Nested, the London ‘proptech’ startup that guarantees to sell your house within 90 days or offer you a cash advance instead, has raised a further £8 million in funding. Read More
Vodafone India has confirmed that it has reached an agreement to acquire rival Idea Cellular. The deal, which is being painted as a merger, will create India’s largest operator with some 377 million customers. The company revealed it was in talks with Idea Cellular over a deal in January, and the coming-together was announced today. Subject to the relevant approvals, it is expected… Read More
Regional media startup Tech In Asia is close to raising as much as $6 million in new funding, three sources with knowledge of the round told TechCrunch.
Singapore-based Tech In Asia’s most recent raise was a $4 million Series C that closed in June 2015, previous funding prior to that was undisclosed. The site was one of the first to cover tech and startup news across Asia since its… Read More
IBM unveiled its “Blockchain as a Service” today, which is based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, version 1.0 from The Linux Foundation. IBM Blockchain is a public cloud service that customers can use to build secure blockchain networks. The company introduced the idea last year, but this is the first ready-for-primetime implementation built using that technology.… Read More
As part of IBM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis. Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM… Read More
Y Combinator Partner Daniel Gross today announced that the accelerator-turned-venture-fund will offer its first “vertical” track exclusively for AI startups. YC gathers founders from different industries together in each investment cycle. The organization hosts interdisciplinary demo days and “dinners,” which are more like half-day sessions for knowledge sharing… Read More
There are roughly 22,000 tech companies in San Francisco, yet most local high school students have never set foot in one. Most don’t even know what a “startup” or a “venture capitalist” is. Stevon Cook, a former resident of San Francisco’s public housing system, is changing that through his work as chief executive of Mission Bit and his work as a commissioner… Read More
It’s not every day that you are wandering around your neighborhood and get a glimpse of the future. Yet there I was minding my own business when I bumped into what appeared to be a Yelp/Eat24 “delivery robot” cruising around San Francisco’s Mission District on a Friday afternoon. Read More
Things just seemingly keep getting worse at Uber, which now is reportedly losing its president Jeff Jones according to Recode. The departure comes amid a series of sexual harassment allegations as well as being hit by a lawsuit from Waymo — Alphabet’s self-driving car unit — that threatens to potentially kneecap its autonomous driving efforts. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick… Read More
In 2000, Republicans, Democrats and Independents were all within six percentage points of one another in terms of their trust in the media, ranging from 47 percent to 53 percent. But since that time, figures for both Independents and Republicans have been declining, with Republicans generally declining at a sharper rate. Read More
Over the past few years we’ve seen a lot of anger. We’ve seen a seemingly sane country cut itself off from mainland Europe and we’ve seen a seemingly beneficent border police force turn angry. We’ve heard that immigrants steal our jobs, kill our people, and bring in drugs and terror. This is wrong. On the pro-side we know that immigrants, as a whole, commit less crime… Read More
ark Zuckerberg is displeased. It’s been more than four months since election night, but Facebook still finds itself in the hot seat over the spread of fake news on the platform, and what role (if any) it played in the election. Read More
He knew a lot about computer science as he had been a computer engineer for so long that he first started developing with a pen and paper. His code would then be stored on punched cards and fed into giant computers. It was always the exact same routine. I’d ask him tech questions and his eyes would light up. What is an IP address? Object-oriented programming? A DNS? Ajax? A SQL database?… Read More
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel … I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose,” declaimed the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 21 years ago. Welp. That did not go quite as intended. Instead the Internet seems to have brought us new, networked forms… Read More
Google plans to give its advertising clients more control over where their ads appear on YouTube and the Google Display Network, which posts advertising to third-party websites.
It announced the move in a blog post from its European business after major brands pulled ads from the platform because they appeared against offensive content, such as videos promoting terrorism or anti-Semitism.
The U.K. Read More
For websites we had Google. For videos, YouTube. For products, Amazon. For general reference, Wikipedia. For Gifs, Giphy. Well when VR and AR devices become mainstream, imagine all the new types of content that will be out there to explore. How will we find what we’re looking for in a brave, new, 3D world? In an interview for Flux, I sat down with Sophia Dominguez, co-founder and… Read More
That’s why over the past few years, Spotify has been pushing five different paths to putting pressure on the labels to cut it a better royalties deal. They all hinge around the idea of making the labels need Spotify as much as it’s historically needed them. When Spotify launched in 2008, it had no power in the relationship since it had so few listeners. It needed to raise over… Read More
NASA’s Valkyrie (R5) robot will never slip the surly bonds of Earth. The humanoid space robot is destined to spend the rest of its days on terra firma with the rest of us. But like Robonaut before it, the six-foot, 290-pound piece of machinery represents a link to the future. She’s a first step toward a goal of human colonization of Mars and beyond, a wonderful dream for a… Read More
The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.” What Slack does isn’t actually all that original as startup ideas go. It merely provides an environment for teams to share information inside a chat client. Yet… Read More
