MarketingMuses

 It’s that time of year again. Samsung is getting ready to unpack some shiny new high end smartphones at the world’s biggest mobile confab. And Android fans are getting ready to cheer… Read More

 elf-driving and electric flying cars are coming. What this means for our cities in the future is unclear, so I chatted with Uber Head of Policy of Autonomous Vehicles and Urban Aviation Justin Erlich to learn more. Erlich previously worked under Attorney General Kamala Harris, where he focused on emerging technology and the key policies that the government will want to have in place to… Read More

 First names, foods and animals have been quite popular lately with founders choosing startup names. Meanwhile, other naming styles are getting more fashionable. We take a look at what’s hot now and what might be in vogue next. Read More

 Atlanta-based Cardlytics made its public debut on Friday, closing the day at $13.37, just a little above the IPO price of $13. The company sold 5.4 million shares, raising $70 million. Cardlytics works with financial institutions like Bank of America and 2,000 others to run cash back programs. It partners with brands across restaurant, retail, travel, grocery and home subscription categories… Read More

 After barring Logan Paul earlier today from serving ads on his video channel, YouTube has now announced a more formal and wider set of sanctions it’s prepared to level on any creator that starts to post videos that are harmful to viewers, others in the YouTube community, or advertisers. As it has done with Paul (on two occasions now), the site said it will remove monetization options on… Read More

 “How fast do I need to be growing to be interesting to a venture investor?” This is a question we get asked all the time by CEOs, and we realize “it depends” is not the most actionable answer to give. Instead, we have come up with a simple model that allows us to give a clear numerical answer to this question. Read More

 The Cloverfield Paradox is the kind of movie where a character will straight-facedly declare: “This dimension is eating us alive!” The first trailer for the film hit during the Super Bowl, and Netflix released the movie itself as soon as the game was over. Paradox takes the vaguely-connected Cloverfield franchise into space, where an international team of scientists (including… Read More

 Maybe you’re sitting at a MacBook or other modern PC right now, typing away in near silence on a keyboard that provides no real satisfying response to your human fingers. Maybe, once in the distant past, you remember when keyboards offered something in return: A “click clack” that stood as an auditory proof of productivity. If you miss that and want it back, the new Azio… Read More

 Schools are often late to taking advantage of new technologies, so today still do much of their business over paper forms. One pain point in particular – for school administrators, teachers and parents alike – is handling permission forms for activities and field trips. A young startup called Script aims to help. Schools can use Script’s app to manage the entire trip… Read More

 Tuesday’s Falcon Heavy launch made history, not only becoming the highest capacity rocket platform since the Saturn V but accomplishing the first double autonomous booster landing. And that’s just the start of what could prove to be an epic year for SpaceX — if Elon Musk’s ambitious timeline isn’t delayed, say by high winds. Read More

 Researchers at Newcastle University, U.K. believe they’ve discovered a differently evolved form of stereo vision in mantises. The research team studied the phenomenon in the insects precisely as one would hope — by attaching a pair of tiny 3D glasses to their bug eyes. Read More

 Hulu Original Hard Sun is streaming starting on March 7, and the show looks great based on this trailer. It’s a combination speculative fiction/detective show, based on a rare PRE-apoclaptic premise: The world is ending in five years, but it seems like much of the tension of this show might revolve around who knows that – and who doesn’t want anyone to find out. The show is… Read More

 Facebook isn’t one to be outdone by Apple’s recent big content spending: It’s purchasing a 10-episode, straight-to-series half-hour drama-comedy series produced and starring Elizabeth Olsen. The production also includes Lizzy Weiss on board as showrunner, Kit Steinkellner as creator and lead writer and Master of None‘s James Ponsoldt as a directly and executive producer… Read More

 Evan Spiegel secretly tried to hire away the team at Secret, but the price was too high. That’s according to three sources familiar with the deal who spoke to TechCrunch. The information expands and clarifies a report from the new book about Snapchat’s origin story coming out next week called “How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars” by former TechCrunch writer Billy… Read More

 The courtroom has been cleared, the lights are off in the spillover room on the 19th floor and the initial takes are in on the Uber vs. Waymo trial. Uber will give Alphabet, the parent company of both Waymo and the search giant Google, some $244 million worth of stock, and agree to ensure that no Waymo intellectual property will make its way into Uber autonomous vehicles. While Uber has… Read More

