When an employee comes to you asking for a flexible schedule, you might be tempted to say yes. But giving one person tailor-made working conditions can easily be perceived as favoritism. Before saying yes (or no), ask yourself three questions: What is the employee asking for and why? If there is a legitimate reason for […]
February 6, 2018
Day One Ventures launches fund which wraps VC and PR into one via @TechCrunch
There is a clutch of new VC funds launched in the US every year, and but when you look at the stats around new funds started by women they are pretty dismal. A cursory glance at the figures from last year reveals that out of 153 funds founded in the US last year, only four were founded by women, and only two have gone on to raise money. Furthermore, women account for only seven percent of… Read More
SpaceX’s spacesuited Starman mannequin serves a real purpose via @TechCrunch
SpaceX put a “Starman” into space today, on a path to a potential wide looping orbit of Mars and Earth — it was actually a mannequin wearing an official SpaceX crew flight suit, but it was more than just a fun payload for a rocket that stood every chance of exploding mid-flight, it turns out. Read More
David Sacks’s new startup wants to make it safer for old-guard industries to jump into crypto via @TechCrunch
SEC chairman Jay Clayton made clear today that his agency, along with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, remains acutely concerned about initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency trades. In fact, toward that end, they’re now looking for more expansive powers when it comes to protecting customers on cryptocurrency exchanges from fraud. Read More
Elon Musk says SpaceX to focus on BFR following Falcon Heavy launch via @TechCrunch
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said at a press event for the just-launched Falcon Heavy that SpaceX will now begin focusing in earnest on ‘BFR,’ the code name for its next big space launch vehicle. BFR (aka ‘big f*cking rocket’ in case you lack imagination) will be designed to be a vehicle capable of using a single stage to make it all the way to orbit, with fully loaded tanks.… Read More
After years of neglect, Snapchat wins in the developing world via @TechCrunch
Snapchat doubled its Rest Of World revenue this quarter. That’s a surprise, considering CEO Evan Spiegel never seemed to care about anyone but U.S. teens. Snapchat’s Android app was buggy. Its videos loaded too slow on weak connections. And Spiegel even admitted “Historically we’ve really focused our efforts on markets where [high-end phones and broadband mobile… Read More
SpaceX landed two of its three Falcon Heavy first-stage boosters via @TechCrunch
SpaceX has managed an incredible feat alongside its historic Falcon Heavy first test launch today – landing two of its boosters at once, nearly simultaneously, intact. The first-stage rockets used during today’s launch included two flight proven Falcon 9 boosters previously used during missions for SpaceX in 2016 and then refurbished, which landed at their intended destinations… Read More
How to Figure Out the Next Step in Your Career [Quiz]
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” Of all the job interview questions out there, this has always been one of the most difficult. These days, however, the next steps in your career aren’t always linear. The age-old corporate ladder model of putting in a few years as an associate contributor, becoming a manager […]
How to Figure Out the Next Step in Your Career [Quiz]
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” Of all the job interview questions out there, this has always been one of the most difficult.…
Does Your Firm See You as a High Potential?
