America has a productivity problem. One explanation may be the growing use of real resources to make virtual products.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-electricity-productivity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
from
https://ifeeltechinc.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/is-bitcoin-a-waste-of-electricity-or-something-worse/
Messaging apps have seen a surge of popularity in recent years as people seek out ways to communicate more directly than on social networks. But they have also been adding large group chat options into the mix, to give a more social experience on those messaging platforms. Now messaging app Viber is introducing the biggest group chat of them all. In a bid to drive more usage and bring in…
If you’re a UFC fan you’ll now have another place to watch fights – Amazon Prime Video. The online retailers just announced that starting with UFC 222 on March 3rd, all pay-per-view UFC fights will be available to buy and watch on Amazon prime. Fights can be preordered and also purchased up to four hours after the start time (in case you want to tune in late just for a…
After raising $4.4 million last March, Virtualitics has closed a $7 million Series B round led by Centricus with participation from The VR Fund. The startup is building a sort of “Excel for VR,” that lets people see data in a more immersive and collaborative way. “[B]usiness intelligence platforms need to be 3D and collaborative by design in order to help companies gain a…
The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo, and iHeartRadio too before Spotify pulled it out from under them by buying it for a reported $100 million — 90 percent in Spotify equity. That deal paid off big time. Today, in Spotify’s SEC filing to go…
The two most highly valued private tech companies (outside of China) are Uber and Airbnb. Both also happen to be marketplace businesses, and their success has helped encourage a rush of VC investment in similar business models over the past several years. But despite all this investment, public comps for marketplaces remain far thinner than those for SaaS.
A reminder that I’m going to have Paul Vigna and Michael Casey, authors of The Truth Machine, onstage with me next week at Knotel, a co-working and event space in Manhattan. I’ll see you there tonight. RSVPs are closed. It starts at 7pm and will feature a 35-minute talk with two of the top writers in crypto. These guys literally wrote the book on bitcoin and their new book is about…
Hall One at Mobile World Congress – a single space more massive than most conference centers in major cities – contained only a few displays. Although a quarter of the room housed small phone and mobile manufacturers, Huawei controlled the rest, creating a walled-off compound patrolled by women in folk costumes from many lands.
A recent Facebook algorithm change seems to have claimed a high-profile casualty: LittleThings, a digital publisher focused on inspirational and how-to content for women, which shut down yesterday. I wrote about the company at the beginning of 2016, when it raised debt funding from City National Bank. At the time, it seemed to be flying high, becoming one of the largest lifestyle publishers…
Spotify has finally filed to go public. But unlike most tech offerings, Spotify won’t be raising any money by issuing new shares. Instead they’ll just allow existing shares owned by investors and employees to be traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. No IPO means there are no investment banks to underwrite and price the offering, meaning the public markets will essentially…
Voice assistants may be the hottest thing since sliced bread when it comes to controlling your $60 wifi light bulbs, but Piccolo is launching out of the latest Y Combinator class with a desire to put a camera in every smart home that can translate your physical motions and gestures into commands. The company’s “Vision Assistant” product works pretty simply, users place the…
It’s clear there is a diversity and inclusion problem in tech. What some companies still struggle with, however, is how to fix it. Part of that is because it can be a hard problem to solve if one doesn’t scratch the surface of understanding it.
Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google. Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of revenue for subscriptions processed through the App Store. Apple…
Music streaming service Spotify is going public and they’ve just unveiled their filing.
For years, one of the holy grails of web design has been trying to automate turning front-end design into clean back-end code. Early attempts included tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Pagedraw, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class, has developed a tool to fulfill that vision in a modern context. Typically, a web design team sits down and creates a mockup of the user interface,…
Awards season might be coming to a close, but there is still one awards show left, and it’s a big one. The Academy Awards airs Sunday, March 4. The awards show will air live on ABC, but Facebook users will also have the ability to tune in to “The Oscars: All Access” via Facebook Watch. The Academy’s show page, ABC Television Network’s Facebook page, Oscar.com…
Arguably the most frustrating part of renting an apartment, especially in an expensive city like New York, is dealing with the security deposit. One startup wants to make renting easier by getting rid of security deposits, with a solution that is beneficial for both renters and landlords. Here’s how it works: For a monthly fee Rhino provides your landlord with an insurance policy which…
Enterprise health management startup Collective Health has added another $110 million to the coffers from existing high-profile investors such as Founders Fund and Alphabet’s investment arm GV, bringing the total now raised to a cool $230 million.
