Category: Tech news

 Facebook Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis has clarified some things about how Facebook’s test pilot to combat revenge porn in Australia works. The strategy entails uploading your nude photos or videos to Messenger in order to help Facebook tag it as non-consensual explicit media. Read More

 Star Wars will get another film trilogy, which will be entirely new and will be separate from the current saga focusing on the Skywalker family and its close associates and friends. The news comes direct from Star Wars’ official blog, and we also now know that the new saga will be led by Rian Johnson, the director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, set for a release this December. Read More

 How old is venture capital? Probably as old as the first hunter/gatherer. Yet, until the mid-20th century, it was mostly practiced by wealthy individuals and families. Modern VC was initiated by French-born American Georges Doriot in 1946, who founded the world’s first publicly owned VC firm. Since then, VC has not stopped finding new ideas to provide an edge for success. Read More

 Redfin, the real estate brokerage site, saw its shares tumble about 7 percent in after-hours trading, shortly after sharing its earnings. The newly public business may have disappointed Wall Street, but it’s still growing. Revenue was up 35 percent from last year and net income nearly doubled, from $5.7 million to $10.6 million. Read More

 Nvidia continues to ride the wave of a myriad of huge success stories for the company, like the rapid adoption of the Nintendo Switch and demand for technology to power AI computation within data centers, as it saw yet another quarter where its business continued to expand significantly.
It’s a wave that’s tripled Nvidia’s stock in the last year. Nvidia’s significant… Read More

 Sogou, the Chinese search engine, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, under the ticker “SOGO.” After pricing at the top of the range at $13 per share, the company raised $585 million. Sogou then hovered around $13.50 for most of its first day of trading, closing the day at $13.51, up about 4 percent. Read More

 Cities make the sharing economy work, and the urban environment is the critical differentiator for experimentation, change and scale. In just a few years, the sharing economy has grown from a niche service only found in tech hubs to a larger share of the economic pie — and it has significantly impacted the local economies of cities. Read More

 Our spidey senses are tingling over here. According to an SEC filing, TechCrunch has learned Bolt Threads, the biotech company spinning microbes into spider silk, is raising a whopping $106 million in Series D financing. Bolt Threads has been on a meteoric rise since it first told TC about its ambitious endeavor to make spider silk, a material stronger than teflon but softer than a cloud. Read More

 Google is hard at work behind the scenes improving one of its ambitious technical projects ever – Street View. The company previously revealed that its been rolling out improved camera cars with better photographic equipment to improve the quality and resolution of images that make up its street-level views in Google Maps, but it’s also fixing the sometimes messy stitching that… Read More

 Apple has released its first diversity and inclusion report since naming Denise Young Smith as VP of diversity and inclusion in May. It’s also Apple’s first report since Donald Trump took the office of president of the United States. Read More

 The Essential Phone just got a camera software update that will allow owners of the device to broadcast live, 360-degree video right from the native camera app, provided they have the Essential 360 Camera, too. The update requires no extra software, and live streaming becomes available as soon as you snap the 360 camera onto the magnetic accessory port on the back of the Essential Phone.… Read More

 Over the last few days, most iOS users have experienced the same peculiar bug: the letter “I” was autocorrecting to… something else. Sometimes it was an exclamation mark. Sometimes it was “A.” Sometimes it was a question mark in a box. A fix was said to be just around the corner, and sure enough: Apple has just sent out a patch that fixes that rando-replacement once… Read More

 Lyft’s chief operating officer Rex Tibbens plans to step down by the end of the year. The news was first reported by Axios and confirmed by Lyft to TechCrunch. Read More

Today’s Stories 

Broadcom offers to acquire Qualcomm for $70 per share
Intel and AMD partner on graphics and CPU combo to challenge Nvidia
Comcast’s Xfinity internet service (and others) seem to be a bit broken nationwide this morning

Credits
Written by: MRD
Hosted by: MRD
Filmed by: Joe Zolnoski
Edited by: Joe Zolnoski Read More

 Computer vision and clever imaging technology remain hot areas in consumer and enterprise apps, and today Microsoft is picking up a startup called Swng Technologies to give it some IP and talent in this department.
Swng Technologies had developed a cinemagraph app called Swng (originally called Polaroid Swing) that lets you take impressionistic, GIF-like short videos that you can then… Read More