued a cease and desist letter to RydenGo, saying that the company had to take down its website. The letter stated that the ride-hailing startup was operating without a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The problem with the order, according to RydenGo CEO Michael Pappas, is that the company is not yet operating. Read More
After pricing its IPO at $15 per share, Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up more than 20 percent, at $18.09. This also is above the range of $12 to $14 for which Cloudera was preparing. Read More
Apple has offered feedback to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) concerning its proposed new rule changes regarding autonomous vehicle testing on state roads. The formal feedback provided by Apple is relatively short and to the point, contained in a letter submitted to the DMV and embedded below, signed by Apple Director of Product Integrity Steve Kenner (who also authored… Read More
On Friday, Microsoft announced that it will create a new role for former Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill. Brill will take the lead on privacy, data protection and regulatory issues at Microsoft as the corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for its Privacy and Regulatory Affairs group. Read More
Here’s an interesting change: Tumblr’s iOS application just received an update which now lets you turn on or off adult-oriented, NSFW search results just by toggling a switch in iOS’s Settings. That’s right: you can now switch on or off the Tumblr porn with ease. Weirder still, Tumblr’s note about the change in the App Store update text says this was… Read More
Virtualities founder Ryan Burningham has a new idea for abandoned retail spaces — VR. VR theaters and arcades like Virtualities are starting to pop up in warehouses and other empty spaces around the U.S., including Burningham’s startup, located in what used to be a Hot Topic on the second floor of the Gateway Mall on Salt Lake City’s west side. Read More
Elon Musk was on stage at the 2017 TED Conference in Vancouver on Friday, and he revealed some of his tunnel work and aspirations, but he also talked about a few ongoing Tesla projects he’s referenced before. The multi-CEO showed a shadowy image that gives us our first look at what his forthcoming electric Semi Truck will look like, and also let drop the suggestion that Tesla will… Read More
Privacy advocates are finally getting (a little bit) of what they want. Friday, The New York Times reported that the NSA will end its practice of collecting texts and emails by American citizens sent or received by individuals abroad that mention foreign surveillance targets. Read More