Sure wearables have been having a tough go of it lately, but maybe the problem is just a general lack of tiny projectors jammed into the products. It’s an idea a few folks have flirted with in the past, and it’s one the folks at Haier are ready to deliver in the future. The Asu is a gigantic new smartwatch from the company that regularly brings you things like transparent and…
Last year, Amazon announced a program that would reward developers for building popular and well-received Alexa skills, by doling out cash payments for top-performing skills. Initially, the program was only open to game skill developers – as that was a category Amazon wanted to encourage – before expanding in August to a limited set of other categories. Today, Amazon is expanding…
AI will create more jobs than it destroys was the not-so-subtle rebuttal from tech giants to growing concern over the impact of automation technologies on employment. Execs from Google, IBM and Salesforce were questioned about the wider societal implications of their technologies during a panel session here at Mobile World Congress.
Triplebyte is a three-year-old, 25-person, San Francisco-based hiring platform that says it makes recruiting and technical screening for tech companies more efficient. It’s hardly alone in making this claim, of course. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a tech recruiting platform that claims to improve on the ways that companies identify and recruit talented engineers.…
According to Bragi, headphones are just the “tip of the iceberg” of what the company’s been working on for the past four years. Last month at CES, the company announced Project Ears, an initiative aimed at enhancing hearing aid capabilities in the smart headphone category. This week at MWC, it’s pulling the curtain back on even broader ambitions to provide AI solutions…
OpenStack, the open source infrastructure project that aims to give enterprises the equivalent of AWS for the private clouds, today announced the launch of its 17th release, dubbed ‘Queens.’ After all of those releases, you’d think that there isn’t all that much new that the OpenStack community could add to the project, but just as the large public clouds keep adding…
Hangouts Chat, Google’s take on modern workplace communication, is now generally available and is becoming a core part of G Suite. Hangouts Chat was first announced at Google I/O 2017, together with Hangouts Meet. While Meet went right into public availability, though, Chat went into an invite-only preview. Now, Google is rolling Chat out to all G Suite users over the course of the…
PullString, the voice technology company that began its life as ToyTalk, and counts among its customers brands like Mattel, Activision, and Samsung, is today publicly launching software that allows non-technical creative professionals the ability to design, prototype and publish voice apps for Amazon Alexa. Originally focused on helping companies build voice-enabled toys like Hello Barbie…
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Rodolfo Rosini, a genuine serial entrepreneur and well-liked and well-connected figure in the U.K. startup scene, is giving up startup life to move over to the “dark side” and become a VC.
Porsche is readying its Mission E for launch, with a 2019 target sales date. The all-electric Tesla Model S competitor has a lot of car fans excited, and has been drawing covetous looks since the concept’s unveiling back in 2015. Now that launch is drawing closer, however, we have some new info about the car, how it charges and its performance. Porsche EV lead Stefan Weckbach told a group…
It’s hilarious to think that it’s been six years since I wrote that software was starting to eat Mobile World Congress, as the action in the mobile world moved — at the time — deeper and deeper into apps. In the intervening year’s we’ve seen a huge boom in the startup world, and six years ago companies like Waze were still startups that could take the heat…
It’s one thing to dispatch a drone when an accident happens to get an aerial overview of what’s happening on the ground, but you get far better situational awareness if you can use augmented reality (AR) to add the names of roads, the location of key personnel, cars and other assets to that view. That’s what Edgybees, a Santa Clara-based startup that current specializes in AR…
LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while laying the foundation for a lucrative business.
Fresh on the heels of settling a contentious and expensive lawsuit with Uber, Alphabet’s self-driving unit Waymo is looking to get out there and educate the public on how its autonomous vehicles work.
