Some more developments over at Opera, the browser company based out of Norway. The company announced that an offer to acquire the company for $1.2 billion has now been terminated, and in the meantime, the deal has been renegotiated: the same group will now pay $600 million to acquire only certain parts of Opera’s business. Opera will sell the Qihoo 360-led consortium its mobile… Read More
In the wake of the historic Brexit vote and the fall of the Pound, the UK is now witnessing its biggest-ever technology exit. Today, Arm Holdings confirmed that Japan’s Softbank Group has offered to pay £24.3 billion ($32 billion) in cash to acquire the company — known for its chip designs for mobile handsets (Apple is a customer) as well as for processors to power… Read More
Baidu has made its second investment in a U.S. fintech company inside a month after it put an undisclosed sum of money into ZestFinance, a big data firm specializing in credit scoring. Baidu, which operates China’s dominant search platform, took part in a $60 million round for payments firm Circle in June. Read More
Tonight SpaceX successfully recovered yet another rocket, making it their fifth one in total.
Elon Musk’s rocket company launched their two-stage Falcon 9 vehicle from Cape Canaveral at 9:45 pm PT tonight and subsequently recovered the first stage of that rocket back on land. The landing marks the second time SpaceX recovered a rocket on land and their fifth recovered first stage in… Read More
The surge in encrypted traffic and a wide adoption of end-to-end encryption by mainstream tech companies is a transformative shift in information security. Billions of online users now enjoy default peer-to-peer security, shielding the content of web communications from prying eyes of criminals and corporate surveillance. Yet the industry continues to collect and store massive amounts of metadata. Read More
Having trouble logging in to Pokemon Go this weekend? You’re not alone. A hacking team called OurMine has spent the past several hours hitting Pokemon Go’s login servers with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, leaving some players frustrated and unable to log in to the game. The group said it would not stop the attack until representatives from Pokemon Go contacted them.… Read More
While the biggest names in tech strive to close the gender gap and build more inclusive working environments, the pool of talent on offer is predominantly male. The truth is, while retention is an issue, there are simply fewer women opting for a career in tech. But new initiatives and an uptick of Gen Z girls opting for sciences in top-tier universities paints a very different future. Read More
Players of Pokemon Go are not only giving up their right to act like sane human beings in public, as they walk around, zombie-esque, reaching into the phones held in front of their faces, they are also likely to be waiving legal rights if they don’t take a very close look at Niantic Labs’ Terms of Service for the game. Read More
Big Data by all accounts is supposed to help humans perform better by augmenting our limited brain power. Computers, after all, have the ability to crunch data with lightning speed, something humans just haven’t been built to do. Conventional tech wisdom states that the more data you have, the better the outcome — even if that sounds counter-intuitive. That’s the thinking… Read More
As a founder or someone working in a startup, the main priority is always staying alive. Every ounce of your budget needs to be spent efficiently. It’s all about difficult decisions, and some of them can be messy and complex. With options coming from every angle, you need to find ways to make them as simple as possible. This is where our good friend Drake comes in. Read More
This week on Technotopia I talked to Neeraj Bansal the co-founder of education startup Simversity. He has a deep understanding of what it takes to build an online education platform and he also notes that the only jobs worth having in the future are the ones that can’t be replaced by machine learning.
Education right now, he says, is a form of data replication. But when computers and… Read More
Chatbots seem to be climbing the proverbial peak of the tech hype curve with every passing day. Popular messaging apps have been attempting to outdo each other in terms of making their platforms open for bot development. The frenetic action notwithstanding, the moot point is whether bots actually solve any real end-user need. The answer is not as clear as the chat platforms would have us believe. Read More
As the internet social turf wars continue to mature, the land grab is becoming much better understood. With a few companies controlling 95 percent of the social data, the internet is more closed and much more controlled than ever before. Read More
Have you ever stopped to think about what it takes to bring an animated fish to life? How a team of people can take a spark of an idea and make it a reality so millions of pairs of eyes can stare in amazement at the big screen? I spoke with Pixar’s president and one of the tech leads on “Finding Dory” to find out more about the creative and technical journey behind the… Read More
We all took a collective gasp when we saw the price tag of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we can pause and reflect on what this means from a data, privacy and email perspective — given that all three are potential strengths, weaknesses and concerns arising from the merger of two giants. Read More
Pokémon; Macbeth; the Illuminati. Those may not sound like they have a lot in common, but they exemplify the three whole new forms of technology-driven entertainment that have erupted in recent years. We’ll soon combine all three–and, eventually, use them to create whole new multi-faceted immersive worlds that will make today’s entertainment look like radio dramas. Read More
Coup attempt in Turkey and social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube gets blocked, Obama launches the Advanced Wireless Research Initiative, Lines share price jumps 50 percent on debut, Netflix launches Flixtape, NASA shows off its new Mars Rover design. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
