Mobile advertising company Tapjoy has settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it was misleading consumers about the in-app rewards they could earn in mobile games. According to the FTC, Tapjoy deceived consumers who participated in various activities — like purchasing a product, signing up for a free trial, providing their personal […]
YouTube just announced that channels publishing “false claims” about the U.S. presidential election will be penalized with a strike, which would temporarily suspend them from posting videos. If you’re wondering why it took this long, YouTube announced last month (a full month after the presidential election, but right after the “safe harbor” deadline for audits […]
Facebook isn’t the only big tech company taking action against Donald Trump’s web presence in the wake of yesterday’s riots in Washington, D.C. Shopify, which hosted shops related to Trump’s campaign paraphernalia and the outgoing President’s personal brand, TrumpStore, has apparently taken down both of those properties. “Shopify does not tolerate actions that incite violence. […]
Consumer financial services startup SoFi is going public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp V, one of a series of blank-check companies formed by venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The deal, confirmed by SoFi, would value the fintech at $8.65 billion according to the company’s statement. It includes […]
What a week. Democracy is still standing and the nation is getting back to work, so let’s press forward, even if it does feel surreal to cover business news after witnessing a live-streamed coup attempt. Setting aside the tectonic political moment, there’s plenty of activity inside the world of startups we need to discuss. The […]
A new startup has officially emerged from stealth with the raise of its $62 million Series A funding round. Endeavor BioMedicines is led by co-founder and CEO John Hood, who previously led Impact Biomedicines, and its new funding comes from Omega Funds and Longitude Capital, as well as the company’s own management team. Endeavor is […]
Former Disney and Discovery execs are teaming up to launch a new streaming service called Struum, arriving in the spring, that aims to take the ClassPass model and apply it to the streaming landscape. That is, Struum’s plan is to aggregate content from smaller video-on-demand services, then provide that under its own subscription. The idea […]
A Twitter spokesperson has confirmed with TechCrunch this morning that Trump has deleted three tweets that led to the temporarily suspension of this account last night. Twitter locked the account pending deletion of the offending tweets on Wednesday following the riot and siege of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and said that the suspension […]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced via his platform that Donald Trump will be blocked from using both Facebook and Instagram “for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” The company blocked his accounts temporarily on Wednesday following Trump’s posting on content that incited his followers to violence, […]
Elon Musk, the controversial and enigmatic entrepreneur who heads up SpaceX and Tesla, has reached a status that only three others have held in the past two decades: world’s richest person. On his way to the top spot, Musk has surpassed a bevy of billionaires this year, including Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. He reached […]
Roblox is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies in the world after a monster Series H raise brings the social gaming platform a stratospheric $29.5 billion valuation. The company won’t be private for long, though. The $520 million raise led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group is a significant cash influx […]
Cable or fiber. For the vast majority of American homes, there’s no choice of how customers get their internet access. If you’re lucky to live in some dense urban areas with amenable landlords, that ‘or’ might become an ‘and.’ Yet, as more and more people rely on the internet for more than just cat photos […]
Mandy Price was already a highly successful lawyer in private practice before she took the jump into entrepreneurship alongside two co-founders to launch Kanarys a little over one year ago. The Harvard Law School graduated didn’t have to start her company, which helps businesses measure the efficacy of their diversity and inclusion efforts using hard […]
Leave it to Lenovo to give the world a swiveling all-in-one. It’s kind of the company’s M.O. – not always the most necessary or practical, but never not interesting. When it comes to fairly staid product categories like this, I’m all for trying something a little weird. And hey, in a world of convertible and […]
This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular, and prior investors LauncHub and CRV. Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a […]
Digital product design — the process of building services like websites and apps that work without bugs and as you intend them to — has come into focus as an especially important thing to get right in the last year. With more customers using sites and apps to interact with a business, if something is […]
Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2. The two-in-one […]
The popular news app News Break is announcing that it has raised $115 million in new funding. The press release claims this round makes News Break “one of the first new unicorns of 2021,” but the startup declined to disclose its actual valuation. Founder and CEO Jeff Zheng said that when he started the company […]
