When an entrepreneur quits their job to found a company, you’re bound to hear the words “I want to build something meaningful. I want to have a bigger impact.” Well, if your job is building rockets for Elon at SpaceX, what do you say? What’s bigger than colonizing Mars? For the SpaceX engineers behind Synthego, the answer was helping cure all human disease. Read More
Yahoo’s board has decided that CEO Marissa Mayer will not receive her annual bonus this year, a decision linked to Yahoo’s handling of the 2014 security breach that exposed data from 500 million user accounts. Mayer volunteered to forgo her annual equity grant, as well, and has asked that the money be redistributed to Yahoo’s employees. Mayer discussed the decision… Read More
Snap has given a final price for its IPO, setting the company’s valuation at nearly $24 billion with a price of $17 per share, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. With that, it looks like Wall Street had plenty of appetite for Snap despite multiple major concerns about the company’s business. Slowing user growth, rising burn and a dependence on Google and Amazon for… Read More
Since Cloudflare revealed a bug that caused random chunks of data to leak from customer websites, including Fitbit and OkCupid, the company has worked to determine the extent of the problem. It turns out that the vulnerability caused extensive leaks — which isn’t much of a surprise, given the sheer number of websites that use Cloudflare for its security and performance… Read More
As new FCC Commissioner Aji Pai telegraphed last week, the commission voted today to stay a set of privacy rules for broadband providers, adopted last year, which would have come into effect tomorrow. Read More
When Snap prices its IPO after the closing bell today, it will be the first tech company to go public this year. It will also be the largest tech company to go public in the U.S. since Alibaba debuted in 2014. Because of the dearth of recent tech offerings, all eyes will be on the Snapchat parent to see what it means for the “IPO window.” The performance of large tech offerings… Read More
Since the election of 45, the worlds of tech and politics have collided. Between tech leaders at Google, Facebook and other tech companies speaking out against 45’s executive order on immigration and, more recently, those same companies speaking out against the 45 administration rescinding guidance for transgender students in public schools, it’s clear that the tech industry is… Read More
While so many virtual reality hardware companies have been tasked only with selling their own product, Oculus has had the intense challenge of building the entire industry’s ecosystem for the last several years. That growth has come with some hiccups by way of lawsuits, product launch delays and executive shakeups, but Oculus is still very much alive and well. Read More
Scorp, a startup out of Turkey, offers another take on the social video theme. The app lets you upload 15-second videos on any topic, such as your view on Trump’s immigration controls. In fact, its young makers call Scorp the video answer to Reddit or Quora. Read More
In the market for online education, Udacity remains focused on teaching its students about software development, data science and machine learning. To this avail, Udacity brought out its M&A team for the first time to strategically acquire CloudLabs, a small shop building interactive coding environments that let groups collaboratively code from within their browsers. Read More
Microsoft previously let us know that a range of its OEM partners with familiar names from the PC world would be building headsets that offer mixed reality experiences on Windows 10 hardware. The first of those, from Acer, will begin shipping out to developers this month, with a phased rollout that will see developer edition headsets continue to arrive at partner doorsteps throughout the next… Read More
Congress could chalk up a quick, easy bipartisan victory for taxpayers if both the House and Senate determined to pass the Email Privacy Act as early as possible, and send it to President Trump for signature. Read More
Snap will begin publicly trading tomorrow, which means that it will officially give a price for its shares in its initial public offering this evening. Originally setting a range between $14 and $16, the company set its own valuation lower than what tech observers might have expected, given the hype of the first big tech IPO of 2017. Read More
It’s hard to be a tutor. For one thing, many educators don’t have time for extracurricular teaching, even while they might need to bolster their paychecks. Most schools prohibit teachers from tutoring children in the school systems in which they work, too, making it difficult to connect with families needing help. Read More
The Craig Newmark Foundation just annoucned that it has donated $1 million to ProPublica. The foundation says that Newmark (either personally or through the foundation) made multiple millions of dollars worth of donations to media-related organizations last year, including giving $1 million to The Poynter Institute to fund a faculty chair in journalism ethics. Newmark recently told… Read More
Facebook and Oculus are looking to make their brand of high-end virtual reality considerably more affordable with a price slash coming to its Rift headset and Touch motion controllers. Read More
Intel lost the last battle for smartphones. In May, the company quietly announced that it was canceling plans for its Broxton mobile processor, effectively acknowledging that it couldn’t compete with Qualcomm and in-house chips from powerhouses like Apple and Samsung. But the war is far from over. Read More
Tech companies are terrible at tempering expectations. Really, really bad. Take last month, when Qualcomm CEO Stephen Mollenkopf told the audience at his CES keynote, “5G will have an impact similar to the introduction of electricity or the automobile, affecting entire economies and benefiting entire societies.” That’s a pretty damn high bar. Read More
GitHub is expanding its offering for large companies today. The service, which allows developers to more effectively collaborate and share their source code, already offered an enterprise version of its tools that large companies could host in their own data centers, AWS or Azure. Now, it is launching a new hosted service of GitHub that, just like the enterprise version, will cost $21 per… Read More
United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V rocket Wednesday, successfully kicking things off at the planned launch time of 12:49 PM ET. The launch put a satellite into space – but the satellite’s specific details and mission are secret, since it’s a classified piece of hardware run by the National Reconnaissance Office. You can re-watch the launch above. ULA declared… Read More
