Almost a year after setting up a UK business entity called Squareup Europe, today the payments company Square is officially opening up for business in the UK, marking its first move into Europe and its fifth country after Canada, Japan, Australia and its home market in the US, with a service that turns ordinary smartphones and tablets into point-of-sale payments devices. Brexit and all… Read More
Amazon today confirmed that it has acquired Souq.com, an e-commerce marketplace serving the Middle East based out of Dubai, which was already commonly described as “the Amazon of the Middle East.” We had reported last week that the companies had already reached an agreement and that “the ink [was] dry” on a deal that was valued at around $650 million. Amazon today… Read More
Canon Europe seems to be developing a penchant for buying up London-based startups in the photo or printing space. Following the acquisition of parental photo-sharing app Lifecake in 2015, the company is on a shopping spree again, this time acquiring Kite, a print tech startup that lets developers add on-demand printing features to their apps. Read More
Sweden-based startup Truecaller made its name as a nifty mobile app that helps people fielder out unwanted phone calls and messaging, but now it is making a move to become a platform. At a press event in India, Truecaller’s largest market based on its 150 million users, the company announced a series of partnerships, including a tie-in with Google which will see the U.S.… Read More
Tesla has refuted the contents of a lawsuit filed by an employee who alleges he was the victim of racial harassment and discrimination while working at the company. DeWitt Lambert, a 44-year-old black man working on the assembly line at Tesla’s California-based plant, claimed in a suit that he was “subjected to racial slurs and lewd behavior” from co-workers for more than… Read More
Didi Chuxing, the largest ride sharing app in China, is deliberating a proposed $6 billion investment backed by SoftBank Group, according to a report in Bloomberg. Read More
The creator of Android, Andy Rubin, teases a photo of a new smartphone his company has been working on, Facebook officially launches Town Hall for contacting government reps and Spotify buys content recommendation startup MightyTV. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
It goes without saying that working with robots and heavy machinery is more than a little dangerous. While better practices and ethical companies are still less common than they should be, smarter robots are another, parallel solution. German research outfit Fraunhofer suggests an intuitive model for human-robot collaboration in industrial settings. Read More
The always reliable Emojipedia (they have one job and they do it well (actually it’s a complex beat)) has posted the final list of emoji that will be included in the Unicode 10.0 release this June. There’s a bunch of great stuff in here if you like fantasy creatures and inclusion. But there are a couple clunkers, too. Let’s look at the best and worst of today’s emoji crop. Read More
A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Read More
The final chapter of Samsung’s lengthy Note 7 saga apparently has yet to be written. Following pressure from environmental groups that culminated with a on-site protester at the company’s Mobile World Congress press event, Samsung has confirmed its intentions to re-release the Note 7 back into the wild in refurbished form. Read More
Late last year the European Space Agency doubled down on its Mars mission, dedicating half a billion euros to the next phase of its Exomars 2020 program — and now we are seeing the benefits of that enormous investment: a pretty awesome new render of the rover they plan to deploy to the Martian surface. Read More
Good news for fans of GoDaddy’s Easter Egg-filled Super Bowl ad: The company has launched an entire campaign around the ad’s star, “The Internet.” Read More
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has a new company — Neuralink — focused on developing the capabilities of the brain through technological augmentation. It’s been known for some time that Musk was working on brain-computer interface tech as a means to help ensure humans can keep pace with the accelerating development of artificial intelligence. Read More
A reminder that I’ll be holding a micro-meetup at Boomtown on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday, March 29th at 7pm. Companies will have 2 minutes to pitch in front of two local judges and then 2 minutes of questions. No slides, no props, no costumes (Ok, maybe costumes.) Boomtown is at 2060 Broadway B1 in the basement. To get there, park around Spruce and Broadway and it’s… Read More
Google, which has accused Symantec and its partners of misissuing tens of thousands of certificates for encrypted web connections, quietly announced Thursday that it’s downgrading the level and length of trust Chrome will place in certificates issued by Symantec. Encrypted web connections — HTTPS connections like those on banking sites, login pages or news sites like this one… Read More
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the company to own the future of virtual reality, and in the short term that means putting a lot of VR headsets on a lot of faces. To do so, the company is hiring Michael Hillman, a 15-year veteran of Apple, to lead the VR product roadmap for Oculus as head of VR hardware. Read More
Apple began offering a “free app of the week” back in 2012 as a means of highlighting some of the App Store’s best titles and encouraging users to start downloading. Google, belatedly, is following in Apple’s footsteps with its own newly launched “free app of the week” section on Google Play. However, we understand that Google has not yet committed to… Read More
Earlier this month, Sarah Silverman tweeted about a new website called Make Tweets Great Again that had sprung up to give money to the ACLU every time President Donald Trump dropped a tweet bomb from his personal account. The project is a prime example of a newfound “apptivism” from coders and developers across the Web. Read More
Faraday Future, the would-be Tesla rival facing well-documented challenges in terms of capitalization and efforts to bring its first production vehicle to market, has scrapped plans to construct an assembly facility and “experience center” (read: showroom) in Vallejo, California on Mare Island. Read More
