Here’s a fresh rumor that is all kinds of interesting. Press in South Korea are reporting that Google is in talks to invest one trillion KRW ($875 million) in LG Display, one of the world’s most prominent producer of screens for smartphones and tablets, in a move to give its Pixel smartphones some curves. The Yonhap News Agency, citing sources, said that the investment would… Read More
Following months of rumors, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has confirmed that it has raised $1.4 billion in new funding at a post-money valuation of $11.6 billion to battle Amazon and Alibaba. The deal includes some big name strategic investors: China’s Tencent, eBay and Microsoft, which joint existing Flipkart backers that include Tiger Global, Naspers, Accel and DST Global.
The… Read More
Rakuten is getting into the Airbnb for business sector after it invested SG$4 million ($2.8 million) in Singapore-based MetroResidences. MetroResidences was founded in 2014 by James Chua and Lester Kang and it matches corporate employees needing to rent for a month or more with home owners who seek tenants. It is currently active in Singapore, but has plans to expand into Hong Kong and… Read More
Tenzo, a London startup and graduate of Techstars, has built what looks like an interesting and timely platform to help restaurants (and potentially any brick ‘n’ mortar retailer) get real-time data insights on how they and their staff are performing. Read More
Payday loan firm Wonga has suffered a data breach affecting up to 245,000 customers in the UK. A further 25,000 customers in Poland may also be affected, according to the BBC. Read More
Saleswhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to let companies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round. The capital was provided by VC firms Monk’s Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni, Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned… Read More
A new European Commission funded startup accelerator, Data Pitch, is being launched today with the aim of connecting established businesses and organisations with lots of data with startups who might be able to help them unlock the value of the info they hold and thereby tackle industrial and societal challenges. Read More
A fund and accelerator for advanced technology startups, The Engine, closed its debut fund at a robust $150 million this week, according to its President, CEO and Managing Partner Katie Rae. Last year, TechCrunch reported that MIT was investing $25 million into The Engine, becoming the anchor LP for the fund. While The Engine is not owned and operated by the private, research university, it… Read More
The smartphone wars are over, and everybody won. Life without our phones is almost unthinkable. I just spent the last five days on a couple of remote Pacific islands, and every so often I’d look up and see a flower-garlanded local child immersed in a Samsung tablet – and this seemed wholly unremarkable. But now that the gold rush is over, and we’ve entered the mopping-up… Read More
People are (rightfully) freaking out about their privacy as the Senate voted to let internet providers share your private data with advertisers. While it’s important to protect your privacy, it doesn’t mean that you should sign up to a VPN service and tunnel all your internet traffic through VPN servers. Read More
While Uber is fighting Waymo at home, the American company is also having issues abroad. As Reuters reported, an Italian court has ordered Uber to stop all activities in all of Italy. The court says Uber represents unfair competition for taxi drivers. Read More
Executives at Twitter make a lot of money. But it’s not just like they make a lot of money relative to you or me, or compared to lower-level employees within the organization. A couple of executives at Twitter make a lot of money compared to their peers at public companies in general, tech or otherwise. Read More
One of the earliest and most prominent startups of the so-called “sharing economy” or “gig economy” is evaluating the possibility of selling itself. As reported by Recode, freelance work marketplace TaskRabbit acknowledged that it is contemplating a sale after receiving inbound interest from a possible strategic buyer. Read More
Streaming video provider Netflix is making a change in its senior management, as the company announced long-time chief product officer Neil Hunt will be leaving in July. International executive Greg Peters will be taking Hunt’s place in the lead product role. Read More
Shadow Brokers, the group behind last year’s release of hacking exploits used by the National Security Agency, has dropped another trove of files. In a Medium post today, the hacker group offered up a password giving free access to files it had previously tried to auction off. Read More
Meditation app Headspace recently brought on Robert Lamvik, Spotify’s now-former director of its premium service, and Dr. Megan Jones Bell, former chief science officer at mental health startup Lantern. Their respective roles at Headspace are head of growth and chief science officer — two new roles at the company. Read More
Postepic wants to liberate all those interesting text snippets you have languishing on your camera roll and turn them into visually appealing quotations ready for social sharing. But is there mainstream appetite for an ‘Instagram for book quotes’? Read More
Autonomous passenger drones might be coming to Dubai this summer, but in Russia I had the chance to check out this startup which literally wants to build a hoverbike. Read More
YouTube is now blocking ads on channels with less than 10,000 views, Amazon pulls Diapers.com and other Quidsi apps and Spotify’s invisible IPO. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
You can imagine that Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is asked a lot about whether his San Francisco-based payments company plans to go pubic any time soon. Last year, the seven-year-old company raised $150 million in a deal co-led by General Catalyst Partners and CapitalG that valued the startup at $9.2 billion, almost double the valuation it was assigned in 2015. Read More
