Category: Tech news

 Without leverage, the private equity sector as we know it wouldn’t exist. While some tech execs and VCs recoil at the thought of using leverage, the truth is that the Innovation Economy has accessed debt for more than 35 years. Given that, debt is worth spending the time to understand. Read More

 I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending to be unbiased. I think exactly what you’d expect a Canadian who lives in San Francisco to think: how could anyone with a reasonable command of the available evidence even consider voting for Donald Trump? …But my search for an answer has led me to the uncomfortable sense that the tech industry is partly responsible for… Read More

 Opera, which recently agreed to sell its browser business in a Chinese consortium, has reset user passwords for one of its services after it servers were breached by hackers. Read More

Justin Kan swings by the TC studio to talk YC, Snapchat and a new app he is working on, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is working on a proposal to retain foreigners who build startups, a new type of shape-shifting material is created out of MIT, three tech stories about cars, and Rackspace is going private. All this on Crunch report. Read More

 Accusations that Spotify has been punishing artists for signing exclusives with other streaming services hit the internet in full force this morning, originating from a Bloomberg article. 
When confronted by TechCrunch, a Spotify spokesperson gave the same response they have been giving since the story broke — that the accusations about burying search results are “unequivocally… Read More

 Pokémon Go has been downloaded more than 100 million times since its July debut, making it the biggest-growing mobile game ever. Naturally, the phenomenon has drawn much commentary about what this means for marketing, but I am more interested in what it teaches us about making money. Read More

 TechCrunch recently went down south to Los Angeles for our mini-meetup and to catch up with the region’s burgeoning tech scene.
One of the startups that caught our attention is HopSkipDrive, which aims to be an Uber for picking up your kids. Uber passengers need to be at least 18-years of age to ride alone, so HopSkipDrive hopes to solve a transportation problem for busy… Read More

 Microsoft today pushed out in a blog post for users of its consumer services new resources to reduce hate speech. Users will now be able to communicate directly with the company to report hate speech, and petition for reinstating content via new online forms.
Most people are familiar with efforts by social networks like Twitter and Facebook to ensure safety within their respective online… Read More

 IT is shifting from the SaaS workflow applications that characterized the cloud computing era to those that help customers make decisions: the intelligence era. The source of competitive advantage is shifting from code to unique data + self-learning code. This brings a change in the expectations of investors. Here we review the requirements of enterprise software investors in the intelligence era. Read More

 The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a series of university partners are developing an earthquake early warning system called ShakeAlert, which aims to provide the general public with alerts up to 10 seconds before an earthquake hits. The system is not yet public, but it is now undergoing testing in California, Oregon and Washington. “There is a similar test effort for an earthquake… Read More

 Big data is hardly new at this point — nor has it wrought anywhere near its potential effects on many companies and institutions insulated by inertia and red tape. A summer program at the University of Washington called Data Science for Good shows that fresh eyes and good code can make more in 10 weeks than some have done in as many years. Read More

 Trying to get more followers on Instagram? If you follow a few verified banks and financial institutions, you’ll suddenly end up with dozens of new followers. There’s just one drawback: Your new followers are trying to scam you.
Instagram has become a hotbed for so-called “money flipping,” according to a study by the social media security firm ZeroFox. Read More

 The Google equivalent in every major market where Google doesn’t really play is making a self-driving car of some kind, and Russia is the latest to join the fray. Yandex is the company in question, which operates Russia’s leading search engine, along with a host of other going concerns. Add to that list a driverless minibus, which the tech company is creating in partnership with… Read More

 Launching with a marketplace for landscaping, snow plowing and other home care and repair services, Plowz & Mowz has raised $1.5 million from the Los Angeles-based startup studio Science and undisclosed angel investors. On the heels of the firm’s successful exit from Dollar Shave Club, Science has turned to the marketplace industry for its next investment. The idea for the… Read More

 Whether designing a software or hardware product, you focus on a few key principles: What you’re creating should be easy to use, elegant and intuitive. How does this differ, then, when you’re designing something that isn’t seen, but spoken? How do users’ brains work differently when talking rather than reading, pointing, clicking, swiping and typing? Read More