 SpaceX made history earlier this week with its Falcon Heavy launch: The Falcon Heavy is now the largest active rocket in terms of cargo capacity, and is able to propel over 140,000 lbs of cargo to lower Earth orbit, or smaller loads all the way to Mars and beyond. The launch was incredible to witness live, and watching the feed is cool enough, but we were actually there on site as it took… Read More

 If you were an early Internet kid you’ll recall a little app called WinAmp that was, in short, the best MP3 player ever made ever. The little program looked like skeuomorphic stereo receiver with a full range of equalizer sliders and included an important MP3 that explained WinAmp’s primary mission: whipping the llama’s ass. A programmer named Jordan Eldredge has created… Read More

 A new report offers a few more details as to what Disney has in store for its upcoming Netflix rival. The company last August had announced plans to debut its own streaming service in 2019 with content like Star Wars and Marvel movies, Disney studio and Pixar films. This week Deadline offered a sneak peek into the service’s initial slate of content, which will include four to five… Read More

 We all know about the unicorns of the startup world — fast-growing companies that appear to be on the road (or have already arrived at) valuations of $1 billion or more — and we hear a lot about the unfortunate ones that either run out of money or fail for another reason. But what about the startups in the middle — reasonably good companies that aren’t going away… Read More

 Lyft has teamed up with Black Girls Code, a non-profit organization dedicated to getting more black girls involved in computer programming and technology, to make the non-profit organization one of its Round Up & Donate partners. Since launching the Round Up & Donate program eight months ago, Lyft riders have donated over $4 million to causes. Other partners include SickKids… Read More

 Is there room in the market for yet another streaming service? Viacom thinks so. The company, on its earnings call on Thursday, said it’s planning to launch its own ad-supported streaming service by September 2018, the end of its fiscal year. The service will include “tens of thousands of hours of content” from across Viacom’s library. Viacom had hinted about its plans… Read More

 Whether you’re trapped on a futuristic island prison full of blood-thirsty gang members or simply stuck in a two-hour meeting, the LifeClock One might be the watch for you. Inspired by the movie Escape From New York starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, the watch is an homage to Plissken’s wrist-worn LifeClock, a device that would trigger the an injection of micro-explosives in… Read More

 Uber has agreed to settle the lawsuit brought against it by Waymo for theft of some of the company’s trade secrets. As part of the settlement Uber has agreed to work with Waymo to ensure that the company’s LIDAR and software represents just the work of Waymo engineers. The agreement also comes with a financial settlement that is 0.34% of Uber’s equity, valued at Series G-1… Read More

 Right now if you want financial guidance and planning help you basically have two options – shell out thousands (or more) a year for an old-school Wall Street-affiliated advisor, or test your luck with one of the free financial planning chatbot startups that have been popping up over the past few years. Neither of these are ideal for most people; traditional advisors give good advice but… Read More

 Aurora, the self-driving startup founded by Google self-driving car project alum Chris Urmson, along with Tesla Autopilot developer Sterling Anderson, CMU robotics expert and Uber vet Drew Bagnell, and a team of industry experts, will be making the autonomous smarts for Byton’s forthcoming electric vehicle. Byton, a startup that had a splashy debut at CES earlier this year.… Read More

 Facebook will award up to $1 million to five community leaders and $50,000 to 100 more to fund their ideas for how to strengthen people’s online and offline connections. Facebook will also hire double the number of engineers currently working on safety-related causes in its London office. These were a few of the big announcements made at today’s Facebook Communities Summit Europe.… Read More

 A so-called ‘Starman,’ which is a life-size mannequin wearing a production version of the SpaceX crew spacesuit; a miniature car created by Hot Wheels to commemorate the Roadster and its primary passenger; and something called an Arch (pronounced “Ark”), which is not so easy to summarily describe. The Arch on board is a data crystal (sort of like a Jedi Holocron if… Read More

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we’re doing another Equity Shot, a short topic-centered episode where we assemble the troops to dive into one particular thing. Or, in this case, two particular things. Matthew Lynley, myself, and Katie Roof gathered to pick over Snap and… Read More

 Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux (via Nintendo Life). The group claims that Nintendo can’t fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches. #switch pic.twitter.com/4iTjTk9D59 — fail0verflow (@fail0verflow) February 6, 2018 According to fail0verflow, there’s a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia’s… Read More

 WeTravel wants to be the payment platform for small travel companies and group trips. Founded by three immigrant entrepreneurs who met at University of California, Berkeley, the company has just closed a $2 million seed round to expand its business among the small and medium-sized agencies that still play a role in tourism and travel. Last year (its second full year as a business) the… Read More

