With Dalian Wanda Group’s $3.5 billion acquisition of Legendary Entertainment in January, this year’s media and entertainment M&A activity kicked off with a bang that hasn’t slowed down. Comcast’s $3.8 billion acquisition of DreamWorks Animation just three months later continued the trend of content consolidation and IP aggregation. The common denominator is access… Read More
Last Wednesday, Google Capital ventured into the world of investing in publicly traded companies, announcing it has backed Care.com, a platform that connects people with caregivers which went public in early 2014. With Google Capital investing $46.35 million, it became Care.com’s single largest shareholder, according to The New York Times. The deal also sent nine-year-old… Read More
With the incessant talk about unicorns, it’s easy to lose sight of the opposite end of the investment funnel. What feeds the industry is not unicorns, but first venture round companies. Yet raising investments from institutional venture capitalists is becoming increasingly difficult for early-stage entrepreneurs — and it likely won’t ease up through the remainder of 2016. Read More
Welcome to the bot-centric future, which is set to make smartphone users navigate the internet in a chit-chat fashion with a virtual assistant. But “assistant” will soon become too impersonal… Alexa, Siri and others will cross the line from impersonal robots to entities that know our habits, routines, hobbies and interests just as well as, if not better than, our closest… Read More
New-market disruption is a rare phenomenon and usually comes in waves in conjunction with some form of dramatic technological advance. Many disruptive companies (both new and existing) created new markets in periods following the introduction of PCs (Apple, Microsoft), mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) and cloud computing (Facebook, Airbnb). And this is what we are seeing in the enterprise… Read More
The British public recently voted to leave the European Union. Only history will tell whether it was a good decision or not. The immediate issue is… what happens now? Those in financial services and technology firms will have to grapple with the unraveling of treaties that will have a direct impact on their business. But first… what happens next? Read More
Let’s pause on the robots-are-taking-over-our-jobs panic for a minute and take a look at how some robots — telepresence robots, specifically — could be used to give access not only to jobs but to meaningful and rewarding careers for a historically overlooked and excluded population — people with disabilities. Read More
Governor Jerry Brown has recently proposed legislation that would streamline the path for large scale development across California. It could have a huge impact on growing housing supply in San Francisco specifically, which suffers from NIMBYism and a lengthy, local review process for building developers. Read More
The imagination is a powerful thing, and what it creates may in fact be powerful beyond our imagining. That was certainly the case with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, the creation of which is documented in a new short film, “Foreveryone.net,” which was directed by Jessica Yu and is currently showing at the Seattle International Film Festival. Read More
The Pro Football Hall of Fame is a hallowed enough place, being surrounded by bronze busts of the most legendary players that the sport has ever had. But walking through the historic grounds in Canton, Ohio later this month may give you goosebumps for another reason.
That’s because, the Hall of Fame is set to debut its A Game For Life exhibit with 4D holographic representations of… Read More
There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago, Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it’s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion run rate. In fact, according to data from Synergy Research, in… Read More
It makes SILICON VALLEY look like C-SPAN–and yet it’s a documentary. Yes, it’s Cryptocurrency!, the show! You already know it’s been the hit of the last half-decade in extreme-nerd, get-rich-quick, and/or libertarian-conspiracist circles. But the story so far may seem incredibly… well… cryptic. So if you’re just tuning in, here’s a timeline to catch you… Read More
A new SEC filing posted Friday gives more clarity about what led up to Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn for over $26 billion. And they prove that Microsoft wasn’t the only prospective buyer. It shows that the talks between LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella began on February 16 of this year, just 12 days after the earnings debacle where LinkedIn shares plummeted. And… Read More
If you’ve ever wished you could roll out a five-mile extension cable for your home phone so you can get your calls when you’re out and about, Invoxia’s new Voice Bridge may be the solution to your globetrotting woes. It’s a virtual phone that connects your landline to your Wi-Fi, making it available via an app. Read More
Today might be conspicuous in the annals of autonomous vehicles for a more serious reason, but another month is over and Google has issued its self-driving car report for June. In it are some interesting details about the system’s ability to detect and avoid cyclists. Read More
It’s difficult enough already for the visually impaired to read the books and publications sighted people take for granted, but it’s downright impossible when the content isn’t even available in accessible formats. Fortunately, a global agreement aimed at alleviating the problem passed a major milestone today and may take effect before the end of the year. Read More
While more and more jobs are being forfeited to robots and artificial intelligence, is it conceivable to convey to machines a responsibility as complicated as cybersecurity? The topic is being hotly debated by security professionals, with strong arguments on both ends of the spectrum. In the meantime, tech firms and security vendors are looking for ways to add this hot technology to their… Read More
Paradox Interactive, best known for developing and publishing a series of popular games including Hearts of Iron, Stellaris and Europa Universalis, today announced it raised more than $11.8m from the crowd on the new Swedish equity crowdfunding platform Pepins. Read More
Google has had a big week around diversity. The company gifted a $2.8 million office space inside its New York City building to Black Girls Code, appointed Roger Ferguson, an African-American finance executive, to its board of directors, and released its latest diversity report.
Most of this was good news. Having a space inside Google’s office could potentially give Black Girls Code… Read More
This week, Airbnb sued the city of San Francisco, details about a fatal Tesla autopilot crash came to light, and Facebook changed the News Feed again. Here are the top tech stories of the week. Read More