Jay Conger, a leadership professor at Claremont McKenna College, goes behind the scenes to show how you can get on, and stay on, your company’s fast track. He demystifies how companies (often very secretly) develop and update their list of high-potential employees. And he discusses five critical “X factors” his research has shown are common […]
Senate cryptocurrency hearing strikes a cautiously optimistic tone via @TechCrunch
In a hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo opened up about what the near-term U.S. regulatory fate of cryptocurrency might look like. In a week of plunging prices and bad news, the hearing struck a tone that coin watchers could reasonably interpret as… Read More
Placements.io raises $3.8M to help digital publishers manage their ad revenue via @TechCrunch
Placements.io says it’s helping online publishers get paid on-time for ads. Founder Edwin Fu said that when he was at Salesforce, he worked with “some of the largest media companies in the world” and “noticed a huge problem — they were having difficulty managing revenue fulfillment and billing for ads.” The problem, he said, is that online ad process has… Read More
Watch the live feed from SpaceX’s Roadster-driving Starman in space via @TechCrunch
SpaceX now has a live feed of its Mars bound simulated astronaut, a dummy wearing the private space company’s new crew uniform. There are cameras mounted on the Tesla Roadster the dummy is “driving,” which was the primary payload for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch, which went off almost perfectly as planned by SpaceX earlier today. The livestream switches between… Read More
The showrunners behind ‘Game of Thrones’ have signed on to write some ‘Star Wars’ movies via @TechCrunch
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the writers who turned George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels into a television phenomenon, will be writing and producing a new series of Star Wars films. Read More
Netgear is spinning off its Arlo security camera business via @TechCrunch
Netgear announced this afternoon that it plans to spin off its Arlo wing into a standalone business. The networking hardware giant’s board of directors has unanimously approved the decision and plans to have the separation to be completed by the second half of this year. Netgear is planning an IPO as part of the process, issuing less than 20-percent of common stock in the process and… Read More
Snap shares skyrocket on first earnings beat with revived user growth via @TechCrunch
Snapchat is starting to turn things around, boosting its sluggish user growth rate and beating Wall Street’s expectations for the first time with today’s Q4 2017 earnings report. It added 8.9 million daily active users to reach 187 million with a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 5.05% percent in Q4, compared to 2.9 percent in Q3. Revenue was $285.7 million, up 72 percent… Read More
Scaling a bootstrapped business is next frontier of entrepreneurship for Evan Frank via @TechCrunch
Evan Frank was five years old when he first knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. While attending kindergarten, Frank crafted books and sold them to his teacher at a nickel to a dime a piece. “There was always this desire to build stuff,” he explained to me, and also clearly a desire to make some money on those projects, to boot. Read More
An inside look into a venture negotiation via @TechCrunch
The actual negotiation of venture rounds remains unnecessarily murky. First-time entrepreneurs are often at a loss for mapping the business values they hold to specific terms during a negotiation. Moreover, many wonder what terms even come up for discussion and why VCs and entrepreneurs may care about a particular term, but barely mention another. Read More
SpaceX’s historic Falcon Heavy successfully launches via @TechCrunch
SpaceX has had a very good first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. The massive, three-booster rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as planned on Tuesday at 1:30 PM EST, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A. This is a historic moment for SpaceX, since it has… Read More
Mozilla announces an open gateway for the internet of things via @TechCrunch
Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung have all been working hard to create their own standard to control all the connected devices around your home. Mozilla just announced that anybody can now create an open gateway to control the internet of things. The organization also confirmed that it is still working on a set of frameworks and open standards so that we don’t end up with an internet… Read More
Google brings an AR mode to its Motion Stills app on Android via @TechCrunch
Google’s Motion Stills video/gif editing app is getting an augmented reality upgrade, with the app bringing some of the fun from AR Stickers on the Pixel 2 to a bevy of Android devices. Read More
