Category: Tech news

 Remember the Arab Spring? “Revolution 2.0”? Remember how we imagined, full of triumphal optimism, that social media would become the web that knit the oppressed masses better, would empower them to join together and overthrow their oppressors and stride shoulder-to-shoulder together into a better world? Yeah, those were the days. But now — “disillusioned”… Read More

Replika, an app that creates an artificially intelligent doppelgänger, offers a glimpse into the future of human-bot interaction.

Twitter is giving users a lot more characters—and boy are folks getting the most out of them.

Opinion: The IRS isn’t an impenetrable fortress. Someone has Trump’s taxes; the question is, who?

Thanks to a profitable casino, an Indian tribe gives its members sizeable cash payments. It’s called a basic income and might be the solution to job losses brought on by automation and globalization.

Elephants did not evolve to become huge animals until after they turned a bit of genetic junk into a unique defense against inevitable tumors.

 What do you get if you endlessly recombine Spiderman and the Joker with Elsa from Frozen and lashings of product placement for junk food brands like McDonalds? Read More

 New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been vocal in pledging to reform Uber’s toxic culture to take the business to the next level — and ultimately an IPO — but, over in Asia, another recent arrival is presiding over a revamped approach which includes turning those who were once enemies into friends. Brooks Entwistle, a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Southeast Asia, joined… Read More

 I’ve tried both Blue Apron and HelloFresh before, but I don’t like being locked into some subscription, so I decided to go with Chef’d this time around. Chef’d, which raised $35.2 million in August from strategic investors like pork producer Smithfield Foods and online grocer Fresh Direct, is different in that you don’t need to subscribe to anything, ever. There… Read More

 Makespace, one of the many startups that launched to give consumers a new option for storing their stuff, has a new chief executive, TechCrunch has confirmed. The company’s thirty year-old co-founder and chief executive Sam Rosen is stepping down to make room at the top for Rahul Gandhi, Rosen’s fellow founder and Makespace’s chief operating officer. News of the change at the… Read More

The company says the departure was “completely amicable.”

 A taxi-hailing app. A transplant device developer. An online mortgage provider. Those businesses may have little in common, but one shared thread is that U.S. startups in these sectors have all secured large funding rounds led by Russia-based investors. They’re not alone. Over the past seven years, Russia-based e investors have participated in more than 300 funding rounds for… Read More

 Time spent by people watching Instagram Stories — which is temporary sharing with private replies — could someday significantly surpass time spent in the Instagram Feed, which is the permanent stream of photos and videos with comments. Although numbers comparing sharing and time spent between Stories and Feed are not available, there’s more to be done. Read More

 Robin, which pitched a combined “Uber for lawn care” and robotic-lawnmower-as-a-service at Disrupt SF’s Startup Battlefield last year, is making some big changes. It quietly sold the first part to Porch earlier this year, and is now focused on expanding the robot service nationwide via a franchising plan. (And they’re going to be on Shark Tank.) Read More

 Alibaba invented China’s biggest shopping day — 11/11 aka Single’s Day — and it dominates the headlines with record sales year-on-year, but another company just stepped out to remind us that others are busy trying to close the gap. JD.com, the perennial challenger to Alibaba’s e-commerce empire in China, just revealed its 11/11 figures for the first time. While… Read More