GM has invested in China’s Yi Wei Xing, a car sharing tech platform provider that’s responsible for Feezu, a timeshare rental car service similar to Zipcar, as well as providing the backend for rental companies looking to provide their own car sharing service. GM’s equity investment in Yi Wei Xing is a strategic one, which could help the carmaker eventually expand its own… Read More
The cord cutting era is now in full effect, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the record numbers YouTube recorded for its airing of the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The video sharing site says that the debate’s live stream and on-demand videos surrounding it drew over 124 million views since Sunday – a figure which not only tops… Read More
As Bitcoin has grown, it’s been forced to contend with a flood of traffic on the network. Developers are divided about what to do. The scalers want more transactions running through the blockchain. The decentralizers say this threatens Bitcoin’s character. Now, Bitcoin must choose what it wants to be and that’s the core of the third episode in our series on Bitcoin and the… Read More
The U.K. government has agreed on an amendment to draft surveillance legislation aimed at strengthening the public perception of privacy safeguards by adding a statement of priority to the face of the legislation. Read More
Stack Overflow, the community site best known for providing answers for all of your random coding questions, also has a thriving jobs board and provides services to employers looking to hire developers. Today, the team is expanding the jobs side of its business with the launch of Developer Story, a new kind of resume that aims to free developers from the shackles of the traditional resume.… Read More
Dropbox is still working its way through the enterprise world in order to show the world it isn’t just dumb online storage — which, given as simple as it was to use, was one of the tool’s original top selling points.
So it’s had to shift gears in order to focus on larger companies, and that means consistently rolling out new tools that companies need as they start to… Read More
Project Fi, Google’s wireless service, is getting a group plan today. While most cell services let you choose a “family plan,” which typically entails the ability to include additional lines at a discount, Fi didn’t yet offer this option. Like you would expect from Fi, it’s all pretty straightforward — but don’t expect to get a massive discount.… Read More
Facebook officially entered the enterprise market this week with the release of Workplace by Facebook (previously known as Facebook at Work). It goes without saying that Facebook has had tremendous success as a consumer tool, but the enterprise is a different place, with distinct requirements. While it picked up 1,000 beta customers when it was free, it could find that enterprises,… Read More
Kettering University unveiled this week an automotive proving grounds in a bid to lure companies and students to the Flint, MI area. The test track is on the school’s grounds, housed on land that once contained a massive General Motors’ manufacturing facility that was torn down and left abandoned. The Kettering University GM Mobility Research Center (or MRC) features outdoor lab… Read More
Google is upping its efforts at getting its U.S. users registered to vote, via a pop-up ad that now appears directly on the desktop home page. The company has historically made an effort to help web users get registered to vote and find answers to their voting-related questions by placing instant answers in its Search results. That has continued this year, as voter searches were redirected… Read More
The Galaxy Note 7 was the best phone available when it was released in August. A culmination of all of the company’s strongest technologies to date, coupled with some fascinating new arrivals, Samsung somehow made the whole thing work in harmony, fit into a beautifully crafted 5.7-inch design. Two months later, the Galaxy Note 7 is dead, marking, perhaps, the most abrupt and… Read More
The NFL just announced a new social media policy that is about as anti-fan friendly as it gets. According to league memos obtained by ESPN, the league’s social media policy (which takes effect tomorrow) effectively bans all video-based social media during games. First, it restricts them from going live on apps like Facebook Live or Periscope during or after the game. Previously,… Read More
Remote Year is a pretty appealing idea for anyone with a serious case of wanderlust: Participants spend a whole year working abroad, moving to a different city and country each month. But is it just a fun, one-time idea, or the seed of a big business? The team at Highland Capital Partners is betting on the latter — it just led a $12 million Series A in the company. Other investors in… Read More
A venture fund that backs very early-stage advanced tech and science startups, Breakout Labs, has invested in 4 new deals, according to founder and Managing Partner Lindy Fishburne.
The fund, which is part of the Thiel Foundation, typically invests $350,000 in each startup, with no strings attached. If a startup’s research and development does not lead to commercialization as hoped… Read More
Facebook today launched Yarn, a new package manager for JavaScript. If you’ve every worked with JavaScript and Node.js, chances are that you’ve used the npm package manager to find and reuse existing code (or maybe publish your own libraries, too). At Facebook’s scale, though, npm didn’t quite work for the company, though, and it started developing an opinionated… Read More
With its Creative Cloud, Adobe made an early bet on offering its tools for creatives as a subscription service. With its Document Cloud, the company also offers a subscription-based service for its more enterprise-focused document management tools. Acrobat DC, the PDF-centric flagship service of the Document Cloud, is getting an update today that introduces a number of new features that… Read More
When it comes to self-driving cars, the public tends to focus on developments for private vehicles for individuals, but there are also some significant advances underway in other categories such as shuttle busses. In the latest piece of news, Navya, a startup out of France that makes driverless shuttles, has raised $34 million (€30 million) in funding to build out its team, technology… Read More
Amazon’s looking to launch convenience stores to sell perishable goods like products, milk and meat, as well as offering drive-in pick-up locations for grocery orders, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The plan would expand Amazon’s grocery reach beyond just Amazon Fresh, giving it both a brick-and-mortar presence, and a streamlined pick-up process that could… Read More
Apple has unveiled its own official measurements for iOS 10 adoption, which comes in at 54 percent. That means the majority of iOS device owners are running the new mobile operating system. What’s interesting, however, is how different Apple’s official figures are from the third-party estimates released earlier this week, which saw much higher adoption among their install base… Read More
Cars are almost the new social apps when it comes to VC interest, especially given the pace of development of autonomous car tech and self-driving systems. It makes sense then that we’d see more dedicated automotive tech investment vehicles, including the just-launched V5, which is helmed by father and son team Sam Valenti III and Sam Valenti IV, sequentially-named investors who have… Read More
