Another major figure could soon join the list of a growing number of people who are done with social media: The leader of the world’s largest democracy. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted Monday evening that he was thinking about giving up on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. Modi, whose 53 million followers
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RTP Global, the VC firm founded by Russian entrepreneur and investor Leonid Boguslavsky, is announcing a new $650 million fund to continue backing early-stage tech startups, primarily at Series A but also some late seed deals and Series B. Of note, the VC’s last fund was launched in December 2017 and totalled $200 million, so
Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020. 1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over The company, like its rivals Sweden-based
Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year. As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain in the history of the index, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error
So much for that correction! After a desolate week, the United States saw its major indices rally on Monday, pushing the value of domestic and domestically listed securities higher. The gains came despite a rising number of infections in the country of the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19. Last week, rising concern about an
Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently exists and the economic development
Google today announced that it is canceling the physical part of Cloud Next, its cloud-focused event and its largest annual conference by far with around 30,000 attendees, over concerns around the current spread of COVID-19. Given all of the recent conference cancellations, this announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise, especially after Facebook canceled its
Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier
Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries. The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25
One of the big, on-going debates in VC and founder circles concerns whether to accept money from top-tier, later-stage venture capitalists during a seed round. Even as their funds reach monstrous sizes, more and more top funds are investing in the earliest stages of a startup’s life, intensifying the question for founders of so-called “signaling
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single
When Elliott Management, a New York investment firm with an activist approach, sets its sights on a company, it usually means it has been under-performing, and it sees a ton of unmet potential. News broke on Friday that the company had bought a substantial stake in Twitter and was seeking board seats. Sources have confirmed
Thoma Bravo announced today that it had closed its hefty $3.9 billion acquisition of security firm, Sophos, marking yet another private equity deal in the books. The deal was originally announced in October. Stockholders voted to approve the deal in December. They were paid $7.40 USD per share for their trouble, according to the company,
Now that the world is swimming in data we may be able to address the climate and environmental risks to the planet. But while there is plenty of capital to invest in things like ClimateTech, a lot of the data that’s needed to tackle this big issue is badly applied, leading to a big misallocation
One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements. The first round of new features arrived in December, including a filter for robocalls, more photo controls, improved Duo calls, and more. Today Google says Pixel
Spinny, an online platform for selling used cars, has secured $43.7 million from a cohort of influential investors in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more Indian cities. The Series B financing round for the Gurgaon-based startup was led by the Fundamentum Partnership, the growth-capital fund backed by tech veterans Nandan
The world of consumer banking has seen a massive shift in the last ten years. Gone are the days where you could open an account, take out a loan, or discuss changing the terms of your banking only by visiting a physical branch. Now, you can do all this and more with a few quick
AudioTelligence, a startup that spun out of University of Cambridge-funded CEDAR Audio, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding for its “autofocus for sound”. Leading the round is Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. Founded in 2017 and based in Cambridge, U.K., the company has
Fictional portrayals of virtual worlds such as “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” typically portray the physical and virtual worlds as distinct realms siloed from each other. Characters escape a dystopian, impoverished physical realm and enter a separate, utopian virtual realm in which they are wealthy and important. Our non-fictional future won’t have that dichotomy.
In part 5 of our virtual worlds series: why this new future will heal fractures caused by today’s social media Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours The basis of the classic James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” is an evil media mogul who instigates war between the U.K. and China because it will be great
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently
Stem, a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale. Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting
For technical and cultural reasons, the metaverse is about to go massively mainstream Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours If virtual worlds are so enticing, why haven’t we already shifted to them as our online social hubs? The thought of virtual worlds for socializing evokes Second Life (launched in 2003), where users created unique avatars
The “Sent via Superhuman iOS” email signature has become one of the strangest flexes in the tech industry, but its influence is enduring, as the $30 per month invite-only email app continues to shape how a wave of personal productivity startups are building their business and product strategies. I had a chance to chat with Superhuman
Facebook first showed off its 3D photos back in 2018, and shared the technical details behind it a month later. But unless you had one of a handful of phones with dual cameras back then (when they weren’t so common), you couldn’t make your own. Today an update brings 3D photos to those of us
‘It’s kind of funny; human bonding happens when there’s another direct task going on, right?’ Lucas Matney @lucasmtny / 8 hours There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator, but Pioneer‘s sell is a bit different. First off, they are fully remote; founders
Chat bots were central to Facebook Messenger’s strategy three years ago. Now they’re being hidden from view in the app along with games and businesses. Facebook Messenger is removing the Discover tab this week as it focuses on speed and simplicity instead of broad utility like China’s WeChat. The changes are part of a larger
A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications. The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that
As things stand in many countries, renting houses and whole apartments is relatively straightforward, if you can afford it. But trying to find rooms in those apartments and houses to rent has been chaotic for many years and relies on hugely informal networks. Some startups have launched in recent years to address this problem of
The FCC has officially and finally determined that the major wireless carriers in the U.S. broke the law by secretly selling subscribers’ location data for years with almost no constraints or disclosure. But its Commissioners decry the $200 million penalty proposed to be paid by these enormously rich corporations, calling it disproportionate to the harm