Backing Robinhood, Jay Z’s Roc Nation invests in would-be Rockefellers via @TechCrunch
Roc Nation, the full service entertainment management company created by the music impresario Shawn Carter (better known as Jay Z), is making an investment in financial trading platform Robinhood. The investment, through Roc Nation’s Arrive subsidiary, is the latest instance of a celebrity rapper plowing cash into Robinhood’s free-to-trade investment platform. The company also… Read More
Should I buy an Apple HomePod? via @TechCrunch
If you want to read a lot of words about the Apple HomePod, you can do so here and here. Obviously, I’d recommend you do so before plunking down $350 of your hard earned cash on a first generation product, but the long and short of it is actually pretty straight forward. Apple made a very nice speaker — arguably the best on the market in its class. But there are caveats. As is… Read More
Twitch now has 27K+ Partners and 150K+ Affiliates making money from their videos via @TechCrunch
Twitch today announced new metrics related to the growth of its game streaming service, including, most notably, that the number video creator Partners who profit from their Twitch content has climbed to 27,000 over the course of 2017, and the number of Affiliate streamers reached 150,000. Until mid-2017, Twitch had only allowed a smaller subset of its creator community to make money from… Read More
ProcessOut chooses the best online payment service for each transaction via @TechCrunch
Meet ProcessOut, a French startup that automatically routes transactions to the best payment provider. This way, big online services can start using multiple payment providers, pay fewer fees and reduce the number of declined transactions. The startup has just raised $1 million from various business angels, such as BlaBlaCar CTO Francis Nappez, former PayPal Director of Global Business… Read More
Tech4Reporters pitches a new hub for journalists to connect with tech experts via @TechCrunch
Technology reporting has become a function of every single major news beat these days. From politics to crime, business and finance to entertainment, it’s increasingly important that reporters get a good grounding in the technology that’s transforming their beats to avoid basic errors. For John Biggs, an editor-at-large here at TechCrunch, the problem became so acute in the… Read More
Patreon Lens is Snapchat for creators’ paid fans only via @TechCrunch
Exclusive content is how creators get patrons to pay them a monthly subscription fee on Patreon, so the startup is equipping them with a Snapchat-like tool to turn their private lives into “behind-the-scenes” footage. Patreon Lens launches today within Patreon’s iOS and Android apps so that creators can share photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours just with those who… Read More
I, for one, welcome our robotic waffle-stacking overlords via @TechCrunch
As a fan of both waffles and robots I present to you the FANUC food and beverage manipulation robot, waffle edition. The robot, as you see below, sorts the waffles by color, stacks them, and then another robot grabs them and puts them into a box. And these bad boys can do some heavy lifting. From the site: We have the largest offering of standard and collaborative robot models with… Read More
How to Be Friends with Someone Who Works for You
Nadezda Kozulina/Getty Images Working as a senior executive can be a lonely job. You have to deliver tough messages. You can’t always be transparent about your own challenges. And you must keep key decisions confidential until the timing is right. There’s no way to escape the necessary burdens of authority. And, from time to time, you […]
Apple’s Shazam takeover triggers competition review in Europe via @TechCrunch
The European Commission has announced a review of Apple’s acquisition of music discovery service Shazam — agreeing to a request made by several countries to weigh competition concerns. Read More
Slack names Allen Shim as company’s first CFO via @TechCrunch
In a blog post this morning Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced the company is naming long-time employee Allen Shim as the company’s first CFO. “Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone: Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Slack,” Butterfield wrote in the blog post. He went onto to describe Shim as his right hand man, who has been with… Read More
The NYT debuts its first augmented reality-enhanced story on iOS via @TechCrunch
Apple’s investment in AR technologies has been ushering in a new wave of apps, from those that let you perform more practical tasks – like visualizing furniture placement in rooms – to those with mass consumer appeal – like AR gaming, including Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. But AR can also be used to create unique experiences within more… Read More
Microsoft will buy out existing cloud storage contracts for customers switching to OneDrive for Business via @TechCrunch
