digital marketing

 Spotify is testing an app that sees it move firmly into Pandora’s territory. ‘Stations’ is a new Android-only app that is being piloted by the company in Australia — it was first noticed by app analytics firm Sensor Tower on Tuesday. This app offers a ‘lean-back’ option to listen to music based on genres and managed playlists. In the description, Spotify… Read More

Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway are building a healthcare company, Facebook is banning cryptocurrency ads and TrackR lays off 42 people. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company told announced the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment… Read More

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

 A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age. Read More

 What should we do about token sales? Two days ago a Lithuanian “company” called Prodeum looked like a promising if silly blockchain startup. Their stated goal? To track every piece of food on the Internet. While I doubt many of us will care about the exact provenance of the orange we just ate, we could see, in some distant future, a need for this sort of tracking. After all, the… Read More

 Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. Read More

 If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. TimeFlip is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. Read More

 QR code style markers — those lil’ barcode-looking boxes you’ll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the US. But that’s not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them “SmileCodes”.… Read More

 What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? Imverse’s team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. “We were working on this before Oculus was even created” says co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz. Now its… Read More

 Valuation concerns are top of mind for many investors. For those in tech investing, this concern is perhaps most acute, given the generally high multiples assigned to the sector. There are good articles addressing how revenue multiples have moved over time or why this methodology even came to be, but I’m still curious as to how a revenue multiples ties to some fundamental unit of… Read More

 Investors panicked this morning upon the news Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway were teaming up to launch a health insurance company for their U.S. employees. Healthcare is one of the biggest operating costs for Fortune 500 companies and the three iconic companies have joined forces to build a new health insurance company for all U.S. employees in an effort to improve satisfaction… Read More

 Amazon announced today it’s launching a new messaging feature for Alexa devices in the U.S. that will allow you to send texts – yes, SMS messages – to your friends and other contacts using your voice. Customers can now ask Alexa to send a message to a specific contact, and Alexa will figure out how to route it appropriately – using either the previously launched… Read More

 Google is launching a digital store that will offer cloud-based software to companies and other organizations. Bloomberg, which reported the news a bit earlier, notes the move is just the juggernaut’s latest effort to ensure that cloud leaders, and specifically Amazon Web Services, don’t leave the company in the dust. Google isn’t launching the store alone but rather… Read More

 JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a new healthcare company for all U.S. employees. Right now details are so sparse that there’s not even a name associated with the new company. However, this is big news for the industry and could possibly have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but for also smaller tech companies that are open… Read More

 The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple’s communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, Bloomberg is reporting. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company’s communications about the software update. The Bloomberg… Read More

 Is there such a thing as bad publicity? It’s an interesting and contested question. To wit: Self styled ‘digital contraception’ app, Natural Cycles — which relies on a set of proprietary algorithms and women inputting their morning body temperature to predict fertility levels each day — has claimed that negative headlines generated after a clinic reported a number… Read More

 A preliminary report from the FCC has revealed additional details about the situation that caused a false missile threat alarm in Hawaii earlier this month. It really was human error, as initial reports indicated, but now the nature of that error (errors, really) is a bit clearer. Read More

 Facebook has a new advertising policy pertaining to cryptocurrency, binary options and initial coin offerings. The policy specifically prohibits ads that promote those types of products and services “that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive practices,” Facebook Product Management Director Rob Leathern wrote in a blog post today. Read More

 SpaceX is launching a rocket today – no, not the Falcon Heavy, that’s still targeting February 6, but a Falcon 9 carrying a satellite bound for Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). The mission, GovSat-1, is set to take place during a launch window which opens today at 4:25 PM EST (1:25 PM PST) and closes at 6:46 PM EST (3:46 PM PST). The payload is a government satellite comissioned… Read More

 Google is expanding the reach of Howard West, which began last year as a three-month residency for students at Howard University. Now, it’s going to be a full academic year and available to students from other historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In the fall, 100 students from Howard and other HBCUs will participate in a nine-month immersive CS program at Google. Read More

 The Boring Company is getting decently well-capitalized on the back of sales of its flamethrower (yes, flamethrower). The no-doubt overpriced piece of knack, which can be make yourself at home using likely around $30 in parts, is selling for $500 and has already netted Elon Musk’s digging venture $7.5 million. That’s after just over a day of being on sale, and not counting the… Read More

