Without leverage, the private equity sector as we know it wouldn’t exist. While some tech execs and VCs recoil at the thought of using leverage, the truth is that the Innovation Economy has accessed debt for more than 35 years. Given that, debt is worth spending the time to understand. Read More
I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending to be unbiased. I think exactly what you’d expect a Canadian who lives in San Francisco to think: how could anyone with a reasonable command of the available evidence even consider voting for Donald Trump? …But my search for an answer has led me to the uncomfortable sense that the tech industry is partly responsible for… Read More
Opera, which recently agreed to sell its browser business in a Chinese consortium, has reset user passwords for one of its services after it servers were breached by hackers. Read More
Justin Kan swings by the TC studio to talk YC, Snapchat and a new app he is working on, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is working on a proposal to retain foreigners who build startups, a new type of shape-shifting material is created out of MIT, three tech stories about cars, and Rackspace is going private. All this on Crunch report. Read More
Accusations that Spotify has been punishing artists for signing exclusives with other streaming services hit the internet in full force this morning, originating from a Bloomberg article.
When confronted by TechCrunch, a Spotify spokesperson gave the same response they have been giving since the story broke — that the accusations about burying search results are “unequivocally… Read More
Pokémon Go has been downloaded more than 100 million times since its July debut, making it the biggest-growing mobile game ever. Naturally, the phenomenon has drawn much commentary about what this means for marketing, but I am more interested in what it teaches us about making money. Read More
TechCrunch recently went down south to Los Angeles for our mini-meetup and to catch up with the region’s burgeoning tech scene.
One of the startups that caught our attention is HopSkipDrive, which aims to be an Uber for picking up your kids. Uber passengers need to be at least 18-years of age to ride alone, so HopSkipDrive hopes to solve a transportation problem for busy… Read More
Microsoft today pushed out in a blog post for users of its consumer services new resources to reduce hate speech. Users will now be able to communicate directly with the company to report hate speech, and petition for reinstating content via new online forms.
Most people are familiar with efforts by social networks like Twitter and Facebook to ensure safety within their respective online… Read More
IT is shifting from the SaaS workflow applications that characterized the cloud computing era to those that help customers make decisions: the intelligence era. The source of competitive advantage is shifting from code to unique data + self-learning code. This brings a change in the expectations of investors. Here we review the requirements of enterprise software investors in the intelligence era. Read More
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a series of university partners are developing an earthquake early warning system called ShakeAlert, which aims to provide the general public with alerts up to 10 seconds before an earthquake hits. The system is not yet public, but it is now undergoing testing in California, Oregon and Washington. “There is a similar test effort for an earthquake… Read More
Big data is hardly new at this point — nor has it wrought anywhere near its potential effects on many companies and institutions insulated by inertia and red tape. A summer program at the University of Washington called Data Science for Good shows that fresh eyes and good code can make more in 10 weeks than some have done in as many years. Read More
Trying to get more followers on Instagram? If you follow a few verified banks and financial institutions, you’ll suddenly end up with dozens of new followers. There’s just one drawback: Your new followers are trying to scam you.
Instagram has become a hotbed for so-called “money flipping,” according to a study by the social media security firm ZeroFox. Read More
The Google equivalent in every major market where Google doesn’t really play is making a self-driving car of some kind, and Russia is the latest to join the fray. Yandex is the company in question, which operates Russia’s leading search engine, along with a host of other going concerns. Add to that list a driverless minibus, which the tech company is creating in partnership with… Read More
Launching with a marketplace for landscaping, snow plowing and other home care and repair services, Plowz & Mowz has raised $1.5 million from the Los Angeles-based startup studio Science and undisclosed angel investors. On the heels of the firm’s successful exit from Dollar Shave Club, Science has turned to the marketplace industry for its next investment. The idea for the… Read More
Twitter’s “Trends” are often confusing. Why is #MPBMS or #TechMunch trending? You had to click through and figure it out for yourself. When Facebook copied Twitter’s trends in 2014, it vastly improved them by adding human-written descriptions right below so you knew if you cared or not. Today Facebook is removing those descriptions, and claims it’s to increase… Read More
This is a LIVE recording session of The Gillmor Gang – today with: Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Today’s LIVE recording has concluded.
Our live chat stream during the show broadcast
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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an office under the Department of Homeland Security, put forward a proposal today that would allow the U.S. Government to offer parole (temporary permission to be in the country) to foreign entrepreneurs starting their businesses in the United States. The proposal specifies that a founder can qualify if they started a company in the U.S. in… Read More
Google today is stepping up its battle with Venmo, Square Cash and other person-to-person payment applications with an update to its Google Wallet mobile app, which now allows for automatic transfers to your bank account. That is, transfers will no longer require you to cash out money from your Wallet balance first. This will speed up the time it takes for Wallet users to gain access to… Read More
Domino’s Pizza Enterprises has demonstrated delivery of hot pizzas by drone in Auckland, New Zealand.
The company has a long history of embracing high-tech concepts. Last year, they tested out a four-wheeled, driverless pizza delivery vehicle. And in 2012, Domino’s launched a casual build-a-pizza game that also let players order the pizza they built digitally for real life… Read More
San Francisco-based education startup StudySoup, which calls itself “a peer-to-peer learning marketplace,” announced it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding.
The company works as an online study group where students can sell or purchase class notes and study guides. “We realized that a lot of students come to college on very different levels,” Sieva Kozinsky, 26… Read More
