A confluence of factors puts China at the financial technology (“fintech”) forefront: economic advancement, investor behavior, mobile technology, big data, financial industry liberalization, and regulatory acquiescence. Read More
Winter came, and now it’s time for a season of shut downs, sell outs, and saving face. The circle of life includes the stage of death. That doesn’t mean these founders did anything wrong, just not quite enough right. Their experiments are coming to an end.
Two years ago a bunch of startups raised two years of runway. An abundance of early capital had emerged. Angels and VCs… Read More
In 2004, Google finally went public in a long-awaited offering that lit the public markets on fire. But Google’s S-1 filing was probably as unusual as anything the technology markets had ever seen: The company promised to not deliver quarterly guidance to investors, and instead promised to invest over the long term to preserve the culture of innovation that the company so fiercely protected. Read More
Imagine a future where individuals can illustrate their progression of lifelong learning and training and its links to their real-world performance. In this version of the future, the once-ubiquitous résumé has been ousted by the experience graph. Read More
Livestreaming app Blab, which amassed 3.9 million users in just one year, shut down this weekend, its CEO Shaan Puri announced with a post on Medium late Friday. The app, which competed with Twitter’s Periscope, Facebook Live, IBM-owned UStream.tv and other media companies in the livestreaming game, was created at Monkey Inferno, a tech incubator self-funded by the founders of Bebo,… Read More
As the Internet of Things becomes more widespread, consumers must demand better security and privacy protections that don’t leave them vulnerable to corporate surveillance and data breaches. But before consumers can demand change, they must be informed — which requires companies to be more transparent. Read More
Niantic Labs, a small gaming company previously owned by Google, has gone from a somewhat obscure gaming shop to one of the most prominent developers overnight. The company launched Pokémon Go in July 2016, the first very long-awaited smartphone version of a Pokémon game. After holding out for nearly a decade, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have finally unleashed one of its most… Read More
It’s time: We need a drone with automated follow features that not only includes a camera for cataloging your many feats, but also has an on-board voice assistant to and a cellular connection to get stuff done for you while you’re out and about. It’s time for friendly flyers; it’s time we each had a companion ship. I don’t know who gets this done –… Read More
Clicks. Once upon a time they were the most powerful tool in assessing online ad performance. A humble beginning, but much has changed. The data-driven measurement and predictive analytics technologies that launched adtech and expanded to marketing are now being applied to nearly everything — and yet, it’s easy to forget the road that led here. Read More
At 1:26am ET, SpaceX launched their Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral and, once again, recovered the first stage of that rocket on a drone ship floating in the ocean. More importantly, SpaceX successfully completed the primary mission of today’s launch by inserting their payload, the JCSAT-16 satellite, into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). First stage landing confirmed on… Read More
As the world tries to make sense of economic tremors from the Brexit fallout, upcoming U.S. elections and volatile European financial markets, it’s easy to see why investors are becoming less willing to roll the dice and throw money at oversaturated venture markets. This presents a window of opportunity for investors trying to spot, catch and ride the wave of the next… Read More
Pokémon Go has changed the trajectory of the world on a scale just slightly smaller than Google Search and Facebook — but it will be felt through all industries in the coming years. It looks like a simple game that incorporates a few unique and compelling features. But this game has taken technologies from niche research and gaming communities and thrust them into the world’s… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 12, 2016. Why Twitter should call itself the Peacock Network, why many are fleeing Facebook until after the election, why social video is moving into corporate life, and why I’m going to help Trumpty continue his great fall. @stevegillmor, @Scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @fradice… Read More
There are neural net machine learning approaches that are simply more than “deep.” Neural networks are popular for advancing voice technologies and AI, but it’s interesting that many of the current approaches were developed for image/video processing. One, convolutional neural networks, makes it easy to see why image-processing neural nets are similar to the way our brains… Read More
Need a tiny, $5 computer to build a robot that will bring you your slippers, initiate a massage chair session, and pour out your daily dose of bourbon? The Onion Omega2 can do all that and more. This tiny board is Arduino-compatible but also runs Linux natively. This means you can plug it in and get a command line or access the system via a desktop-like web interface. It has Wi-Fi built in and… Read More
If you’re a big fan of wine but still want to run a startup, there may not be that much innovation you can get away with on the product side. Wine, when all is said and done, is still wine. That doesn’t mean you can’t turn the industry inside out by turning the traditional winery business model on its head — and that’s exactly what Naked Wines did. I decided to have… Read More
In the last year, writers, editors, producers and other content creators at “digital native” companies have won representation with the Writers Guild of America, East. These innovative, mostly younger professionals want a voice in shaping their work lives, and they recognize that collective bargaining is a vital way to engage in the decisions that affect how they work and how that… Read More
Frank Abagnale, Jr’s ignominious youth as a clever con artist was made famous in the 2002 movie, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DeCaprio as a young Frank, but Abagnale, as you might imagine, would rather talk about the life he led after he got caught, went to jail and paid his debt to society.
It was then that he turned his conning skill to good and began a 40-year career as a… Read More
Dear executives of United Airlines, I have some advice for you. 1: Fire whoever is in charge of your online security. 2: Burn down the building in which they worked; it may be tainted. 3: Salt the ground so nothing ever grows there again, to be safe. 4: Hire somebody competent who will not infuriate your users while simultaneously compromising their security. Read More
Disrupt NY winner Beam gets acquired by Microsoft, study shows VR and exoskeletons can help paraplegics, soon even our tattoos will be smart, Facebook delivers the latest adblocker punch, and a new Star Wars Rogue One trailer. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
