Category: Tech news

 If you were looking to build a company, and you were looking to build a unicorn, what conditions should be present for the best chance of success? Based on current unicorns, your best chance is to start a business that is revenue-growth based, rather than user-growth based. It has to move money from day one. Read More

 Contract work is becoming the new normal. Consider Uber: The ride-sharing startup has 160,000 contractors, but just 2,000 employees. That’s an astonishing ratio of 80 to 1. And when it comes to a focus on contract labor, Uber isn’t alone. Handy, Eaze and Luxe are just a few of the latest entrants into the “1099 Economy.” Read More

 Last Sunday, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, took a hit. But it’s a hit that’s stirring the hopes of the nation’s entrepreneurs and investors.
For the first time in 13 years, the AKP failed to secure a majority of seats in Turkey’s 550-seat parliament. Garnering 40 percent of the popular vote, it won 258 seats… Read More

 Every time I hear people talking about Unicorns, I think “all hat, no cattle” or “another person living in the land of style over substance.” In spite of the fact that I’ve never been diagnosed with Aspergers, I’ve found myself blurting out, “F$&@ Unicorns!”* twice recently, including when I was on a panel at Stanford School of Engineering… Read More

 One thing was clear to me this week as I wandered the halls of the Hilton at Torrey Pines for the Cloud Identity Summit, and it had nothing to do with the famous golf course or the trees for which it’s named. Whatever the subject, enterprise scale brings with it complexity, and one of the ways to counteract that complexity is developing standards. In fact, a persistent theme across… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, June 12, 2015. Jack is back to do it again as Team Twitter shuffles the cards. Apple goes after Spotify, Flipboard, and the Google Web. Is Track on the way back? Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Halley Suitt Tucker, Mary Hodder, Kristie Wells, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Gillmor. Read More

 In work and personal online communication, I find myself using animated GIFs almost more than words these days. Between Slack and iMessage, there’s little that needs to be said that isn’t best said by an animal clumsily and cutely falling over. But discovery can be a bit tricky, and so can finding your favorites for repeat use. That’s where GIFs, a new application for OS X,… Read More

 A U.K. review of state surveillance capabilities takes the view that more widespread use of strong encryption within the technology industry ultimately sanctions government agencies conducting mass surveillance — and even hacking activities — as “ingenious or intrusive” workarounds to get at information that’s otherwise locked out of reach. Read More

 Over the past three years, the Emergence Capital team has closely monitored the growing ecosystem of mobile enterprise applications. We have been fortunate to learn from our investments in a few of the early leaders across this landscape, including Box (collaboration), Doximity (digital health), ServiceMax (field service) and Cotap (enterprise mobile messaging). Read More

 Whatever the relative merits of the various browser options, there’s one big advantage that Apple’s homegrown Safari has over most of the competition – using it as your browser can have a significant positive impact in terms of battery life on portable Macs. Now, Google is hoping to close that gap with upcoming changes to Chrome. Chrome already got a new feature that can… Read More

 The great thing about Bitcoin, for a tech columnist like me, is that it’s simultaneously over-the-top cinematic and technically dense. Richard Branson recently hosted a “Blockchain Summit” at his private Caribbean island. There’s a Bitcoin Jet. At the same time, 2015 has seen the release of a whole slew of technically gnarly–and technically… Read More

 Fintech is hot. It is the home of the fabled unicorn. There are now 36 fintech unicorns in the wild. This is up 25 from 11 over the last year. This staggering growth is a reflection of the hype around fintech, where a plethora of startups are using technology to compete against or collaborate with established financial players. The result is a dramatic increase in company valuations as… Read More

 It’s Friday afternoon, and that means it’s time for CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to talk about the biggest stories from the past seven days in tech news. This time around I was joined by Matthew Lynley and Darrell Etherington to talk about the big takeaways from Apple’s WWDC conference (one of which was the launch of Apple Music,) the… Read More

 You probably don’t always like/share/comment on the stuff that pops up in your Facebook feed, even if it’s something you care to see. Take, for example, a breaking news items about an earthquake on the other side of the world — you’d probably feel weird hitting a button labeled “Like” on that one, and you might not have anything to say… but that… Read More

 Looklist has raised a small seed round to build out its “inspiration engine” for fashion and hair. I know, I know, this sounds a bit like a bunch of other fashion startups, not to mention one of the main reasons people use Pinterest. But founder and CEO Shaz Sedighzadeh said there’s really no good place to find curated images and search through through them based on factors… Read More