Twitter is losing the head of its Asia Pacific business, Aliza Knox, after she announced the end of her near-five year tenure with the company. Knox was Twitter’s first hire in Asia — minus Japan — when she joined the company in 2012. (Twitter runs its Japan business separate from its APAC operations.) Prior to that, she spent five years at Google, rising to the… Read More
Grab, Uber’s biggest rival in Southeast Asia, has completed its first major acquisition after it bought up Indonesian startup Kudo to boost its nascent mobile payments platform. Neither party is giving a figure for the size of the deal, which was first rumored in February. Initial reports at the time suggested Grab would pay over $100 million for Kudo, but two sources close to the… Read More
In the novel Desperate in Dubai, Ameera Al Hakawati wrote: “Dubai is… after all, a lonely, transitory place. It’s hard to maintain relationships when people are always coming and going.” Two years ago, during my first time in Dubai, I agreed. After attending a UN conference there, admiring the city’s glittering, intergalactic architecture, visiting the Gold Souk,… Read More
When we last left Misen they were crowdfunding a very nice, very usable chef’s knife. They completed their crowdfunding goal and shipped the knife last year. Now they’re back with a paring knife for $30 and it’s pretty darn good. Given that almost anything – from jeans to sous vide machines – can get the high-tech, Internet-only treatment it’s to be… Read More
Clerky may not be a household name like TurboTax today, but the company’s business formation software has been called a “secret weapon” by startup founders in Silicon Valley for years. Many Y Combinator cofounders use it to get their companies started on paper. And now, Clerky is launching two new tools called Hiring and Fundraising to help startups move beyond… Read More
The number of things that can be done from the comfort of one’s own bed has increased in recent years — shopping, banking and now geospatial analytics. Ok, it doesn’t sound sexy but it might give you a leg up the next time your friend starts an arcane argument with you over whose neighborhood historically has more vehicles on the road. With SpaceKnow’s online… Read More
Politicians and economists lament that certain alpha regions — SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris — attract all the best jobs while becoming repellently expensive, reducing economic mobility and contributing to further bifurcation between haves and have-nots. But why don’t the best jobs move elsewhere? Of course many of them can’t. The average financier in NYC… Read More
It’s hard to visit a tech site these days without seeing a headline about deep learning for X, and that AI is on the verge of solving all our problems. Gary Marcus remains skeptical. Marcus, a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and professor of psychology at NYU, has spent decades studying how children learn and believes that throwing more data at problems won’t necessarily lead… Read More
In preparation for Disrupt New York and our upcoming TC Sessions series on Robotics Matt Burns and I will be heading to Pittsburgh to talk to some startups. We could use some help. We’re aiming to be in Pittsburgh on April 11 and we need a spot and potentially a beer sponsor. We prefer neutral spots but we could be convinced if you have a cool meeting space at your accelerator or office.… Read More
April Fools’ Day falls on a Saturday this year. Seemingly worried that the internet goes away on weekends, a bunch of companies rolled out their April Fools’ jokes a few days early.
Some of them are really, really good. Some of them… are not.
Here’s our round-up of the ones worth a laugh, chuckle or, at the very least, a mildly amused puff of air through your… Read More
We’ve got a whole roundup of 2017’s tech April Fools’ pranks, but this one from Snapchat deserves a little highlight all its own. Back in August of last year, Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories feature. There’s no arguing it. Instagram’s CEO even says Snapchat deserves credit for “this format”. They didn’t even bother changing the name… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 31, 2017. Doc checks AdTech’s pulse, Google poisons search with Fake News, and Social stews over trust. Plus the latest G3 with Denise Howell, Halley Suitt Tucker, Elisa Camahort Page, Kristie Wells, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor @dsearls @fradice… Read More
Tour and activities marketplace Zozi fired its CEO earlier this year, but employees were only just informed of this fact last week, when the ousted CEO – who hadn’t been in the office for months – crashed an emergency Town Hall meeting scheduled the day after the company announced a series of layoffs, affecting nearly 40 percent of staff. Read More
When I first met Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly in 2015 at the Intel Capital Summit, we were about to go on stage for a fireside chat to discuss among other things Intel’s massive investment in his company.
While on stage, the conversation inevitably turned to when the company might go public. As you might expect, he gave me the standard startup CEO answer. While Cloudera was certainly of… Read More
Things are going well for Krablr, the crab pricing messaging app for millennials. Yet now that the app has managed to attract millions of crab lovers the company faces more scrutiny. That’s why Krablr CEO Paul Paulson Black III just released the company’s first ever diversity report detailing the demographics of its employees. Read More
On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one, setting them gently in a nearby box. It isn’t much of a romantic celebration, but it is a triumph of sorts. Soft Robotics’ RL7 and other grippers can reliably perform some of the physical tasks we do countless times a day… Read More
Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey leaves Facebook, SpaceX successfully re-launches a rocket, Cloudera files for IPO and Snapchat now allows you to search Stories. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
The nine startups participating in Singularity University’s accelerator program presented this afternoon at Moffett Federal Airfield just outside Mountain View, CA. Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, aims to make it more feasible for people to address hard science problems and those that require a global reach. Startups backed by… Read More
When it comes to video, the audio is pretty damn important. Hell, they even give out some sort of award for them on occasion. Moodelizer wants to put the power of suitable soundtracks in the hands of amateur filmmakers, by letting you add a delightfully over-the-top soundtrack to the most mundane of tasks at the touch of a button. Read More
The field of soft robotics has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years for the alternatives it presents to the rigid machines we tend to associate with the space. A team of scientists at North Carolina State University is offering an interesting take on the space, utilizing magnetic fields to move around the biologically inspired robots. Read More