 As Pinterest increasingly tries to sell itself as a startup specialized in computer vision that it plugs into visual discovery, it’s continuing to pick up additional pieces to help continue to build that out. Today, the company said it is hiring former Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg, who was previously at Google for 14 years. Pinterest sees more than 300 million… Read More

 Heptio holds a special place in the Kubernetes startup ecosystem. Its co-founders are, after all, two of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project. Heptio has raised millions, but it was never clear what their business plan looked like beyond offering training and professional services. It’s becoming clearer now, as the company today announced the launch of the Heptio Kubernetes… Read More

 The relatively open nature of Android has made it a target for malware authors and other bad actors of all stripes who often try to get their wares onto your phone through both the official Google Play Store, third-party app stores and any other way they can think of. For most users, though, the main Android app store is Google’s own Play Store and as the company announced today, the… Read More

 Instagram today made a long overdue change to its product that social media managers have wanted for some time – it will allow businesses on Instagram to schedule their posts. Before, there were unofficial means to aid with this – like tools that would send out a push notification to remind you to publish a post at a given time, for example. But no functionality was available in… Read More

 Yet another defeat in the courts for the UK government’s use of mass surveillance as an indiscriminate and, as it frequently turns out, unlawful investigatory tool. Read More

 Want to put your money in something like a 1955 Porsche or 1985 Ferrari but don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend? Meet Rally Road. The New York-based startup lets investors buy a real equity stake in a classic car for as little as $50. The company just closed a $2.9M seed round led by Columbus Nova with participation from Social Leverage and other angel… Read More

 The SoftBank Vision Fund has struck again. This time, it’s investing $300 million in on-demand walking and dog care startup Wag. Wag has also brought on Hilary Schneider, formerly of identity theft protection company LifeLock, to serve as the company’s new chief executive officer. Last year, Wag was reportedly in talks with a handful of investors, including NEA and Kleiner… Read More

 Amazon Treasure Truck, the retailer’s deals-on-wheels program that is literally a truck driving around with discounted products you can buy online and pickup in person, will now be popping up at Whole Foods. The companies announced today that Treasure Truck will start coming to Whole Foods stores with new offers, starting with today’s deal on the popular kitchen item, Instant Pot.… Read More

 With Event Grid, Microsoft introduced a new Azure service last year that it hopes will become the glue that holds together modern event-driven and distributed applications. Starting today, Event Grid is generally available, with all the SLAs and other premises this entails. Read More

 Shadow of the Colossus is one of those games I’ve purchased multiple times on multiple platforms, because the original was about as unique and satisfying a video game experience as you can find. But the new PlayStation 4 remake of the Team ICO standout, which recreates the game in stunning 4K HDR, is that rare remake that proves a better and more satisfying experience than the… Read More

 It’s crunch time for TrackR, that startup that lets you use an app to find items like keys, wallets and bags that have been tagged with its small Bluetooth-based tracking devices. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company has laid off a substantial proportion of its staff, as it seeks to sharpen its focus amid a wider market contraction for item-tracking businesses. The… Read More

 Everyone loves free stuff, apparently including VC investors. Toronto-based Drop, whose app allows consumers to collect points for transactions they make and then receive reward offers, has secured a $21 million Series A round led by Rick Yang at NEA. The company has previously raised about $10 million in seed capital over the past year. Drop’s concept is simple. Unlike traditional… Read More

 Evangeline Lilly moves up to superhero status alongside Paul Rudd in Marvel’s sequel to Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, which hits theaters on July 6, 2018. The first trailer for the movie shows Wasp in action plenty, and also contains a whole lot of Michael Douglas, plus what seems like jokes that land better than those peppered throughout the first installment. This should be an… Read More

 A startup called Cake has an ambitious plan to take on incumbents like Chrome and Safari to build a better browser for mobile devices. The company announced this morning it has raised $5 million for those efforts from Peak Ventures, Pelion Ventures and Kickstart Seed Fund. Cake was founded in late 2016 in Provo, Utah by Jase Bosarge, who had originally developed technologies and a… Read More

 Mammoth Media has raised a $13 million Series A funding to create what it calls “entertainment experiences for the mobile-first generation.” Mammoth isn’t not the first startup to pitch itself as reinventing entertainment for smartphones, but for the most part, that message has come from gaming companies. Co-founder and CEO Benoit Vatere said he wanted to take the… Read More

