Less than a month after Vodafone confirmed it is in talks to merge with Idea Cellular and create India’s largest mobile operator, one piece of M&A has been confirmed in that space. Bharti Airtel has gobbled up smaller player Telenor India in a deal announced today. The Airtel-Telenor deal is subject to regulatory approvals, but both sides said it should be completed within the next… Read More
Apple’s new campus will open in April, never-ending turnover at Twitter, Instagram adds a carousel feature and Snapdeal to lay off 500-600 people. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Airbnb has finalized its deal to buy social payments startup Tilt, TechCrunch has confirmed. We reported on the acquisition talks last month, but now everything has been made official. We are told that investors will be getting back about $12 million in cash, but the deal value is tens of millions of dollars higher if you include employee retention packages, which were paid for in cash… Read More
Already a hit in the limited California regions that it serves, doctor-on-demand startup Heal is planning to take its house call service to more cities across the country. Today, the company announced that it would be expanding into cities in Florida, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania by the end of the year. It has been only two years since Heal’s first doctor made the first house call… Read More
A pair of studies, one from Stanford and another from the University of Geneva, exemplify the speed with which brain-computer interfaces are advancing; and while you won’t be using one instead of a mouse and keyboard any time soon, even in its nascent form the tech may prove transformative for the disabled. Read More
For the better part of the last year, tech pundits have been writing about the demise of the app. Once thought to be the savior of consumer-facing software, apps are now ubiquitous, underused, underappreciated and underwhelming. Enter the Los Angeles-based startup Maple Media. Read More
Amobee just announced that it has agreed to acquire adtech company Turn for $310 million. Amobee used to be a mobile ad startup itself, before a 2012 acquisition by Singtel, where it remains a subsidiary. Since then, Singtel and Amobee have continued to make more acquisitions on the digital ad side, including Gradient X, Adconion and Kontera. Turn, meanwhile, operates both a data… Read More
With national immigration policies in flux, tech’s privacy advocates aren’t wasting any time rallying around common causes. This week, the Center for Democracy & Technology announced a coalition to oppose efforts by Homeland Security to collect social media passwords from individuals wishing to enter the United States. Read More
A new report by The Intercept provides some compelling specifics on collaboration between Palo Alto’s secretive big data shop Palantir and the intelligence agencies that it keeps on its client roster. While some broad strokes are known about Palantir’s relationship with spy agencies, the finer points seldom see daylight. Read More
Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday alleged efforts on behalf of employees at its Fremont factory to unionize. Read More
Headphone startup Earin announced today that it’s scored $3.5 million in funding, hot on the heels of announcing its second-generation wireless earbuds back at CES. The new round will go to fund the release of the M-2, due to be released at retail this spring. The move marks a shift for the company, which took to Kickstarter to fund its first headphones back in 2015, ahead of the recent… Read More
Tesla has begun offering customers in Asia a package that includes in the purchase price the cost of insurance and maintenance, the company noted on its earnings call today. This is how they’d like to offer vehicles across their markets in the future. Read More
SocialRank co-founder Alex Taub classifies most brand interactions on social media into two broad categories. They’re either broadcasting to all of their followers or, if they’re communicating individually, it’s usually in a reactive way, like responding to a complaint. With the just-launched SocialRank Realtime, Taub and his team are trying to enable something different. Read More
Tesla announced on its earnings call that CFO Jason Wheeler has decided to leave the company in April to pursue opportunities in public policy. He’ll be replaced by Deepak Ahuja, who was Tesla’s first CFO when he joined the company in 2010 after 15 years of experience at Ford Motor Company. Elon Musk sounded upbeat and jocular about the news on the call, and he also noted, as… Read More
Among the tidbits found in Fitbit’s disappointing new financial filing is the fact that it apparently picked up Pebble’s assets for a relative song. Although the company didn’t reveal the actual numbers when the acquisition was announced, reports pegged it at upwards of $40 million. According to today’s filing, the amount Fitbit paid is actually $23 million. Read More
While Twitter continues to struggle as a public company, Jack Dorsey’s other business seems to be doing pretty well. Today payments company Square announced earnings, beating the street with a narrower loss than expected — $0.04 per share — on revenues of $452 million for the fourth quarter 2016. Read More
Half of the web’s traffic is now encrypted, according to a new report from the EFF released this week. The rights organization noted the milestone was attributable to a number of efforts, including recent moves from major tech companies to implement HTTPS on their own properties. Over the years, these efforts have included pushes from Facebook and Twitter, back in 2013 and 2012… Read More
Waze’s Carpool ridesharing features might be coming to a city near you relatively soon. The Google-owned crowdsourced navigation app piloted carpooling features first in its home country of Israel, and then in San Francisco and the Bay Area – and now it’s looking to spread it further, including in additional U.S. cities, and in Latin American markets. That’s according… Read More
Knotel announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding.
Founded in 2015, the company offers what co-founder and CEO Amol Sarva described as “headquarters as a service” — a flexible office space that can be customized for each tenant while also growing or shrinking as needed.
This might sound like it’s addressing the same need as WeWork and other… Read More
Images of the LG G6 leaked today and overall it looks like a solid phone with soft lines, very little bezel and a face on the backside made up of the dual lenses and power button. It looks surprised and maybe a little shocked.
LG will likely reveal all the details of the phone next week at Mobile World Congress. Read More