 Amazon is gearing up to compete directly with UPS and FedEx, according to a new Wall Street Journal report. The so-called “Shipping with Amazon” program will be an end-to-end shipping solution, with pickups from businesses and shipments made to consumers, per the report. The timeframe for rollout is soon, too: Amazon is said to be readying the service for its first launch in LA in… Read More

 More problems and controversy for Logan Paul, the YouTube star who caused a strong public backlash when he posted a video of a suicide victim in Japan. Google’s video platform today announced that it would be pulling advertising temporarily from his video channel in response to a “recent pattern of behavior” from him. This is in addition to Paul’s suspensions from… Read More

 After teasing the feature back in September, Apple is adding support for live news in the TV app on the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV — 9to5mac first spotted the new section. For now, it’s quite limited as it only supports a handful of channels for American users. If you’re running the most recent versions of iOS and tvOS, the feature should now be live. I’m running iOS… Read More

 Another antitrust fine for Google. India’s competition commission has issued a 1.36BN rupees (~$21.1M) penalty on the search giant for abusing its dominant position in the local search market for online general web search and web search advertising services.  Read More

 B Capital Group, the VC fund founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, has closed out its first fund at $360 million. Read More

 There’s controversy in the crypto community after one of the founders of a prominent wallet service for storing and sending cryptocurrencies abruptly announced a rival venture. Taylor Monahan, who start MyEtherWallet.com (MEW) with Kosala “Kvhnuke” Hemachandra in 2015, announced a new company and wallet service called MyCrypto.com on Thursday. MyCrypto.com is initially a… Read More

 This week isn’t turning out to be great one for Uber in Japan. Two of its investors — Didi and SoftBank — are teaming up to launch a rival service, while one of its existing competitors has just landed a big cash infusion and highly influential backer after Toyota backed JapanTaxi. The auto giant said it will invest 7.5 billion JPY ($69 billion) into JapanTaxi, an… Read More

 China’s top wearable firm Huami has raised $110 million after it listed on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Fresh from launching iits Apple Watch-like Amazfit Blip this week, Huami sold 10 million shares at $11 a pop, the mid-point of its price range. The company joined the NYSE under the ‘HMI’ ticker symbol. It potentially raised up to $16.5 million more if… Read More

 A number of iOS app developers have been mystified by a new wave of app rejections related to their use of Apple’s emojis. They’ve suspected that a new App Store crackdown is underway. However, the company hasn’t changed its policy on Apple emoji usage in apps, nor its enforcement, according to sources familiar with the App Store review team’s processes. The policy… Read More

 Uber’s tangled relationship with investors Didi and SoftBank is about to get more complicated after the duo inked an agreement to introduce taxi-hailing services that will compete directly with Uber in Japan. Didi dominates the Chinese market — thanks in no small amount to its acquisition of second-placed Uber China — but this year it has expanded to Brazil via an acquisition… Read More

 Attorneys for Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle spinout, are nearing the end of their plaintiffs presentation against Uber in a trial that is likely to have broad ramifications for the common Valley practice of acqui-hiring talent. The case hinges on whether the jury believes Uber’s assertion that the technology used in its autonomous car project was developed and acquired… Read More

 How can Facebook promote meaningful interaction between users? Apparently by letting them downvote inappropriate, offensive, or misleading comments to hide them. Facebook is now testing a downvote button on a limited set of public Page post comment reels, the company confirms to TechCrunch. A Facebook spokesperson tells us “We are not testing a dislike button. We are exploring a feature… Read More

 HBO is bringing the popular left-wing podcast Pod Save America to TV this fall with a series of hour-long specials. The podcast is hosted Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett, all alums of the Obama administration. They started out by hosting the podcast Keepin’ it 1600 for The Ringer (a site backed by HBO), before launching a new podcast in January from their new… Read More

 Nvidia’s successes are continuing to pile on as the company’s gaming and data center businesses drove revenues up 34 percent year-over-year. Nvidia shares were up around 10 percent after-hours following the company’s release of its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company reported EPS of $1.78 on revenue of $2.91 billion, beating analyst expectations of $1.17 per share… Read More

 A day after Alphabet announced plans to roll Nest into its hardware team, co-founder Matt Rogers has announced that he’s exiting the company. The story was first noted by CNET and quickly confirmed by Rogers on Twitter. Read More

 The largest tech acquisition offer in history wasn’t enough. Qualcomm’s board of directors issued a statement on Thursday saying that they are turning down Broadcom’s $121 billion bid to buy the competing chipmaker. According to the release, Qualcomm “unanimously rejected” an “unsolicited proposal” to buy all of its shares at $82 each, of which $60… Read More