 When you’re big enough and powerful enough, you don’t need to rely on the existing private healthcare providers out there to handle your employee medical needs. That’s what Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase have determined, and so they’re working together to build their own, fully independent employee healthcare company, which will exclusively offer benefits… Read More

 Now you can customize your Snapchat Bitmoji avatar with 40 skin tones, 50 hair colors, 50 hair treatment options and more so it looks just like you no matter what you look like. Today Snapchat launches Bitmoji Deluxe, a more configurable version of its cartoony avatars that embraces the growing diversity of its users. The feature offers an easier front-end builder that instantly previews… Read More

 As the founder of the Google Brain deep learning project and co-founder of Coursera, Andrew Ng was one of the most recognizable names in the machine learning community when he became Baidu’s chief scientist in 2014. He left there in early 2017 and launched a number of new AI projects. What he was really working on, though, was his AI Fund. Read More

 Warby Parker has been around for seven years, but today the company is finally unveiling a new product category. In a 12-week pilot program, Warby Parker is now offering kids’ frames to folks in the NYC area. The company is pulling from some of its most popular frames, shrinking them down to fit kids 8 years and up (Jr.) and kids ages 4-7 (Jr. Jr.). But why not go big with the launch… Read More

 Code.org has partnered with Alaska Airlines to offer free educational videos on how computers and the Internet work, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi wrote in a blog post.. The video series, which stars Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other industry leaders, will be available beginning in April on Alaska Airlines flights. “Whether you use a PC, a smartphone, a wearable device, a connected… Read More

 The slings and arrows of outrage keep flying at Facebook. Today a coalition of child health advocates has published an open letter addressing CEO Mark Zuckerberg and calling for the company to shutter Messenger Kids: Aka the Snapchat-ish comms app it launched in the US last December — targeted at the under 13s. Read More

 Hyperledger, the open source blockchain project from the Linux Foundation, released Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, its latest open source digital ledger project. Sawtooth joins its sister project, Hyperledger Fabric which reached 1.0 in July last year. Among the features in this latest open source distributed ledger product is on-chain governance, which lets members adjust the rules on the fly… Read More

 Montreal-based travel booking platform Busbud has closed an $11M Series B round led by iNovia Capital. New investors backing the company include Teralys, Claridge and Plaza Ventures. Existing investor Real Ventures also participated in the round. Read More

 Ken Chenault, the outgoing CEO of American Express, is quickly building a platform in the startup world. Chenault announced plans to leave his position as the head of Amex last October, ending a 17-year run, and this month he’s bagged a trio of top positions within the tech/startup world. Facebook appointed him to its board on January 18, last week Airbnb said he’s joining its… Read More

 SAP, the German enterprise software giant, announced it acquired CallidusCloud last night for $2.4 billion or $36 per share. Callidus provides configure price quote (CPQ) and sales performance management tools delivered as a cloud service. The share price is a nice bump for shareholders, representing a 21 percent premium over over the 30-day volume weighted average share price, according to… Read More

 American Express announced today that it has acquired Mezi, the AI-based virtual travel assistant, for an undisclosed amount. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. Its technology is already powering AskAmex, a personal concierge app for cardholders that launched its pilot program last year. Read More

 GitLab, which helps businesses manage their software development and operations lifecycle from planning to deployment and monitoring, has acquired Gemnasium, a service that alerts developers of known security vulnerabilities in open source libraries and helps them resolve those issues. Gemnasium will wind down its operations over the next few weeks. The company expects to completely shut down… Read More

 It’s not often you see a single venture capital firm investing $50 million in a Series A round. These usually involve a much smaller number spread across a variety of investors, but Accel saw something in BrowserStack, a mobile and browser testing platform, that’s a bit too successful to warrant the usual early-round startup label. BrowserStack has built a huge market with over… Read More

 When you reach BlaBlaCar’s scale, you need to find customers who are hard to reach — literally. The French company announced an effort to optimize its ride-sharing for long-distance rides for people who don’t live in major hubs. BlaBlaCar now has 60 million users. When you list a ride on BlaBlaCar, you tell the service where you’re coming from and where you’re going. Read More