Microsoft is targeting its cloud storage rivals including Dropbox, Box, and Google today by offering to essentially buy out customers’ existing contracts if they make the switch to OneDrive for Business. The company says that customers currently paying for one of these competitive solutions, can instead opt to use OneDrive for free for the remainder of their contract’s term. The… Read More
Houzz acquires IvyMark to expand into services for designers via @TechCrunch
Houzz, the platform now valued at $4 billion where people plan and help find people to complete home design projects, has made an acquisition to expand how it works with one of its most important groups of customers, interior designers. The company is acquiring IvyMark, which offers a set of business management tools and a community platform for interior designers and home design firms. The… Read More
Samsung is bringing bokeh camera effects to cheaper phones via @TechCrunch
Portrait mode-style bokeh camera features have largely been the realm of high-end flagships to this point. That’s due, in part to the fact that many device makers rely on a dual-camera system to create the effect, driving up prices in the process. Samsung is getting ready to change that soon, however, with a plan to bring its version of the tech to mid-range and entry-level handsets.… Read More
Alibaba Cloud growing like gangbusters, but still far behind AWS and other market leaders via @TechCrunch
Last week Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba announced its Q3 earnings. Cloud revenue was $553 million, an impressive 104 percent year-over-year increase. That comes out to a run rate in the range of $2.2 billion, well behind Google which announced it is pulling in a billion dollars a quarter and still buried behind the market leaders all of whom reported around $4 billion+ a quarter. While… Read More
SimpliSafe upgrades the DIY home security experience via @TechCrunch
SimpliSafe, a Boston-based home security company, launched their first security products in 2009 and the devices were a hit. Thanks to their home-security-in-a-box solution the average homeowner could install door sensors, glass-break microphones, and motion detectors without having to run wires or even have a salesperson visit their home. The Lego-like system of removable components was… Read More
Red Dead Redemption 2 rumors hint at Battle Royale mode via @TechCrunch
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been delayed more than once, with a current slated release for October 2018. That said, RDR2 fans are likely desperate for even the slightest whiff of the game, which is why an allegedly leaked document from Trusted Reviews couldn’t have come at a better time. The leak, which TechCrunch has not been able to verify, includes information on potential game modes… Read More
SocialRank’s new product helps marketers understand why tweets go viral via @TechCrunch
The team at SocialRank has spent the last few years building ways for brands and marketers to get a better sense of who’s following and engaging with them on social media. Until now, they’ve been doing that on an account level — plug in an account and you get a SocialRank report covering things like your most valuable followers. With a new product called SocialRank for… Read More
Embark’s self-driving truck completes 2,400 mile cross-U.S. trip via @TechCrunch
Embark’s autonomous trucking solution just demonstrated what it could be capable of in a big way: It make a coast-to-coast trip from L.A. to Jacksonville, Florida, driving 2,400 miles and delivering refrigerators for Electrolux from one end of the U.S. to the other. This follows Embark‘s prior test route, which ran from L.A. to El Paso, and covers more than four times the distance… Read More
Why Every Company Should Consider Creating a “Cyber No-Fly List”
Luerat Satichob/Getty Images We’ve all heard of the No-Fly List. Managed by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the list bans people on it from boarding commercial aircraft within, into, or out of the United States. The No-Fly List is only one tactic that the U.S. uses in its fight against terrorism, but since its inception […]
To Change Someone’s Mind, Stop Talking and Listen
Colormos/Getty Images Samar Minallah Khan, the feminist Pakistani anthropologist and filmmaker, was enraged. Local tribal leaders were trading little girls as compensation for their male family members’ crimes. These leaders, responsible for settling legal disputes in their villages, act as local judges. A longstanding practice was to address major crimes by “compensating” a harmed family […]
CloudBees acquires CodeShip as devops consolidates via @TechCrunch
More consolidation is afoot in the busy world of backend developer tools. Today, CloudBees — the company closely associated with support and services for the open source Jenkins continuous integration and delivery engine — has announced that it will acquire CodeShip, another startup in the dev-ops space focusing on continuous integration and delivery. Terms of the deal are not… Read More
