Contracts for a number of coronavirus data deals that the U.K. government inked in haste with U.S. tech giants, including Google and Palantir, plus a U.K.-based AI firm called Faculty, have been published today by openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove — which had threatened legal action for withholding the information. Concerns had been raised about
Month: June 2020
The world feels as fragile as ever, and those with any options at all are looking to get away this summer. For many, planes and hotel rooms won’t be an option they consider owing to continued concerns about the coronavirus (not to mention the expense, which 40 million fewer Americans can likely afford). That leaves
Snapchat is the latest social media company to take on the president, Fitbit gets approval for its emergency ventilator and we review the new Sonos soundbar. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 4, 2020. 1. Snapchat is no longer promoting Trump’s posts Snap announced that it will not be promoting content from President Donald Trump’s
C4 Ventures, the Paris -based VC, has raised a new €80 million ($88 million) “Fund II”. The fund was founded by Pascal Cagni, a former Europe boss of Apple, and includes cofounder Raph Crouan, another Apple alumni previously with Techstars and Hardware Club. C4 is designed to be a “post-Series A” fund and normally invests
Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months. After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background.
Corporate harassment training is often defined by mandatory annual workshops, stock photo-ridden curricula and, often, outdated scenarios. Harvard graduates Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen think there’s a business in doing better than that. The duo co-founded Ethena, a software-as-a-service startup that sells anti-harassment training software that is more comprehensive and flexible than the status quo.
Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to see a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the
Searchable.ai is an early-stage startup in the alpha phase of testing its initial product, but it has an idea compelling enough to attract investment, even during a pandemic. Today the company announced an additional $4 million in seed capital to continue building its AI-driven search solution. Susquehanna International Group and Omicron Media co-led the round
Well the votes from the public and the judges are in and we can finally reveal the shortlist for The Europas Awards 2020 to find the hottest European tech startups! The entries were sorted and sifted by journalists to compile an editorially-driven ‘long list’ of some of Europe’s most exciting startups and investors. The list
Sonos has been releasing new hardware at a remarkably consistent and frequent pace the past couple of years, and what’s even more impressive is that these new releases are consistently excellent performers. The new Sonos Arc soundbar definitely fits that pattern, delivering the company’s best ever home theater sound device with performance that should convert
Apps like Signal are proving invaluable in these days of unrest, and anything we can do to simplify and secure the way we share sensitive information is welcome. To that end Signal has added the ability to blur faces in photos sent via the app, making it easy to protect someone’s identity without leaving any
Mar.20 — Bloom Energy Corp. Chief Executive Officer K.R. Sridhar discusses the rise of clean energy and the fallout from PG&E’s bankruptcy with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
It was perhaps not until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the planet that most of us had ever heard or uttered the phrase “supply chain”. But in a global economy that had become drunk and lazy on ‘just in time ordering’ and similar, the threat to supply chains of things like, oh, food, from that pesky
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. The ZoomInfo IPO slipped through our fingers in the last news cycle, so we’re going to catch up. Founded in 2000, the company has had a somewhat complicated history. ZoomInfo raised a Series A in
Facebook will soon add labels to news outlets owned or otherwise controlled by a government, marking that information as, if not necessarily false or unreliable, at least worth considering the origin of. Those so labeled will also be banned from buying ads starting this summer. The company announced its plan to do this a few
As the pandemic surged and companies moved from offices to working at home, they needed tools to ensure the continuity of their business operations. SaaS companies have always been focused on allowing work from anywhere there’s access to a computer and internet connection, and while the economy is reeling from COVID-19 fallout, modern software companies
Facebook’s photo transfer tool is now available globally half a year on from an initial rollout in Europe, the company said today. The data portability feature enables users of the social network to directly port a copy of their photos to Google’s eponymous photo storage service via encrypted transfer, rather than needing to download and
Electric-bike maker Cowboy has released a new iteration of its bike, the Cowboy 3. It’s a relatively small update that should make the experience better for newcomers. The first orders will be delivered at the end of July and the Cowboy 3 is now slightly more expensive at €2,290 or £1,990 ($2,500). The bike still
Homage, the Singapore-based startup that matches families and caregivers, has launched a new service that provides home medical visits, telehealth consultations and medication delivery. Called Homage Health, the service was already being developed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but co-founder and CEO Gillian Tee told TechCrunch that its launch was accelerated because many of the company’s
LinkedIn is announcing some new features for advertisers — retargeting capabilities tied on video ads and lead generation forms, as well as new brand safety integrations for the LinkedIn Audience Network. Abhishek Shrivastava, the senior director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, told me that his team has been shifting its product plans in response
Automation is the name of the game in enterprise IT at the moment: we now have a plethora of solutions on the market to speed up your workflow, simplify a process, and perform more repetitive tasks without humans getting involved. Now, a startup that is helping non-technical people get more directly involved in how to
A lot of the attention in medical technology today has been focused on tools and innovations that might help the world better fight the COVID-19 global health pandemic. Today comes news of another startup that is taking on some funding for a disruptive innovation that has the potential to make both COVID-19 as well as
RiskIQ, a startup providing application security, risk assessment and vulnerability management services, has added National Grid Partners as a strategic investor. The funding from the investment arm of National Grid, a multinational energy provider, is part of a $15 million new round of financing designed to take the company’s technology into critical industrial infrastructure —
Facebook said on Wednesday it has entered into a global deal with Saregama, one of India’s oldest and largest music labels, to license its music for video and other social experiences across its eponymous service and Instagram. The partnership, which comes weeks after Swedish music giant Spotify also signed a deal with Saregama, will allow
When Spotinst rebranded to Spot in March, it seemed big changes were afoot for the startup, which originally helped companies find and manage cheap infrastructure known as spot instances (hence its original name). We had no idea how big at the time. Today, NetApp announced plans to acquire the startup. The companies did not share
In entrepreneurship, timing is everything. Launch too early and the market or underlying tech may not be ready to support your idea. Launch too late and the opportunity may have already been conceded to competitors. For Endlesss, the music-making app from Tim Exile, the timing feels just right. Launched on March 31st, just as the
Dec.20 — Sinovation Ventures CEO Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft executive who led those companies’ efforts in China, discusses the road ahead for U.S. tech companies in China on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0” with Emily Chang.
Adam Guild Contributor Adam Guild is a growth marketing expert and the founder of Placepull. Imagine going from zero followers to 10,000,000+ followers in less than five months. I have watched somebody do exactly that. My brother Topper Guild is already reaping the benefits of fame: People stop him in the street for photos and
Lili, a startup building banking products to meet the needs of freelance workers, is announcing that it has raised $10 million in seed funding. The startup takes its name from its founders, CEO Lilac Bar David and CTO Liran Zelkha, who previously founded Israeli challenger bank Pepper. Bar David told me that while many neobanks have
Snap announced this morning that it will not be promoting content from President Trump’s Snapchat account in its Discover tab following statements from Trump last week on Twitter, which threatened that protestors could be met with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons.” The move is notable for many reasons, but is particularly interesting because social media