 As Uber works on trying to find a more profitable path ahead for its transportation-on-demand service, it has sold off one of its units that sat peripherally to that business. Fair, the car leasing startup that announced debt and equity funding of up to $1 billion in October, has acquired the active leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing, a service Uber first established in 2015 to lease new… Read More

 Mahjoubi joined Emmanuel Macron’s team as the person in charge of all things digital while Macron was campaigning to become France’s President. He joined the French government immediately after the 2017 election and has been in charge of Digital Affairs. In addition to being the go-to policymaker for the tech industry in general, he’s also working on digital initiatives… Read More

 French startup Spendesk just raised $9.9 million (€8 million) from Index Ventures with Michael Benabou, Laurent Asscher and Showpad cofounders Louis Jonckheere and Pieterjan Bouten also participating. Spendesk is a service that combines prepaid cards with an expense report solution. After signing up, each employee receives a personal card. Companies can top up their global Spendesk account… Read More

 Waymo has ordered thousands of new Chrysler Pacifica minivans from FCA to help populate its autonomous ride-hailing fleet, which it will open to the public in 2018, the company says. The public launch of its Pacifica-based self-driving ride hailing service is set to occur sometime later this year, after Waymo starts testing its minivans without anyone behind the wheel, achieving true Level… Read More

 Google has announced the completion of its $1.1 billion deal to buy a large slice of HTC’s hardware business. The acquisition was announced back in September 2017 but now it has passed the requisite approvals and is finalized. Beyond the transfer of over 2,000 engineers from HTC — that’s around one-fifth of HTC’s engineering team — Google will also receive… Read More

 Fitness app Strava has said it will review its privacy settings and features after it was found to have exposed the location of military bases across the world by releasing user activity data. The Strava activity heatmap was supposed to be a fun and informative look at how the world works out. It ended up, however, putting Washington on alert after a student noticed flashes of activity in… Read More

Elon Musk’s flamethrowers have made $5 million so far, Google invests in Go-Jek and Facebook will start prioritizing local news. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 2018 is the year for ride-hailing expansions. Fresh from China’s Didi moving into Brazil and Taiwan, Ola in India is taking the first steps to move into the Australian market and expand its rivalry with Uber. Ola — which counts Didi as an investor — announced today that it has started recruiting drivers in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in what will be its first expansion… Read More

 Instagram copied the ‘Snap’ and now it might be going after the ‘chat’. A video calling feature was spotted in a non-public version of Instagram by WhatsApp industry blog WABetaInfo. It would let users who’ve begun an Instagram Direct message thread to video chat with each other. That could let people spend even more time in the app, but by actively… Read More

 A report this weekend by Axios cited documents from within the National Security Council describing the possibility — nay, inevitability — of a 5G network built and operated by the U.S. government. Officials have since poured cold water on this idea, and really, it was never feasible. Read More

 Like most adventurous design the Spheres are divisive: some call them an eyesore or attention-seeking behavior by Amazon, but others will admire the originality and intelligent use of space. Seattle is no stranger to odd architecture, and the Spheres seem to meld the mind-bending MoPop (formerly the EMP) with the multifaceted complexity of the Central Library. Click on to see and learn much more. Read More

 Facebook has stolen away Google’s director of Product for AR Nikhil Chandhok, who will be joining FB to lead product management of the Camera team working on augmented reality. Chandhok worked on Google’s ARCore smartphone augmented reality platform as well as its Daydream VR platform in his position there. Previously, Chandhok had co-founded AI startup Bento Labs, which raised… Read More

 As more and more startups aim to 3D-scan the world, the question of what consumers will actually care about enough to bring into the digital world is a tough one to answer. For most people, a home will be the biggest investment they make in their lives, so SF-based Hover is theorizing that’s the place to start. Read More

 Sunday night’s airing of the 60th Annual Grammy Awards turned out to be a big boost for CBS’ streaming service, CBS All Access, which offered a live stream of the event on its service. According to the network, its subscription video on demand and live streaming service hit new records in terms of subscriber sign-ups and unique viewers for the awards show specifically, and was… Read More

 The metal joysticks are safely nestled inside the flip-out arms of the controller, the landing gear safely nestled in the propeller arms. Not a millimeter is wasted, not even in the packaging. It’s the culmination of a dozen years of drone making experience — but really, it’s built directly on top of the company’s recent push to make the perfect consumer quadcopter.… Read More

