Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart is in the midst of transition after it welcomed a new CEO this month, but that hasn’t stopped it from investing $2 million in parenting startup TinyStep. Read More
Helping’s broader vision was always to offer a range of home services. That vision finally comes into focus today with news that the Rocket Internet company has begun adding window cleaning, furniture assembly, painting, and more to its on-demand home cleaning offering. Read More
As more of the world’s population comes online for the first time, so Google is focusing on making the web and its services more accessible. That means smaller sized apps for budget devices with limited space, and offline support to help deal with intermittent, spotty or weak internet connections. Read More
Theranos is closing down its last remaining blood-testing facility after the lab reportedly failed a regulatory inspection, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Read More
Chelsea Manning is going to be freed this May, Zoom video conferencing raises $100 million, Vine is shutting down — today is the last day to grab your videos, Google Drive has been experiencing intermittent outages and Juicero lowers the price of its juicer. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees virtual reality as a future computing platform that his company has a chance to own, though he admits it may take 5 – 10 years to bring it to the masses. Members of the press had a rare opportunity to get a more unfiltered view into the future of Facebook’s virtual reality ambitions as Zuckerberg took to the stands today to testify in a $2… Read More
New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the 40-year-old venture firm, has signaled its intention to raise $3 billion for its 16th fund in a new SEC filing. The Form D states that the first sale has yet to occur, though typically, when a firm registers a fund of this size, it has already soft circled many, if not all, of the commitments from investors to reach its goal.
Three billion dollars is… Read More
It was understandably difficult for Note 7 owners to abandon their device. After all, it was a well-received handset, save for…that one thing…
Still, as Samsung has routinely reported, return rates have been high for the device. At last count, the electronics giant touted a 96 percent return rate on the phone (tied to a bit of news about the FAA no longer having to announce its ban on… Read More
Zeotap, a startup that helps telecom companies sell their data to advertisers, announced today that it has raised €12 million in Series B funding (that’s just under $13 million). Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Projjol Banerjea told me that while there’s “decent data” available for online advertisers targeting desktop users, things are shakier on the mobile… Read More
Alchemist Accelerator has closed a $2.5 million fund for very early-stage investments in tech startups serving large organizations in an era when robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are fundamentally changing the way they operate. Limited partners in Alchemists’ second fund included Johnson Controls, Ericsson and Analog Garage, a VC arm of Analog Devices.… Read More
There have been rumors for a while about Twitter preparing to retire its commerce operation. Now it looks like the company has finally started to wind down its partnerships in confirmation of that fact. Customers of e-commerce platform Shopify are receiving notices informing them that the Twitter sales channel is getting shut down “as a result of the Twitter team pivoting way from… Read More
After facing similar charges around the world, Qualcomm is getting some major pushback on its home turf. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed charges against the company, accusing the San Diego-based Snapdragon-maker of anticompetitive tactics in an attempt to maintain a monopoly in its chip business. The commission issued a statement today detailing the allegations in what… Read More
HPE today announced that it has acquired data management platform SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. SimpliVity is one of the many companies in this space focused on what is often called “hyperconverged infrastructure.” That sounds like somebody’s buzzword — and it definitely is — but the core idea is pretty sound: hyperconverged systems combine compute,… Read More
Vine as we know it is dead. Today Twitter turned off sharing, liking, commenting and revining in Vine, and released its successor, Vine Camera, as an app update on iOS and Android. It has also discontinued the Vine Windows Phone app. For now you can still open the old Vine app if you don’t update, where you can view your old feed and profile, and download your videos. But Twitter confirms… Read More
President Obama commuted the majority of the 35-year sentence faced by Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower who supplied diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks. Manning, who came out as a transgender woman following her trial, has been incarcerated in an all-male military prison in Ft. Leavenworth for almost seven years and has twice attempted… Read More
How do local boutiques compete with the Amazons of the world? The easy answer is they don’t. When you shop for quality and design over cheap and easy, it’s a different market entirely. But the popularity of online retail has created a need for boutiques to have a presence online. London startup Trouva is helping small boutiques open up their customer base to the global community.… Read More
Deliver My Ride, a new car buying site from the new firm MadDog Technology, is the latest to offer a car buying service without the buyer having to visit the dreaded dealership. Deliver My Ride made the interesting choice to be website only so far; there is no smartphone app. Users create an online profile that will be sent to multiple dealerships and brands for free (the site makes money… Read More
The Federal Aviation Administration and SkyPan International in Chicago have settled a civil suit that was closely watched by the nascent commercial drone industry. The government agency said the privately held company flew its drones over New York City and Chicago from 2012 to 2014, violating its rules which barred drone operators from flying over densely populated areas without… Read More
Initialized Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm that was founded by former Y Combinator partners Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan, has added three new partners. Eric Woersching comes aboard the five-year-old outfit as a general partner. Woersching formerly managed the trading desk at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management; he was more recently a… Read More
There’s no great time to break bad news, of course, but your two best shots are either when no one is looking or when you’ve got enough good news to offset the bad. The former is known in political circles as the Friday news dump; all the bad news suddenly appears while everyone is more consumed with the important task of getting ready for the weekend. The news dump stars… Read More