 Media executives sometimes say that their companies are like a startup — but in the case of This Old House, that’s actually kind of true, since Time Inc. sold the 40-year-old brand (best known for the home improvement TV show of the same name) to Eric Thorkilsen and TZP Growth Partners less than two years ago. Read More

 A few months after hearing closing arguments in the Lawson v. GrubHub case, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has ruled Raef Lawson, the plaintiff, was indeed an independent contractor while driving and delivering food for GrubHub. “We’re extremely satisfied with today’s ruling in Lawson v. Grubhub, which validates the freedom our delivery partners enjoy from deciding when, where… Read More

 Deliv, the crowdsourced same-day delivery service which today partners with retailers like Macy’s, Best Buy, Petsmart and Walmart on various initiatives, today announced a new service to offer same-day delivery of prescription medications. At launch, Deliv Rx, as the service is being called, will power same-day delivery of prescriptions for select Walgreens, as well as Kay Pharmacy,… Read More

 There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the future of blockchain lately. With cryptocurrency prices reaching all-time highs and total market capitalization topping $800 billion recently, everyone wants to know if we’re witnessing the second coming of the internet or the craziest bubble of all time. If you ask me, it’s a bit of both. Read More

 The recent arrival of the Apple HomePod and Google Home Max have demonstrated, if nothing else, what a smart speaker can be when it’s music first. On the other hand, audio’s never been as much of a driver on Amazon’s Echo line, though the company did take a small step in that direction with its recent refresh. This week, the company’s adding another small but useful… Read More

 Avid audiobook nerds tired of dealing with Audible’s nonsense or long library queues now have a new way to get get a steady stream of the good stuff. Scribd just announced that it will be reinstating an unlimited plan offering relatively unfettered access to ebooks, audiobooks, news, magazines, documents and sheet music. Unfortunately, the service sounds like it won’t be truly… Read More

 The blockchain is the buzziest thing on the internet these days and now MIT professor and godfather of the Human Genome Project George Church wants to put your genes on it. His new startup Nebula Genomics plans to sequence your genome for under $1,000 (the current going rate of whole genome sequencing) and then add your data to the blockchain through the purchase of a “Nebula… Read More

 Earlier this week, iOS source code showed up on GitHub, raising concerns that hackers could find a way to comb the material for vulnerabilities. Apple has yet to confirm or deny the legitimacy of the posted material, but all signs point to it being the real deal — a fact seemingly confirmed by a DMCA takedown notice issued to the platform. Read More

 Scheduling tech conferences is hard, especially in May, when seemingly every company wants to hold a major event, including Google and Microsoft. Typically, Google I/O and Microsoft Build, the flagship developer conferences for both companies, happen within a week or two of each other in May. But not this year. Microsoft today announced that its Build conference in Seattle will run from May 7… Read More

 The world needs more emojis. Ever since emojis became a cultural phenomenon, tech companies have been working together to add new smileys, animals and objects. And the Unicode consortium just published this year’s list of new emojis. While many glaring omissions have been fixed in recent years, the Unicode consortium has accepted 157 new emojis. But who are these people who get to… Read More

 Designing VR and AR products is a challenge that’s not particularly well-suited for this reality. Unity and Epic Games have made great strides in adapting their workflows to allow users to edit virtual reality content in a very precise way, but at the same time, they’re both still very technical programs tailored towards people who are technically skilled. Today, Sketchbox is… Read More

 After having declared last year that the app would receive no future updates, Facebook is delivering a big update to its VR painting tool Quill. The update expands on Quill’s initial promise, expanding it from being a platform for designing static scenes to one that can handle dynamic animated ones. The new updates adds the ability for artists to craft and edit frame-by-frame… Read More

 Google’s Chrome browser will soon flag every site that doesn’t use HTTPS encryption. Starting in July, with the launch of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as ‘not secure’ and prominently highlight this in its URL bar. Over the course of the last few years, Google has strongly advocated for the use of HTTPS to help keep your browsing data safe from anybody… Read More

 Sylabs, the commercial company behind the open source Singularity container engine, announced its first commercial product today, Singularity Pro. Sylabs was launched in 2015 to create a container platform specifically designed for scientific and high performance computing use cases, two areas that founder and CEO Gregory Kurtzer, says were left behind in the containerization movement over… Read More

