Snap, the parent of Snapchat, had a great first two days on the stock market, only to be followed by two terrible ones. Shares quickly tumbled to beneath $22, an over 11% drop in morning trading. This means that most investors are already losing money on the social media company. Snap opened Thursday at $24 per share. It is still above its $17 IPO price, but that’s mainly relevant for… Read More
Goodyear is thinking ahead to how tires – yes, tires – might change as autonomous driving technology alters vehicle design, and as available technologies like in-vehicle and embedded machine learning and AI make it possible to do more with parts of the car that were previously pretty static, like its wheels. Its new Eagle 360 Urban tire concept design builds on the work it… Read More
Tech is divergent, not convergent. Tech is still growing increasingly concentrated in a few prospering metropolitan areas while the rest of the country drifts. It doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe it’s time for tech people to do more to make the “rise of the rest” a reality. Read More
A new startup called Indigo Fair is looking to change the way local retailers do business — specifically how they source and manage the inventory they use to stock their shelves. Founded by a team of former Square employees, the company is launching with seed funding from Khosla Ventures, YC and some angels. Read More
Adding to the plethora of streaming services on the market, BBC Worldwide announced the launch of its subscription-based, video-on-demand service called BritBox, arriving today. The service offers a large catalog of British television series to U.S. users, many for the first time, at a cost of $6.99 per month. The service was previously announced in December, but without details about its… Read More
Australian peer-to-peer car parking marketplace Spacer has acquired U.S.-based Roost, which provides the same services stateside from its San Francisco-based headquarters. It’s a move that lets Spacer make its entry into the U.S. market without having to establish its own office and start from scratch. The deal will include rebranding all of Roost’s existing U.S. service… Read More
Doppler Labs got a strange sense of déjà vu when Bose announced the limited release of its hearing-assisting Hearphones late last year. The technology, the look, even the name hit a little too close for home for the headphone startup, so it filed suit earlier this month in Massachusetts, Bose’s home state. In a 16 page filing, Doppler accuses the audio giant of “unfair and… Read More
Wikileaks is at it again. A massive new set of documents believed to be legitimate just hit the organization’s website. Called “Vault 7,” the initial data dump is said to include more than 8,000 files. According to Wikileaks, Tuesday’s release is only the first part of a series in the “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” Vault… Read More
Scavenger hunts just got significantly more tactical with Descartes Labs’ new GeoVisual Search. Finding shipping containers, runways and even parking lots on a global scale is no problem with the free tool made available today. Descartes Labs is a geospatial analytics startup based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The company specializes in analyzing satellite imagery and other global data… Read More
Company builder and early-stage investor Entrepreneur First’s Demo Day for its 7th London cohort has just taken place. The event, held in Kings Cross, saw 18 newly outed startups pitch their wares on stage to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene. Read More
While the European Commission continues to work through a stack of antitrust complaints against Google and its dominance in the market across areas like search, advertising and mobile, one of the groups leading the charge against it has struck again. The Open Internet Project — a consortium that says it represents some 400 companies and groups in Europe, including (as of today) members… Read More
Blue Origin is working towards the first launch of its super heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn. Bezos’s rocket company just released a video showing how the rocket will launch and land. Spoiler: It’s a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. In the video embedded below, the rocket takes off from a pad close to a company facility and lands vertically on a large barge in a similar fashion… Read More
Who carries around cash anymore? The answer? Parents, who still need to hand out allowance and pocket money to their kids. That’s where Current comes in. Current is the latest company out of Expa, and was built by Stuart Sopp. Sopp told TechCrunch that he built Current out of a personal need — he has a seven-year-old daughter who often wants to make purchases online but… Read More
Flipping burgers is a hot and greasy job. Slips and trips, burns and cuts are common hazards associated with the work. But global demand for burgers is tremendous. Top burger chains racked up more than $75.5 billion in annual sales in 2016. To help keep human cooks out of harm’s way while fulfilling our collective appetite for burgers, a Pasadena-based Miso Robotics is rolling out a… Read More
Google just announced that search results in Baidu, Sogou and Yahoo Japan will be connecting directly to Accelerated Mobile Pages.
AMP, which was first announced in 2015, is the Google-led open framework for creating articles and other web pages that load more quickly — think of it as a way for regular web pages to stay competitive with fast-loading distribution channels, particularly… Read More
The Tivoli Audio Model One Digital packs modern features in a retro design. Inside the gorgeous wood box are most of the features now standard in tabletop radios: Bluetooth connectivity, access to streaming services, color display. But the $299 Model One Digital is lacking. Sure, it looks great, but suffers from a painful and dated user experience. I tried to talk to the radio, and it just… Read More
Streaming music service Spotify announced this morning it has acquired a company called Sonalytic, makers of an audio detection technology that can identify songs, mixed content and audio clips, as well as track copyright-protected material, and aid in music discovery. These features line up with services that Spotify offers, making Sonalytic a natural fit for the company, it seems.
Spotify… Read More
Facebook has again been criticized for failing to remove child exploitation imagery from its platform following a BBC investigation into its system for reporting inappropriate content. Read More
Amazon’s First Amendment fight was short lived. After pushing back against investigators, the tech giant handed over data from an Echo believed to contain vital information pertaining to 2015 murder. The move, which occurred on Friday, was initiated by defendant James Bates, who agreed to allow police to review the information retained on his smart home assistant. Bates plead not guilty… Read More