 Facebook’s latest step in its on-going effort to fix its embattled news delivery offering involves prioritizing local sources. The social media giant announced today in a blog post that, along with efforts to elevate content from friends and outlets designated as “high quality,” the site will be working to push local news offerings to the top of users’ feeds. The… Read More

 In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired PlayFab, which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified back-end services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. Read More

 The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Musician Ryan Leslie learned that when… Read More

 The U.S. military has responded to privacy concerns over a heatmap feature in the Strava app which displays users’ fitness activity — and has been shown exposing the location of military facilities around the world — by saying it’s reviewing the rules around usage of wireless devices and apps by its personnel.  Read More

 Microsoft’s Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, rolled out its biggest update since the software’s launch last year, the company says. The focus of the new set of features is allowing users to better work with apps – something Microsoft Teams accomplishes via integrations, new search and discovery features, commands, and more. Some of the features are, in fact, quite… Read More

 By now you’ve probably heard that the Dell board is supposed to be convening later this month to figure out how it might reorganize itself to deal with the mountain of debt it took on when it bought EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. The rumors began on Friday and involved a couple of possible scenarios including Dell going public or Dell buying VMware (which I’m not sure solves the… Read More

 Boeing’s HorizonX is the aerospace company’s vehicle for making investments in promising next-generation startups and technology, and it just placed its latest bet: funding in Cuberg, a Berkeley-based battery tech startup that has a founding team including Stanford University researchers. Battery tech is still one of the most frustrating roadblocks any company encounters when trying… Read More

 Voicelabs, a company that has been experimenting in the voice computing market for some time with initiatives in advertising and analytics, is now pivoting its business again – this time, to voice-enabled commerce. The company is today launching its latest product out of stealth: Alpine.AI, a solution that builds voice shopping apps for retailers by importing their catalog, then layering… Read More

 Uber has partnered with Polaris, which aims to fight human trafficking at the global level, to empower its drivers to combat this form of modern-day slavery. Worldwide, there are an estimated 20.9 million victims of human trafficking, according to the International Labour Organization. The partnership will help educate Uber drivers about some signs of human trafficking and empower them to… Read More

 Zelle, U.S. banks’ answer to mobile payment services like PayPal and Venmo, claims that nearly 100,000 consumers, on average, are signing up for its service per day. The company also painted a picture of growing traction, noting it processed over 247 million payments in 2017, an increase of over 45 percent year-over-year, totalling $75 billion in peer-to-peer payments, up from $55… Read More

 Brooklyn-based startup LittleBits has worked hard to shake the “tech toy” label. While the company’s done a good job getting its kid-friendly engineering kits into the hands of schools, a new partnership with Pearson will certainly add an extra bit of legitimacy to the company’s methods. The education publishing giant announced this week that it’s… Read More

 Nvidia and GE subsidiary Baker Hughes want to bring the power of artificial intelligence to bear on the oil and gas industry – and do so throughout the space, covering everything from locating new oil sources, bringing it up to the surface, refining it for use and even delivering it to the end customer. Baker Hughes is working with Nvidia on making this happen using its range of… Read More

 According to a Bloomberg article, Apple could be workin on three new Mac models for this year. All three of them could feature an ARM coprocessor to improve security. Apple isn’t switching to ARM chipsets altogether. There will still be an Intel CPU in every Mac, but with a second ARM processor. Currently, the MacBook Pro features a T1 chip while the iMac Pro features a T2 chip. On… Read More

 Hats… and now flamethrowers. Elon Musk’s Boring Company has so far been more of a ‘lifestyle’ brand (and a weird one at that) than a company that, you know, digs massive tunnels through the earth as a going concern. But it’s making bank. The hats, which retailed for $20, were capped at 50,000, thus netting The Boring Co. a cool $1 million. The flamethrower, which… Read More

 Another startup in the area of cyber security has been snapped up as platform businesses serving enterprises look for more ways of securing their own networks and working with customers to secure theirs. Today, the RELX Group (formerly known as Reed Elsevier) announced that it would acquire ThreatMetrix for £580 million (about $817 million) in cash. This is a big exit for ThreatMetrix, which… Read More

 As data privacy becomes an increasingly important notion, especially with the EU’s GDPR privacy laws coming online in May, companies need to find ways to understand their customer’s private data. BigID thinks it has a solution and it landed a $14 million Series A investment today to help grow the idea. Comcast Ventures, SAP (via SAP.io), ClearSky Security Fund and one of the… Read More