 It’s a half-serious joke among people who bet early on cryptocurrencies and have watched their values soar. At some point, it’s time to buy a Lamborghini, as did Peter Saddington, an Atlanta-based coder and self-described serial entrepreneur who says he cashed out 45 bitcoins last fall to purchase a $200,000 Lamborghini with race exhaust features. Saddington tells CNBC that he… Read More

 WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts. The feature is currently in beta, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, but hasn’t been publicly announced because it’s not widely available at this time. The company has been  working on support for a… Read More

 There is a movement underway to ban involuntary pornography, videos that use machine learning libraries like TensorFlow to superimpose faces of unwilling participants onto porn actors’ bodies. Yesterday as TC’s Taylor Hatmaker noted, Reddit published a content policy banning such images and video, while also shutting down a series of subreddits devoted to the practice. Pornhub… Read More

 Pay discrimination and discrepancies based on gender and race are nothing new. Unfortunately, it seems that little has changed over the years. In the tech industry, white people on average make $136,000 a year, which is about $6,000 more than black people with the same level of expertise. It also turns out white tech workers ask for more money, according to Hired’s data. Hired’s… Read More

 Hey startup world, get ready for the biggest, most ambitious TechCrunch Disrupt event ever. Disrupt, the world’s top technology and startup event, will take place in San Francisco on September 5-7, 2018, and it’s about to level-up in a big way. This is the one tech event you do not want to miss, and tickets are on sale now. For starters, as we mentioned late last year,… Read More

 Here at TechCrunch, we cover company earnings on a pretty regular basis. And we promise it’s for a good reason: The success and failure of these publicly-traded companies tends to give us at least one more data point when it comes to calibrating which technologies are exciting to investors, as well as the trajectory of those technologies. One of our favorite companies to cover,… Read More

 Hulu announced on Wednesday it has begun to rollout 60fps (frames per second) to its Live TV service – something that’s been one of the most-requested features, especially from those who stream live sports. These higher-quality streams are initially coming to a select number of channels and devices as the first phase of a larger rollout. One of the troubles with switching from… Read More

 The process of making a Disney park feel alive is most easily encapsulated in animatronic figures. These hydraulic, pneumatic and now electric figures have been a fixture at Disneyland since the 60s. Since then, massive advancements have been made in control systems, movement architecture and programming. The most advanced animatronic figures like the Na’Vi Shaman in Disney… Read More

 By combining augmented reality with your customizable captions, Snapchat hopes you’ll share more from birthdays and weddings while earning it a little money. Today Snapchat launches Custom Lenses, expanding its 2016–launched on-demand geofilter program so you can make temporary, geofenced AR effects that people can add to their Snaps at a special event. Users choose from 150… Read More

 The HomePod was never preordained to be a blockbuster for Apple. Sure, the smart speaker has received overwhelmingly positive marks for sound quality, but the product is a bit late to the game, after both Amazon and Google have launched major offensives. The company also got dinged for its relatively limited Siri functionality at launch. By one metric, however, Apple’s first… Read More

 If you’ve been waiting to see what the new movie version of Venom will look like — well, keep waiting. Venom stars Tom Hardy (!) as Eddie Brock/Venom, and the film’s first teaser trailer has plenty of Hardy as Brock, plus glimpses of fellow cast members Michelle Williams (!!) and Riz Ahmed. Sadly, though, it lacks any footage of Venom in-costume. For those of you who… Read More

 Amazon today is launching a new Amazon Polly WordPress plugin that gives your blog a voice by creating audio versions of your posts. The resulting audio can be played from within the blog post itself, or accessed in podcast form using a feature called Amazon Pollycast, the company says. The plugin itself was jointly designed by Amazon’s AWS team and managed WordPress platform… Read More

 Because there are not enough ways to get around major cities and campuses, Spin is working to launch stationless electric scooter-sharing. These aren’t the electric scooters you see in San Francisco, operated by Scoot Networks. These are essentially electrified Razor-like scooters that can go up to 15 mph and cover 18 miles on a single charge. “Spin’s mission is to… Read More

 PAX Labs has a new CEO. The company, which makes loose-leaf vaporizers, has brought on Bharat Vasan as Chief Executive Officer. Vasan has spent the last 15 years in consumer hardware, serving as the President and COO of August Home, which was acquired by Swedish lock maker Assa Abloy in 2017. Before August, Vasan was the cofounder of Basis (a fitness-based wearable company), which was acquired… Read More

