The news of the DNC email hack has put the issue of securing the US election systems against foreign attacks and boosting the resilience of national critical infrastructure front and center. It has also raised the stakes for solving the shortage of cyber security professionals that can actually address these risks.
One way to widen the cyber talent pipeline is to start… Read More
Ola, the company battling Uber in India, has confirmed today that it has shut down TaxiForSure, a rival it acquired for $200 million last year, after it integrated its services. Read More
On-demand food delivery startup Deliveroo has stepped back from trying to force a new payment contract on its existing riders in London, after a group organized protests against a planned trial of a new payment model due to kick off tomorrow. Read More
Google’s new video calling app Duo launches today, India’s messaging app Hike raises $175 million, Google search now includes info on how to vote, Apple is building a super secret lab in China, Intel reveals its all-in-one virtual reality headset. All this On Crunch Report. Read More
Jonah Goodhart started his entrepreneurial journey while still in college at Cornell University. What started out a bit haphazardly with an email list turned into solid learning opportunities that have informed his business decisions along the way. After the acquisition of his second company, Right Media by Yahoo in 2007, Goodhart decided to go in a different direction and started investing… Read More
Chip maker Intel and British semiconductor IP company ARM announced an agreement that could help boost the chip giant’s custom foundry business. The deal, revealed today at the the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, will allow Intel Custom Foundry to make ARM processors for third parties. Intel’s latest earnings announcement made it clear that the company is in the midst of… Read More
The arrival of new gaming products from HP is very infrequent. After all, HP isn’t a PC gamer’s first choice in hardware, at all. Well if you’re Hewlett-Packard, what do you do? Well, you design a complete PC gaming line, evidently. HP’s efforts begin with the OMEN X desktop, a tower with support for dual GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs — the best there is. If you’re… Read More
Acquisitions starting with a “B” are not uncommon in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. Roughly two to four billion-dollar deals have gone down each quarter (on average) over the last few years. The recent purchases of Cruise Automation by General Motors and Dollar Shave Club by Unilever turned heads for another reason — the buyers were as non-techie as you can get. Read More
Univision has won the auction to acquire Gawker Media’s websites and business. Recode broke the news, reporting the acquisition price was $135 million and would cover all seven of Gawker’s websites. The company’s founder Nick Denton confirmed the deal in an email to reporters: Gawker Media Group has agreed this evening to sell our business and popular brands to Univision,… Read More
At the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, Intel unveiled a new, hardware product — a ready-to-fly drone; specifically, a quadcopter, aimed at software developers rather than casual hobbyists or commercial drone operators.
Intel’s drone is a fully assembled unit that runs on Intel’s Aero Compute Board with a Linux operating system, RealSense for vision and comes with Santa… Read More
Easy come, easy go in corporate bookseller land. Less than a year after starting his gig as company head, Ronald D. Boire has been unceremoniously let go from his CEO gig at Barnes & Noble. The once ubiquitous book store chain made the announcement today in a somewhat tersely worded press release, noting that its Board of Directors, “determined that Mr. Boire was not a good fit for… Read More
Live streaming video platform Twitch (a subsidiary of Amazon) is doubling down on video games with the acquisition of a significant player in the world of video game communities: Curse. The terms of the deal are undisclosed and Twitch declined to comment beyond the official announcement. Curse operates myriad websites and services — some of them were created in-house over the past… Read More
While the US waits to get Super Cruise in Cadillacs next year, Toyota has already rolled out a pretty robust V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle, system in three models available in Japan. The latest version of the Prius, the Lexus RX, and the Toyota Crown, a luxury sedan sold in Japan, all have the ITS Connect system available as an option. The cars communicate using a channel abandoned by analog… Read More
Big purchases are scary to make online without anyone there to quell your fears and answer questions. Operator’s app wants to give you the same peace of mind, not with mechanical chat bot responses, but through real humans with knowledge about whatever you’re buying. Today Operator 2.0 launches with a new Discovery tab where curators assemble recommendations about their… Read More
With more and more unguarded IoT devices becoming connected to the internet every day, malicious bot lords are having an easier time conscripting new recruits into their undyingly loyal armies of zombie machines — and their next target can be your smart fridge, light bulb, kettle or door lock. Here’s what you need to know about IoT botnets and what can be done to fight this… Read More
We’ve all had crappy customer service calls. Primed by staticky elevator music and the ever-mysterious agitating echo, most of us come into calls with strained patience. On the line, customer service and sales agents are paid to build relationships, but after a long day of working with callers (who typically only call if they’re having a problem), even the bubbliest of people can… Read More
Silicon Valley’s gig economy isn’t known for being very supportive of its core workers — the ones working on the ground, making deliveries and picking up and dropping off passengers. The “best” cases in point are Uber and Lyft, two on-demand ride companies that have been resistant to allow drivers to access their fair share of wealth. Josephine, the startup… Read More
Congratulations are in order for China: by launching the world’s first quantum communications satellite, the country has achieved an interesting — if somewhat difficult to explain — milestone in space and cryptography. Read More
Eventually, we’ll never leave our VR-enabled domiciles. But until that happens, we occasionally need to go outside – and Nvidia’s GeForce GT 10-series notebooks mean that when you do, you can at least take VR with you. The new 10-series GPUs for notebooks follow the 10-series desktop line launched earlier this year, which includes the GTX 1080, the first card by the company… Read More
Today marks the grand opening of Apple’s new retail store at One World Trade Center, located in the Oculus at the brand-spanking-new Westfield Mall. The space has two floors, a 6K video screen that spans half the length of the space itself, and a living wall. Oh, and there’s no genius bar. We took a tour of the space today during the grand opening, and brought home some pics to… Read More
