Can Peter Thiel see the future? You’d be forgiven for thinking so considering he invested early in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Stripe. His strategy with Founders Fund and Mithril Capital is to fund ideas that sound crazy to most people, but have the potential to radically change the world. Exponential innovation > linear innovation. But how does Thiel tell the crack-pot… Read More
Category: Tech news
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Vinli Promises To Bring Autos Into The Smartphone Age
With Vinli, cars are about to get apps. And not just cars made in the future. The system works with nearly any car made after 1996 and is compatible with Android and iOS devices. The company just launched on the Disrupt SF 2014 stage and announced that the Vinli device is available for pre-order. Vinli plugs into a car’s ODB II port — a data interface equipped standard on cars… Read More
Tailor Brands Aims To Bring Small Business Owners Affordable Access To Professional Design
Tel Aviv and Brooklyn-based Tailor Brands launches publicly on the Disrupt Battlefield today with the goal to democratize design. Founders Yali Saar, Tom Lahat and Nadav Shatz say they can help any small, local business feel like they have an in-house designer with a special algorithm system that helps customers think like a designer.
Companies with deeper pockets are able to add to the… Read More
Gem Is A Bitcoin API To Seamlessly Build Bitcoin Services With Bank-Grade Security
Meet Gem, a new bitcoin startup with a different take and a focus on developer tools. Gem provides a highly available, scalable API for bitcoin developers to abstract the bitcoin storing layer. In other words, Gem will store, encrypt and backup your users’ bitcoins so you don’t have to take care of this cumbersome aspect. The startup is launching today in private beta at… Read More
Tinder And IAC Settle Sexual Harassment Suit With Early Employee Whitney Wolfe
Mobile dating company Tinder has settled a lawsuit with early employee Whitney Wolfe, who claimed sexual harassment and sexual discrimination on the part of former CMO Justin Mateen. The settlement puts to bed an ugly “he said, she said” conflict that has loomed over the ultra-hot subsidiary of IAC since June.
A spokesman for IAC said that “the lawsuit was settled with no… Read More
The Original Disruptor, Clayton Christensen, And VC Bill Hambrecht Talk About The Theory Of Disruption
Investment bankers Bill Hambrecht and Clayon Christensen took to the Disrupt SF stage today to defend the concepts of disruption and to address the ways the Valley predicted the future of financial services and technology. Christensen is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and a lauded professor at the Harvard Business School. His writing on “disruption,” a concept he says… Read More
Home Depot Finally Confirms Its Payment System Was Hacked For Months
Remember that “suspicious activity” that Home Depot was looking into last week? Six days later, the company has at last publicly confirmed that the “suspicious activity” was a breach of its payments system. Credit card data was exposed, though Home Depot is quick to note that PINs were not. If you used a credit card at Home Depot in the past 4-5 months, you should… Read More
Kanzee Makes Sharing Clothes With Friends A Breeze
Kanzee is a social network and accompanying app that allows people to share and swap clothes with each other. It’s a simple concept and that’s why I like it. It also solves a problem that many a fashionista have encountered (myself not included) — how to get new outfits or accoutrements for specific events without purchasing them. Read More
PCH’s Liam Casey On The “Renaissance Of Prototyping”
Liam Casey is best known as “Mr. China,” the founder and CEO of PCH, which sources, designs and manufacturers custom hardware for Fortune 500 companies and startups in Shenzhen. Before founding PCH in 1996, however, he spent 10 years in the fashion business. Now Casey is excited to see a “renaissance in prototyping” that makes creating hardware prototypes almost as easy… Read More
How Investors Are Trying To Change The Culture Of Silicon Valley
Over the last year, the tech press has been filled with stories of high-flying startups struggling with issues of gender discrimination and harassment, sometimes with those issues coming from the founders themselves. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF today, investors from some of the Valley’s top firms discussed how startups are attempting to create a more inclusive environment, especially for… Read More
PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
Nearly a year after PayPal acquired it in an all-cash $800 million deal, online and mobile payments platform Braintree is unveiling one-touch payments and is integrating Bitcoin.
Bill Ready, who led the company through its sale, says that mobile conversion rates are still far off from where they are on the desktop web. That’s partially because it’s a lot more tedious to enter or… Read More
Yahoo Acquires, Shuts Down Luminate, An Interactive Image Platform
Another acquisition today from Yahoo to beef up its advertising and media business. It is buying Luminate, a startup founded by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images — or, as we have called it in the past, an AdSense for images.
Terms of the deal, which was announced on Luminate’s homepage, have not been disclosed. Read More
CrunchWeek: Samsung’s Gadgets, iCloud Hacks, And Sarah Goes To Burning Man
Happy pre-Disrupt Friday, everyone, I hope you are well rested for next week’s fun. Today on CrunchWeek Sarah Buhr, Jordan Crook, and myself sat around the white table to dig into the biggest stories of the week: Samsung’s raft of new hardware, the issues with cloud security and iCloud itself, and, of course, Sarah’s recent expedition to the desert. Read More
Alibaba Proposes To Go Public For As Much as $66 Per Share, Valuing The Firm At More Than $160B
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant run by Jack Ma, has submitted F-1 paperwork to the SEC with the expectation that it will go public on September 8 under the NYSE symbol BABA. The filing appeared on SEC.gov today. 20.1 million shares will be on offer. Japanese investor Softbank currently owns 34 percent of the company while Yahoo owns 22 percent. The initial price is expected to hit at… Read More
The One Where Grover Norquist And I Decompress From Burning Man
The Libertarian-leaning Republican leader of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist went back to Washington, D.C. this week after his first visit to Burning Man. The two of us were able to catch up this week and decompress – a word burners use to describe how they adjust back into life after experiencing Black Rock City. This was both our first time at Burning Man. This is our… Read More