 Adding to what’s already a Very Weird 2018, Twitter now has a bigger market cap than Snapchat maker Snap after posting a thoroughly interesting earnings beat for its fourth quarter this morning. Shares of Twitter rocketed more than 25% this morning following the report, which showed the service is actually able to generate a profit on a GAAP basis. Twitter already wrapped up 2017 with a… Read More

 Police in Lower Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania have spotted a group of thieves who are placing completely camouflaged skimmers on top of credit card terminals in Aldi stores. The skimmers, which the gang placed in plain sight of surveillance video cameras, look exactly like the original credit card terminals but would store debit card numbers and PINs of unsuspecting shoppers. “While Aldi… Read More

 While Apple continues to focus its eye on how to step up its game in the area of original content, it’s also striking some partnerships that could help put its name on the map specifically in sports coverage. The company is adding a new section in Apple News that will be dedicated to the Winder Olympics in Pyeongchang. The Olympics section will appear in the “For You”… Read More

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat. Not only did venture capitalist Annie Lamont join our own Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm, we also recorded this episode live at SaaStr, a yearly SaaS-focused confab in San Francisco. (SaaStr is the brainchild of venture… Read More

 Unless you’ve ever used it, chances are you’ve never heard of Adobe’s Experience Manager. Inside of large enterprises, though, it’s among the most popular cross-platform content management systems for marketing teams and those who have to manage large online stores. Today, the company is launching an update to the Experience Manager that brings a number of new… Read More

 Yet more consolidation in the enterprise collaboration software market. Today LogMeIn, the company that offers conferencing services like GoToMeeting and join.me as well as authentication and other online services to businesses and others, announced that it would acquire Jive Communications for $342 million in cash plus up to $15 million based on reaching specific milestones in the next two… Read More

 Sneaker marketplace GOAT is merging with Flight Club, essentially the first name in after market sneaker retail. It’s also raising a $60M series C led by Danny Rimer at Index with previous investors Accel, Matrix, Upfront and Network participating. The raise is significant, putting the total just shy of $98M raised, but it’s the merger with Flight Club that will cause this news to… Read More

 Despite flat user numbers and a nominal beat in revenue, Twitter’s fortune-reversal over the past several months is still going as the company said it actually posted a GAAP net income — sending the stock jumping more than 12%. Twitter’s overall user numbers were flat, but the company was still able to post a surprising profit and fell above what Wall Street expected for… Read More

 Attentive is coming out of stealth today with the announcement that it’s raised $13 million in Series A funding. The company was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones. They previously founded TapCommerce, a mobile ad startup that was acquired by Twitter for a reported price of $100 million. Long and Jones both worked at Twitter for a couple of years before leaving to start something… Read More

 China already operates the world’s largest surveillance state with some 170 CCTV cameras at work, but its line of sight is about to get a new angle thanks to new smart eyewear that is being piloted by police officers. The smart specs look a lot like Google Glass, but they are used for identifying potential suspects. The device connects to a feed which taps into China’s state… Read More

 Amazon has taken a big step forward with Whole Foods after it began offering grocery delivery from the retailer through its Prime service. The option is open to Prime Now customers, who get free two-hour deliveries of their products when they spend over $35. An “ultra-fast” one-hour delivery option costs $7.99 for orders of $35 or more. The integration is limited to four regions… Read More

 The Indian food delivery startup Swiggy has raised $100 million in its latest round of funding. Led by the global investment and media conglomerate, Naspers, with participation from the Chinese e-commerce company Meituan-Dianping, the investment is an indicator that the Indian technology market is hitting its stride. The company said that it will use the funding to introduce new products… Read More

 Tronc, the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, announced today that it now owns a majority stake in BestReviews, which publishes in-depth reviews of consumer products. In another announcement today, Tronc said that it intends to use funds from the sale of its California News Group, which included the Los Angeles Times, to focus on a new digital growth strategy that includes investing… Read More

 Following other recent bans on the controversial practice of AI-generated, face-swapped porn, Reddit too has brought the ban hammer down. On Wednesday, the social platform shut down r/deepfakes and r/deepfakeNSFW, two popular hubs for the fake videos, which use algorithmic software to create virtual pornography depicting the likeness of unwilling participants. Reddit also updated its policy… Read More

 John Perry Barlow has one of those resumes that seems too surreal to possibly be true. Entertainment sites are lamenting the loss of a poet turned Grateful Dead lyricist. Political sites are mourning the death of a lifelong activist. For tech sites such as ours, he’ll be forever remembered as the co-founder of the EFF — arguably the most influential organization for internet… Read More