Last November, Twitter rolled out its Hide Replies feature to all users worldwide. The feature, largely designed to lessen the power of online trolls to disrupt conversations, lets users decide which replies to their tweets are placed behind an extra click. Today, Twitter is making Hide Replies available to its developer community, allowing for the
Panasonic said it will stop producing solar cells and modules at Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, N.Y., ending a four-year joint venture with the electric automaker. Nikkei Asian Review was the first to report that Panasonic planned to end its production agreement with Tesla . Panasonic has since issued an announcement to explain its decision. Tesla
When Keith Block joined Salesforce from Oracle in 2013, the CRM giant was already a successful SaaS vendor on a billion dollar quarterly revenue cadence. When the co-CEO announced he was stepping down yesterday, the company reported revenue of $4.9 billion for the quarter. During his tenure, the company’s revenue more than quadrupled, earning an
It seems like everyone wants student entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur First makes startups out of raw student material, for instance. Most countries want high-skilled students to stick around and make new companies. Only the UK likes to charge them a fortune for an education and then kick them out if they don’t earn enough. But I digress!
For a decade, Apple has solely relied on third-party sellers, stores, and marketplaces to sell its products in India. That will begin to change this year. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, chief executive Tim Cook told investors that Apple will open its online store in India, the world’s second largest smartphone market, at
$28 million-funded crypto startup Tagomi will be the newest member of the Libra Association that governs the Facebook-backed Libra stablecoin, TechCrunch has learned. A formal announcement of Tagomi joining was slated for Friday or next week. Tagomi offers a platform that helps large traders and funds easily access cryptocurrency markets. The news comes days after
WordPress remains the juggernaut of content management systems, even though it now often gets used in ways it was never intended. And with that, managing the life cycle of WordPress sites has only gotten more complicated, too, all while hackers are trying to exploit any and all security issues to take control of a site.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.Today we’re getting two items out of my notebook while sticking to our recent fintech theme (Q1 fintech VC results here and more on investing patterns into the category here). Let’s chat about fintech customer acquisition costs
Wattpad, the online storytelling community that’s home to some 80 million monthly users, has successfully tapped into the power of crowdsourcing to help uncover the next potential hits for media companies including Netflix, Hulu, NBCU, Sony Pictures Television, and others worldwide. It even launched its own YA book line to bring its online stories to
Customer engagement platform Freshworks today announced that it has acquired AnsweriQ, a startup that provides AI tools for self-service solutions and agent-assisted use cases where the ultimate goal is to quickly provide customers with answers and make agents more efficient. The companies did not disclose the acquisition price. AnsweriQ last raised a funding round in
Excitement for The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups is hotting up. Here are the first wave of speakers and judges — and more are coming! The Awards – which have been running for over 10 years – will be held on 25 June 2020 in London, U.K. on the front lawn of the Geffrye
Tempo wants to be the Peloton of barbells. It’s a 42-inch tall screen with 3D machine vision that tracks and teaches you as you workout. The giant upright HD display makes it feel like your personal trainer is right there with you while you compete with others in live and on-demand classes. Tempo’s Microsoft Kinect-esque
One thing you can say for sure about 2020’s smartphone landscape: there’s no shortage of options. Sales have taken a dip in the last few years, causing a number of manufactures to get creative with their offerings. LG’s certainly in that boat. It’s been a less than spectacular few years for the company’s mobile offerings,
When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes. That is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the
B-Social, the London-based fintech building what it calls a “social bank,” is announcing that it has raised a further £7.8 million in seed funding. Once again the injection of capital comes from “high-net-worth” individuals. They include Rudy Karsan from Karlani Capital, although most of the investors remain undisclosed. It brings the total capital raised by
Just under a month ago Facebook switched on global availability of a tool which affords users a glimpse into the murky world of tracking that its business relies upon to profile users of the wider web for ad targeting purposes. Facebook is not going boldly into transparent daylight — but rather offering what privacy rights
Stonly is building a service for customer support teams so that they can share step-by-step guides to solve the most common issues. The startup just raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Accel with business angels also participating, such as Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and PeopleDoc founders Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse. The startup
Tier Mobility operates a scooter service, the kick-scooter-with-a-motor kind. And it has acquired assets from Coup, a now defunct scooter service, the moped kind. Coup shut down late last year, and Tier Mobility plans to take over and start its own shared moped service. To be clear, Coup is over but its mopeds will stick
India is unlikely to have any substantial coverage of 5G until at least the end of next year, with telecom operators in the country yet to participate in spectrum auction. But that hasn’t stopped Chinese vendors Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi from bringing 5G-enabled smartphones to the world’s second largest handset market. Xiaomi, Vivo’s sub-brand iQoo,
Vimeo signaled last year its plans to move further into the social video creation and editing space with its acquisition of short-form video editor Magisto. Today, the company is unveiling the results of its work in the months following the deal’s close with the debut of Vimeo Create. The new app includes a set of
The student loan crisis in the U.S. has left venture capitalists searching for novel approaches to financing higher education, but can the same systems designed for helping coders in Silicon Valley get jobs at Google help underserved students in developing countries become part of a global work force? Similar to the buzzy San Francisco startup
Checkout.com, the quiet London-based payment platform, has acquired its first startup, ProcessOut. Checkout.com surprised everyone last year when it announced a gigantic $230 million Series A round. It turns out the payment processing boom is not over yet. Checkout.com focuses on enterprise clients with customers all around the world. It provides a full-stack payment service,
A significant majority of Americans have lost faith in tech companies’ ability to prevent the misuse of their platforms to influence the 2020 presidential election, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, released today. The study found that nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) don’t believe platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google will be
It’s been a big news day for Salesforce . It announced that Co-CEO Keith Block would be stepping down, and that it had acquired Vlocity for $1.33 billion in an all-cash deal. It’s no coincidence that Salesforce targeted this startup. It’s a firm that builds five industry-specific CRMs on top of Salesforce — communications and
UK startup Babylon Health pulled app data on a critical user in order to create a press release in which it publicly attacks the UK doctor who has spent years raising patient safety concerns about the symptom triage chatbot service. In the press release released late Monday Babylon refers to Dr David Watkins — via
Let’s talk about money. More specifically, let’s talk about how much things cost. A few years back, the price of flagship smartphones leapt above the $1,000 threshold, owing largely to the cost of screen technology. It’s a tough calculus, but that’s the price of innovation. The rising cost of smartphones is largely regarded as a
Recapped. Layoffs. Slowdown. CEO transition. Budget cuts. Downsizing. In spite of a spate of massive startup exits the last few months, culminating in fintech’s shining moment yesterday with Intuit’s $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, it’s been a tough period for the startup world. Layoffs abound, centered perhaps on SoftBank’s Vision Fund portfolio but hardly
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Over the past three months, a number of financial events have occurred in the fintech and finservices world that have caught our eye. Between two rounds at $500 million and two exits in the billions
In Part 1 of our Virtual Worlds series, we look at how games have already become popular social platforms Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours Video games are only getting more popular. Roughly 2.5 billion people around the world played games last year, double the number of players in 2013. Gaming is a $149 billion
To ward off a hostile takeover bid by Xerox, which is a much smaller company, HP (not to be confused with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a separate public company) is promising its investors billions and billions of dollars. All investors have to do to get the goods is reject the Xerox deal. In a letter to