 Here’s another cool project out of MIT’s CSAIL labs. Researchers are looking to bring color-changing properties to the 3D-printing process in an attempt to help reduce material waste in the future. That last bit is admittedly a pretty lofty goal as far as this project is concerned, but at the very least, it could go a ways toward making 3D printing for manufacturing even more… Read More

 As companies gear up to make themselves complaint with upcoming data protection regulations in Europe around GDPR, those doing business in Member States will also be facing another wave of requirements around cyber security, as part of the NIS Directive covering network and information security that must be put into place across Member States by May 9, 2018. In the UK, the government has… Read More

 Los Angeles is becoming one of the more interesting destinations for startups and the investors that provide money for venture capital firms to place bets on young companies are increasingly starting to take notice. New funds are launching in Los Angeles at a pretty feverish clip, and the latest to plant its flag in the city is Bonfire Ventures, which just closed a $60 million vehicle for… Read More

 ContentSquare, which offers cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has picked up $42 million in Series B funding. Read More

 Most financial authorities worldwide have warned their citizens on the risks of buying bitcoin or investing in ICOs, but Hong Kong is going a step further. Concern is such in the country that authorities are taking to TV and other media to warn of the risks of investment. Today the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB) and the Investor Education Centre (IEC), which is a subsidiary… Read More

 As the May 25 deadline for compliance with the EU’s updated privacy framework fast approaches Facebook is continuing to PR the changes it’s making to try to meet the new data protection standard — and steer away from the specter of fines that can scale as high as 4% of a company’s global turnover. Read More

 Alibaba’s cloud computing business is to deploy its big data services package for cities in Kuala Lumpur to help Malaysia’s government with the running of its capital city and potentially other parts of the country in the future. “City Brain,” an Alibaba Cloud service that uses big data and artificial intelligence on its cloud computing infrastructure, will be put to… Read More

 Goxip, a Hong Kong-based social shopping service, has raised $5 million to branch out into influencer marketing. The investment was led by Meitu, the $6 billion Hong Kong-listed company that develops selfie apps and selfie-optimized phones, with participation from Hong Kong conglomerate Nan Fung Group via its inaugural Mills Fabrica Fund. Others who took part include a trio of young female… Read More

 Strava, the popular app for tracking running, cycling and swimming, is not the most obvious go-to for exposing national secrets, but a heatmap of activity from users has been found to unearth the locations of U.S. military bases worldwide. The company’s review of 2017 showed all routes taken by its users across the world. It was released back in November 2017, but it came to the fore… Read More

 Google has confirmed its investment in Go-Jek, the hail-railing service that rivals Uber and Grab in Indonesia. TechCrunch reported the investment last week, which was made alongside China’s Meituan-Dianping and Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek. The trio were part of a final tranche of a $1.2 billion round that Go-Jek began negotiating on last April, with commitments from the likes… Read More

 As the popularity of cryptocurrencies has grown, so has the banking industry’s interest in blockchain for fintech, with an increased and focused push on bank-backed blockchain projects. Read More

 Pre-seed has risen in prominence in recent months due to the growing gap between what founders are seeking at the seed stage and what the market is offering, yet conversations around pre-seed come with preconceived notions and false assumptions about the companies and investors who care about early stage funding. To break down these misconceptions, we’ve assembled a list of 5 common… Read More

 Bodle Technologies is a startup spun out of Oxford University, that is developing a new type of ‘reflective’ display technology that promises to use a lot less power. In fact, in some states the screen tech may require almost no power at all. Read More

 Facebook announced on January 11 that it would change its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over public content. Say goodbye to never-ending sponsored posts from Tasty, CNN, and other brands that have embraced the platform. Time to say hello to more personal posts featuring commenting and sharing from your friends. Sounds like the original version of Facebook… Read More

 Intel is not having that great of year thus far in the face of a slew of information about security flaws in it hardware coming out — and you can add another new report from The Wall Street Journal today, which suggests that Intel didn’t immediately notify the U.S. government of the issues, to that list. The Journal is reporting that Intel notified some of its customers of the… Read More