Apple Watch shipments jumped in 2017, according to analysts via @TechCrunch
The Apple Watch continues to be a bright spot in amongst the middling world of wearables, according to new numbers from Canalys. The analyst group’s figures put the smartwatch at 18 million shipments for 2017, representing a 54-percent jump over the device’s 2016. Apple’s wearable popped for a couple of reasons, LTE functionality being chief among them. For one thing,… Read More
Influencer Marketing: When & Why You Should Invest
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that places focus on influential people rather than the entire market as a whole. It attempts to identify…
Quizlet raises $20 million for virtual flash cards via @TechCrunch
If you’re in high school in the United States, there’s at least a 50% chance you’re using Quizlet. And there’s an even better chance you’re at least familiar with it. But for the rest of the adult population, times have changed since we were students. Educational apps like Quizlet help you do your homework and prepare for tests. Quizlet builds modern day flash… Read More
Mixmax raises $10.35M to improve email via @TechCrunch
Hundred of startups have tried to kill it, but email is still alive and well. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon, though. Mixmax, a startup that aims to make email more useful for businesses, today announced that it has raised a $10.35 million from Creandum’s Carl Fritjofsson and SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin. Previous investors Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal… Read More
InVision launches Studio Platform, challenging Adobe with an open ecosystem via @TechCrunch
In October, InVision made the first dramatic change to its product portfolio since the company’s inception. The team launched InVision Studio, a design tool meant to take on the likes of Adobe PhotoShop and Sketch. Now, however, InVision is taking yet another huge step forward with the announcement of the Studio Platform, letting third-party developers build products and programs for… Read More
Voicegram lets anyone record and share a conversation with Alexa via @TechCrunch
If you’ve ever wanted to share a voice conversation you had with Alexa, you probably pointed your smartphone at your Echo speaker and recorded a shaky mobile video. That solution may work for the occasional tweet, but businesses and developers may want an easier, more professional way to show off their Alexa skills. That’s where Voicegram comes in. Created by the makers of… Read More
Reporting Vs. Analytics
As marketers, we crave good reporting—this is how we know if we are successful in our work, and it’s how we demonstrate the value of our campaigns. Enter Pardot. With the power of Pardot and Salesforce reporting, marketers can track the success of their campaigns, measure their audience engagement and understand the impact of their […]
Mayfield joins Velocity Network to connect enterprise startups with NYC execs via @TechCrunch
Last year two venture capital firms, General Catalyst and CRV, launched a program called the Velocity Network to get their startups in front of Fortune 500 executives in New York City. Today they announced that Mayfield has joined as the third VC firm in the network. New York is home to financial, insurance, security, retail, media, and other Fortune 500 companies — the very types of… Read More
Loris.ai, a Crisis Text Line spin-out, raises $2 million to help companies have hard conversations via @TechCrunch
Loris.ai, a spin-out product from the maker of suicide prevention organization Crisis Text Line, has raised $2 million to help companies navigate conversations around harassment and other charged topics. Loris.ai’s seed round was led by Floodgate with participation from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Kapor Capital and others. “We started getting calls from companies and even one… Read More
Mirror raises $13 million for virtual fitness classes via @TechCrunch
It may seem like there are already enough on-demand fitness classes, but one startup has an idea for something a little different. Mirror is debuting an at-home device that looks like a mirror, but also lets you see the instructor and classmates for fitness routines like barre, yoga, boxing and pilates. I’m told that this is no ordinary mirror or video conferencing system, but that… Read More
Rubrik acquires Datos IO to expand into NoSQL database management support via @TechCrunch
Rubrik, the enterprise startup that provides data backup and recovery services across cloud and on-premise environments, is putting some of the funding that it raised last year at a $1.3 billion valuation to use. Rubrik has acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, the company announced today, in what appears to be Rubrik’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are… Read More
What Could Amazon’s Approach to Health Care Look Like?