Skiers, rejoice! It just got a lot easier to track your mountain treks. Due to an Apple Watch update that combines GPS and altimeter (altitude) measuring, ski apps are now able to quantify performance. If you’re wondering how many calories you’ve burned or how fast you were going, all that data is available and more. The new features are rolling out today, with Ski…
Nick Nash is leaving his role as group president of Sea, the Singapore-based games and e-commerce company that went public in the U.S. last year, to start his own startup fund.
Baidu’s iQiyi video division is set to become the latest Chinese tech company to go public in the U.S. after it filed to raise up to $1.5 billion via an IPO on the Nasdaq. The service was started in 2010 by search giant Baidu, which owns a dominant 70 percent of the company. Xiaomi (eight percent) and Hillhouse (six percent) are the other major names that have backed it. A…
There’s a problem in the UK tech industry and it’s staring us in the face. The tech industry is growing at twice the rate of the wider economy and now contributes around £97bn a year, up 30pc in five years. And yet only 4% of military veterans work in ICT, which is 20% fewer than non-veterans. Meanwhile, 45% of businesses claim to have a problematic shortage of cybersecurity…
It sure seemed like Fitbit was all in on the Ionic. The company’s first true smartwatch was the result of multiple acquisitions and CEO James Park was talking up the device as a sort of lifeline for the struggle company. But the product stumbled for both hardware and software reasons, and the company acknowledged during its earnings call that sales weren’t near what it had hoped.…
eBay is ramping up its presence in Japan via its latest investment in Asia. The U.S. online retail giant announced today that it has acquired the Japan-based business of pan-Asia e-commerce company Giosis, which is called Qoo10.jp, in an undisclosed deal. eBay originally set up Singapore-based Giosis in 2010 alongside Korea’s Gmarket, and as part of today’s deal it will give up…
Self-driving car startup Aurora has raised $90 million in a Series A round, with participation from both Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. The new funding adds to its available cash and will make it possible for the young startup to scale more quickly, but Aurora CEO Chris Urmson told me that the most important part of this deal from his perspective is that Aurora gets two, high-profile…
Your trip through the airport or train station may soon become a little more crowded — not with people, but with robots, busily scanning and plotting the space so that one day, even more of their cousins can zip around with your luggage and Shake Shack orders. Here, the mapping company majority-owned by Audi, BMW and Daimler, has entered a robotics partnership with Naver Labs, part of…
Kindred Capital, a London-based VC firm that has actually been up and running since 2015, is announcing that it has closed its first seed fund of £80 million, money it has already been deploying in around 20 tech startups throughout Europe over the last two years.
Latin America is emerging as the new battleground for the global tech giants, and some of Silicon Valley and Asia’s biggest investors—from Sequoia Capital to SoftBank—are taking notice. International investment in Latin American startups has more than doubled since 2013, with 25 new investors entering the region in 2017 alone, including SoftBank, Didi Chuxing and…
In the beginning, there was TechCrunch. Then there was new TechCrunch. And, if you’ve been reading TechCrunch for the last five years or so, you’re used to seeing new, new TechCrunch. Our last redesign, launched in 2013, was conceived when iOS was still Skeuomorphic and responsive web design was forward thinking. It’s served us well, but the internet never stands still and…
The warrantless surveillance law gained attention in 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked that the NSA was using it to spy on Americans’ text messages, phone calls, emails and internet activity — all legally, and without warrants. That bill has been passed by the U.S. Senate for another six years and has been signed into law by President Trump. Naturally, this has caused quite the uproar.
Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash app — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on at a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending…
For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. “It’s a challenge, it’s a goal and there’s certainly reason to believe that it’s possible,” High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Sonos One users in Canada can now join their peers south of the border in yelling requests at their connected speakers – a free update issued today enables Amazon Alexa on the Sonos One. The One launched with Alexa support in the U.S., but while the speaker has been available to Canadian buyers since late last year, Alexa voice commands are new with the update. That means Canadians will…
With Nest’s first smart video doorbell right around the corner, Amazon is busy buying up the competition. After acquiring Blink just two months ago, Amazon is now acquiring Ring, makers of the self-titled Ring doorbell (plus a bunch of other ecurity gear, like solar security cameras, floodlight cameras, and a in-home security alarm). Geekwire broke the rumor this afternoon, and…