 Don’t have a TV or just want to watch Kesha, Cardi B and Lady Gaga walk the red carpet from the comfort of your laptop? Thanks to modern tech, that’s possible tonight. James Corden kicks off the 60th annual Grammy awards this evening, Sunday, January 28, at 7:30 pm EST/4:30 pm PST, which is set to run for three and a half hours (though, fair warning, these types of awards shows… Read More

 At first, I wasn’t impressed by The Shape of Water‘s visual effects. That might seem like a strange thing to say about a movie whose effects  have been nominated for multiple awards (though not an Oscar, despite the film’s 13 nominations). What I mean is this: When I was watching, I never wondered about the technology behind the merman — the sometimes-monstrous… Read More

 One of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, passed away today. As Reuters pointed out in its short biography, Kamprad created a store — as a teenager mind you — that today has more than 400 locations, revenues of $62 billion, and a cultural ubiquity that very few consumer products could ever hope to attain. Having read the IKEA story… Read More

 I don’t like tech conferences. I mean, of course I don’t, they’re not meant for people like me. I’m an introvert, so I find them exhausting, and am (presumably) less likely than an extrovert to meet interesting or contributory people. I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things. But there’s more to my dislike than… Read More

 So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50,000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can pre-order one now if you want need a ridiculous way to spend $500. Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see… Read More

 If hardware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. Even so, Sphero managed an impressive feat over its first five years, growing from a small startup with a glowing, smartphone-controlled ball into the maker of the most talked about piece of merchandise for cinema’s biggest blockbuster franchise. But last week, it became clear that not all was rosy with the company, as they cut 45 jobs. Read More

 Facebook Messenger was down for me for about an hour earlier this week. My MacBook Pro randomly kernel panics overnight and restarts. Slack was down, and Github, and AWS. A little more than a year ago, Dyn went down, throwing the DNS layer of the internet into a tailspin. Practically every chip made by Intel has serious security flaws. Equifax leaked 143 million accounts. Tokyo-based… Read More

 SpaceX has set February 6 as the target for its Falcon Heavy launch, the first ever test flight of the new, high-capacity rocket that the company is building to allow it to send nearly three times as much payload per mission into orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the target date on Saturday, adding that there will be plenty of viewing opportunity for the public from the nearby causeway.… Read More

 Elon Musk, a charismatic entrepreneur, is nothing if not audacious. You’d expect the board of Tesla Industries to shape a CEO compensation plan that suits its outsized leader, and boy, did they ever. But a look at Tesla’s newly announced pay plan reveals many elements that should cause shareholders to raise their eyebrows and pause. Read More

 We aren’t so much seeing through a lens darkly when we log onto Facebook or peer at personalized search results on Google, we’re being individually strapped into a custom-moulded headset that’s continuously screening a bespoke movie — in the dark, in a single-seater theatre, without any windows or doors… Read More

 Big IPOs by the best-known brands tend to dominate attention in startup circles. But when it comes to delivering significant returns on invested capital, it’s often lower-profile companies that come out on top. We look at some of the top-returning large exits, first for tech and Internet companies, and then for life sciences. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018. G3: White Roses — Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018. @stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @kteare, @DenisPombriant Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor… Read More

 Welcome back to another glorious episode of CTRL+T. This week, Henry Pickavet and I explore Amazon’s new cashier-less stores that promise no waiting in line — except to get in — and Uber’s newest C-level executive hire. Later in the episode, I rage with Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Algorithms of… Read More

 Founders are extraordinary busy, even for their own investors. A decade ago, they might have had relationships with a handful of VC partners as they scaled their businesses and raised additional rounds of capital. Today, it is hardly rare to see as many as fifteen or twenty investment firms and angels listed on the cap table following a seed round. If you add up all the partners at those funds,… Read More

 From the furore engulfing the FCC this last year you might think that the agency had accomplished little but appalling privacy advocates and dancing for its patrons, the telecoms. But as is often the case, small works were overshadowed by more controversial items. Ajit Pai has released a list of “accomplishments,” such as they are, reminding us both of the FCC’s hard work and… Read More

 Dental care can be costly and hard to access, especially if you live in a rural community or a third-world country. In fact, the biggest barrier to dental care is cost. This is according to the American Dental Association, which says many rural areas lack access to dental professionals.  Read More

Google experiments in local news, MoviePass pulls out of AMC theaters and the Kalanick-Benchmark lawsuit has officially been dismissed. All this on Crunch Report. Read More