jamie jones/Getty Images It is clear from some of its recent moves that Amazon sees the 18% of U.S. GDP dedicated to health care as fertile ground for expansion. Consider its decision to pursue the market for pharmaceutical distribution, or the recent announcement that it will be teaming up with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase to create joint solutions for […]
A four-sentence HomePod review (with appendices) via @TechCrunch
Apple’s HomePod delivers superior sound quality and solid Siri performance but still lags behind competition on breadth of voice commands. Read More
Review: The Kube speaker is overpriced and underwhelming via @TechCrunch
This speaker is huge. It’s the size of a cooler a person would take camping for a week. It weighs 48 lbs. And for a good reason, too. The Kube speaker from Thomas and Darden is solid and packed with power. The company says it can put out 122 dB of sound. But it’s not a good sound. That’s the rub. This is a massive speaker that gets really loud but doesn’t sound great at… Read More
The Surprising Relationship Between Stress and Creativity
Thomas Edison grossed 1,093 patents over the course of his career. He was also reportedly fired from his first two jobs for not being productive.…
Augmented reality developer tools startup 8th Wall raises $8 million via @TechCrunch
Mobile AR had a lot of hype heading into the rollout of ARKit and ARCore this past year, but for the most part mobile AR apps have delivered a pretty heavy thud, failing to deliver on their futuristic promises. 8th Wall believes that this is the result of developers looking to port existing experiences into AR rather than designing for mobile AR’s strengths in the first place. The… Read More
Slab raises $2.2M to build tools for an internal employee information nexus via @TechCrunch
When Jason Chen first ended up at Salesforce through the acquisition of his last company Stypi, he had the tough task of integrating within Salesforce’s complex infrastructure — and not a lot of documentation to go on. Fortunately, Chen’s company had just been acquired and he was able to get the attention of the higher-ups and find that information, which was actually… Read More
The Surprising Relationship Between Stress and Creativity
Thomas Edison grossed 1,093 patents over the course of his career. He was also reportedly fired from his first two jobs for not being productive. Huh? Popular opinion might say that’s because creativity needs both stimulation and room to breathe. These workplaces were likely either uninteresting or too stressful, preventing Edison from flapping his inventive […]
Tyson Foods invests in Tovala’s new oven and meal kit business via @TechCrunch
Tovala, the startup that’s designed a new steam-based oven and accompanying meal kit subscription service, has inked an investment and partnership agreement with the food prep giant Tyson Foods. Through Tyson Ventures, the company’s investment arm, Tovala will get an undisclosed amount of new financing as the two companies pursue collaborations on Tyson-branded Tovala meals.… Read More
Battery Ventures ups the ante, raising $1.25 billion across two new funds via @TechCrunch
Battery Ventures is a 35-year-old, global investment firm that tends to keep its nose down. Its bench of 10 general partners have mostly been operating quietly in the business for many years if not decades, yet none are household names. Partly, that owes to the fact that Battery prefers to promote from within — often after many years of service. General Partner Neeraj Agrawal, who… Read More
At last an end to geoblocking in Europe? Nope, not by a long chalk… via @TechCrunch
Hold your horses. Geoblocks for stuff like Netflix and Spotify are still not being vanquished in this round of EU Digital Single Market regulation chess… Read More
Apple is sending some developers ad spend and install details for other people’s apps via @TechCrunch
An issue at Apple appears to be resulting in app developers getting emails of ad spend and install summaries for apps belonging to other developers. The issue — which appears specific right now to developers using Search Ads Basic, pay-per-install ads that appear as promoted apps when people search on the App Store — was raised on Twitter by a number of those affected,… Read More
Could Mindfulness Help You Control Your Anger?
I still remember the time I hit one of my close friends. It happened many years ago. We were exiting a chemistry class together, and he was teasing me…mercilessly. I repeatedly asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Rather than shrugging it off, though, I hit him hard on the arm. Both of us were […]
Apple continues to dominate the tablet market as sales decline once again via @TechCrunch
Bitcoin and crypto aren’t the only things on the decline, sales of tablet devices once again dropped in 2017, according to new data. Figures from analyst firm IDC show that overall tablet shipments fell by 6.5 percent to 163.5 million units last year. That’s down from 174.9 million in 2016, when the annual decrease was in double digits. Despite demanding falling overall, Apple… Read More
The unbeatable advantage of Apple and Amazon via @TechCrunch
There are a handful of companies that have an unbeatable advantage — the fiduciary moat. In finance world, when you hire an advisor who is a fiduciary — he’s legally bound to put your financial interests ahead of his. There are many paths to business success and financial models that go with it. You can make money directly from the end user or you can find an… Read More
Watch SpaceX launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time here via @TechCrunch
SpaceX is test launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, the first ever launch of the new heavy-lift orbital rocket. The Heavy’s thrust is generated by its 27 Merlin engines, which is three times the number of engines you’d find in the current Falcon 9 rocket. That amounts to over 5 million pounds of thrust, and a total cargo capacity of around 119,000 pounds. That gives it more than… Read More