Now that Snap is revealing its financial guts to the world in its filing for its initial public offering, we’re getting a small glimpse at how much the company is paying to acquire startups. As Snap becomes a larger company and is able to amass more of a cash pile, it’ll be able to start picking off startups that can either fill out the company’s ranks with talent or add… Read More
Snapchat was flying high in early 2016, but the launch of direct competitor Instagram Stories coincided with a massive drop in how fast Snapchat was growing, judging by new stats in its IPO filing. That aligns with our report that multiple analytic providers and social media talent managers saw a big decline in Snapchat usage after Instagram Stories came out. While we can’t be sure… Read More
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and businessman Dan Gilbert are set to announce Microsoft is moving downtown from the suburbs. TechCrunch has confirmed the move with several trusted sources and learned that Microsoft will occupy 50,000 square feet in One Campus Martius, a building owned in part by Dan Gilbert and home to a large chunk of the Quicken Loans team. Microsoft’s Detroit operation… Read More
Ousted Snapchat early employee Reggie Brown was paid $157.5 million in a settlement in September 2014 to close off a 2013 lawsuit he had brought against other co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, alleging that they had taken his original idea and run with it, pushing him out of the company without compensation in the process.
The details were made public for the first time in… Read More
Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat and Spectacles, included in its filing to go public a brief tidbit on diversity. Unlike tech companies like Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and several others, Snap has not released a diversity report. At the end of 2016, Snap employed 1,859 employees, but Snap won’t say how diverse it is. “That’s because we believe diversity is… Read More
Snapchat, which filed for its initial public offering today, sees potential risks to its business in cybersecurity and international regulation, particularly in China and the European Union.
Security breaches — and the privacy concerns that follow — have already caused problems for Snapchat, according to its filing. The document refers to a CEO impersonation scam that occurred… Read More
Snap, Inc. just released its IPO and there’s a lot to take away, but from a hardware perspective there’s not much present – which is actually telling in itself. The S-1 filing contains a few references to Spectacles, but they don’t suggest Snap’s view of itself as a camera company leans very heavily on its hardware products or pipeline. But that could still change,… Read More
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. wanted to present a growing and and highly engaged user base today in its bid to go public. But there are reasons for concern, especially when you look more closely at user growth in Europe and the rest of the world With the release of the company’s S-1 filing today, Snap revealed that at the end of 2016 the company had 158 million daily active users who… Read More
Evan Spiegel’s letter to investors would fit in a 10 second snap. The CEO’s penchant for minimalist design seems to have influenced the opening statement in today’s Snap Inc S-1 filing to go public. It’s just a 1/16th the length of Mark Zuckerberg’s letter when Facebook went public. But it was enough for him to declare the camera as the “starting… Read More
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has removed himself from Donald Trump’s economic advisory group, as first reported by both Recode and the New York Times, and confirmed by TechCrunch. Kalanick was set to speak with Trump tomorrow at a meeting of the President’s advisory council on business matters, which was established late last year and which also includes SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The… Read More
This is another incremental step in the process of going public, but it’s probably the most important because we’re finally getting our first glimpse at the financial guts of the company. Snapchat has gone from a zeitgeist-y app among a younger audience to one with more than 150 million daily users — and one with a strong pitch to advertisers based on the engagement of the… Read More
Progressive Web Apps, which are basically sophisticated web apps that are able to use features like push notifications and a local cache to give users a native-like experience, have been on Google’s radar for the last few years. While they almost look and feel like native apps, they were never fully integrated into Android. Google plans to change this soon, though. Soon, you will not… Read More
When Amazon announced its earnings for its Amazon Web Services cloud division on Thursday, the results were hardly surprising. While AWS might not have the eye-popping growth percentages of its rivals, it still grew at a decent 47 percent, with earnings of $3.53 billion on an astonishing $14.2 billion run rate. You may point to the rivals and say, well, they had better quarters from a… Read More
GoPro today reported its fourth-quarter and year-end earning results. And they weren’t good. The stock is currently falling like a recalled GoPro Karma drone. It’s down 10 percent in after-hours trading. The company reported $540 million in fourth-quarter revenue, with a net income loss of $.082 a share. That’s under what analysts expected. And the company didn’t fare… Read More
Mixed faces in Seattle today as Amazon delivered its Q4 2016 earnings. The e-commerce company reported lower than expected revenue of $43.74 with better than expected earnings per share of $1.54. Expectations had been high in the run up to the release. Wall Street consensus was that Amazon would deliver revenue of $44.68 billion with $1.35 earnings per share. In the immediate moments… Read More
Y Combinator’s recent mashup with the American Civil Liberties Union has raised some questions and concerns. The main concerns are around how YC and Silicon Valley influences will mix with the ACLU and its mission, as well as YC’s connection with Peter Thiel, a part-time partner at YC. “I wish I was excited abt this, but I’m nervous bc principles of tech growth have… Read More
Normally, if the creators of an app claimed that it could look inside things and tell you their constituent parts, I would tell you to go peddle your snake oil elsewhere. But this app is from veteran R&D group Fraunhofer — so it may very well be the real thing. Read More
The 10th Annual Crunchies Awards show is less than a week away, and it’s finally time to formally introduce you to the companies vying for Best Startup in 2016. Obviously, with these companies attacking a variety of verticals and sectors, it’s quite difficult to determine which one of them is “best.” But that’s why we have our lovely Crunchies Board, comprised of… Read More
As the dust settles from yesterday’s $500 million verdict against Oculus VR and Facebook, Oculus CTO John Carmack still has some things he wants to get off his chest. “Being sued sucks,” he said in a Facebook post he published this morning. Though Carmack avoided paying any damages in the final verdict, unlike Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and former-CEO Brendan Iribe, he was… Read More
Elemeno Health started building something akin to a personal assistant for hospital staff while in Y Combinator last summer. It helps hospitals gather best practices, checklists and videos doctors and nurses need to reference in a snap, all in one place. Often these materials are locked in binders and papers that staff must find and then make copies of if they want to share with colleagues.… Read More
