Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial announced a surprise deal to acquire international payment service MoneyGram for $880 million last month, but that looks like being just the start of its M&A activities. A source at the company confirmed to TechCrunch that it is close to raising nearly $3 billion in debt financing in order to bankroll further acquisitions, as The Information and… Read More
Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek has led a $55 million investment in India’s CarTrade, a listings site for selling automobiles in the country. CarTrade didn’t confirm the identity of other investors that partook in the round, other than that it included a contribution from “a large US family office.” CarTrade acquired rival Carwale in late 2015 to grab… Read More
HBO NOW passes 2 million subscribers, Trident Capital Cybersecurity raises a $300 million fund, Pinterest adds new visual search features and Y Combinator now takes recommendations from anyone. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
As a child I always lusted after the Armatron robotic arm. Oh, the amazing things I would have done! I could have assembled miniature cars! Pinched my sister remotely! Gently squashed bugs to paste! But, alas, the Armatron was too expensive and I never got one. Now that I’m old and wizened I can finally get one. Or at least something like it. The Swift by UFactory is a crowdfunded… Read More
Facebook is rolling out a useful new feature that puts a full weather forecast inside its mobile app and desktop site. The feature is accessible from News Feed or the mobile app’s “More” menu — the section that links you to areas like Friends, Events, Groups, Pages and other key Facebook features like On This Day or Saved items. Within the Weather section, you can view… Read More
Until October, John Podesta was most known as a diehard Democratic campaigner who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton and served as the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But after WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of Podesta’s emails in the final month before the 2016 election, Podesta became perhaps the most widely recognized victim of hacking. Read More
Feeling in the mood to do a little remixing of classic pieces of art? You’re in luck: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just made hundreds of thousands of pieces available under the Creative Commons Zero license, meaning they can be used pretty much however you see fit. Read More
Plagued by terror attacks and distracted by volatility from within and by neighboring civil issues, Turkey has made quite a few headlines recently. These have been happening to a country that was once regarded the beacon of hope as a secular, democratic, Muslim country in the Middle East. Read More
Intel’s latest press conference was its most well-appointed yet. The chipmaker’s CEO Brian Krzanich announced his company’s newest initiative in a tasteful if traditional space with lavish gold curtains and a stately desk. The room, with notably rounded corners, was nearly 3,000 miles away from the company’s headquarters and many of its manufacturing sites. In lieu of PR… Read More
An arms race in patents. A surge in high-cost patent litigation. And the emergence of unscrupulous patent trolls who use the threat of lawsuits to extort nuisance settlements. These are the costly side effects — the dark side, if you will — of America’s enormous technological progress over the last decade. Read More
Facebook announced in November that it would stop advertisers from targeting users by race for ads that focused on housing, employment, and credit opportunities, in response to a report that found that Facebook’s tools could be used to place discriminatory advertisements. Today, the social network provided a progress update on the matter, disclosing what actions it has taken since… Read More
Self-driving cars require self-driving car software, and Udacity’s helping to feed that need with its nanodegree program in the field. Now, the online education company is also making available its self-driving car simulator via open source license, allowing anyone with a working knowledge of Unity to gab the assets, load its preexisting scenes and create their own tracks for virtual… Read More
Rothenberg assigned the firm the name Frontier Tech Ventures in September 2016 after a series of events tarnished the brand, starting with an SEC investigation, which opened in July of 2016. What drew the agency’s attention: Rothenberg himself, whose lavish spending to market his fund began to concern employees, as well as his 176 investors — almost all of them wealthy… Read More
SpaceX has a new date for its next launch – February 18, when it’s hoping to make its first launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at pad LC-39A. The first launch from the Florida facility was originally set for January 29, and was set to be a mission to deliver a commercial EchoStar satellite into orbit, but that was pushed back to a target of the end of February when… Read More
A password may soon be required to enter the country — the applicant’s Facebook password, that is. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly suggested the measure to the House Homeland Security Committee today during talks around Trump’s embattled executive order on immigration. Read More
While creating content for kids on tablets has been largely the preserve of smash games like Clash of Clans, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and another way may be to wrap it in hardware. That’s the thinking behind the Cinemood, an appealing, portable mini-cinema projector which comes bundled with content, and number of other features, for young kids. It’s now raised… Read More
GM-owned Cruise Automation wants you to be able to see the progress it’s making with its self-driving car tests, in a way that’s more tangible than looking at boring lists of disengagement reports. That’s why it’s been publishing videos of its Cruise test cars navigating real city streets, and a new episode of that video series is available now, showing a Bolt EV… Read More
Facebook’s stripped-down but speedy Lite app is growing fast and adding countries so it can keep connecting people and building the company’s business in the low-bandwidth world where revenue increased 52% this year.
Facebook Lite launched in June 2015, it rocketed to 100 million monthly users by March 2016, and now it’s doubled in size to 200 million users, Mark Zuckerberg says. Read More
Samsung has seemingly put its on-going Galaxy Note 7 issues behind it, courtesy of a couple of recalls, an expensive investigation and promises to implement stricter standards. But the company’s battery woes aren’t yet fully behind it, as it was no doubt reminded earlier today when a small fire broke out in a plant located in Tianjin, China.
The company reported that the fire… Read More
Londoners in the unfun position of needing to find a new flatmate — and lacking the easy options of friends or family to move in with — can get a little algorithmic help from a UK startup with the no-frills name of Ideal Flatmate. Read More
