It’s March, and beyond seasonal allergies and college basketball, that means the FBI’s controversial changes to its FOIA request system are now fully implemented. For reporters and government transparency advocates, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is an essential tool. Enacted in 1966, the act requires the government to provide answers to specific requests for information,… Read More
Thank you to our 50 million subscribers. #Spotify50 pic.twitter.com/eXkOV71bwu — Spotify (@Spotify) March 2, 2017 Spotify has reached a new milestone after it crossed 50 million paying users. The service is currently available in over 60 markets, with a total catalog of more than 30 million songs. The streaming firm clocked 40 million ‘Premium’ subscribers in September… Read More
Snap makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, NASA makes its software catalog public and one bitcoin becomes more valuable than one ounce of gold. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, had a stellar first day in its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange, popping 44%. The self-proclaimed camera company that began its roots as an ephemeral photo-sharing app first priced its IPO at $17 per share on Wednesday. The stock opened at $24 and closed the day at $24.51. The company’s market cap is being reported as $34 billion… Read More
The Vice President’s personal email was hacked last year, and it turns out that the hackers may have had access to official state business which Pence reportedly conducted on it. But wait — put down the pitchfork, for now anyway. Read More
In the late 1990s, Volkswagen approached the music label Rykodisc with a proposition. They wanted to take the music of a then-obscure singer-songwriter from the company’s catalog and use it as the soundtrack to an ad for their new Cabriolet. The artist was Nick Drake and, though I’m not sure how well the car sold, the ad (VW’s first online) became iconic and brought a… Read More
Pick up that can. Now say you had to put it down on its side rather than its base, how would you go about doing it? Very easily and without thinking about it, no doubt. But simple manipulations like that, which allow us to interact fluidly with objects and environments, are actually incredibly hard for robots to pull off. Researchers at MIT are working to make it a little bit easier. Read More
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, had a great day in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. After pricing the IPO at $17 per share yesterday, the stock opened at $24. It then closed the day at $24.48, a 44 percent premium to the people who bought it yesterday. But like with all IPOs, not everybody got to access Snap’s IPO price. This is usually reserved for a… Read More
Many of tech’s largest and most powerful companies have signed an amicus brief in support of transgender student Gavin Grimm as the first case on transgender rights makes its way to the highest court in the land later this month. Read More
Uber is now in the process of getting a permit from the California DMV to resume testing its self-driving vehicles on public state roads. Uber started testing its self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs in San Francisco last year – but the state DMV ultimately opposed the tests since Uber had not applied for its autonomous testing permit prior to beginning service. While Uber took its test fleet… Read More
In the hype period for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game’s creators compared it to the original NES classic. I chalked this up to the usual pre-release silliness; how could a brand-new game be anything like something released in 1986? It turns out I’d underestimated both Nintendo’s candor (understandable) and the timelessness of the first Zelda’s design. Read More
Facebook’s Messenger bots may not be having the impact the social network desired. Just yesterday, online retailer Everlane, one of the launch partners for the bot platform, announced it was ditching Messenger for customer notifications and returning to email. Following this, Facebook today announced an upgraded Messenger Platform, which introduces a new way for users to interact with… Read More
Upstart, a nearly five-year-old online lending company that prides itself on quickly identifying people who are less likely to default on money leant them, has raised $32.5 million in fresh funding that brings its total funding to date to around $85 million. Partly, the company plans to use the capital to further fuel its current growth trajectory. In fact, according to CEO… Read More
For the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold. While today’s swap can be attributed to a good day for bitcoin (up ~3%) and a bad day for gold (down ~1.3%), the big picture is that bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year (up ~185% from a year ago) while gold is essentially trading exactly at the price it was a year ago. Even… Read More
Floodgate, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based early stage venture capital firm, has raised $131 million for its sixth fund, according to an SEC filing that shows the 11-year-old firm turned to just eight investors for the capital commitments. Though small by today’s fundraising standards, the fund reflects a bit of a departure for the firm, whose fifth fund closed with $76 million in 2014. (Its… Read More
With the dawning of the digital age, low-income students face a new, unprecedented challenge: access to high-speed internet. Startups and nonprofits across the country are stepping up to help low-income families connect to the internet. They deliver programs that aim to facilitate the personal, academic and professional growth of their local communities. Read More
Your Android phone is about to get an upgrade. Google today is making good on its promise to bring its Siri alternative known as Google Assistant to more Android devices, starting today. The company announced at Mobile World Congress over the weekend that its Assistant would soon launch in the U.S., followed by English-language launches in Australia, Canada and the U.K., as well… Read More
AWS took a lot of heat when its S3 storage component went down for several hours on Tuesday, and rightly so, but today they published a post-mortem explaining exactly what happened complete with technical details and how they plan to prevent a similar event from occurring again in the future. At the core of the problem was unsurprisingly human error. Some poor engineer, we’ll call him… Read More
NASA has just published its 2017-2018 software catalog, which lists the many apps, code libraries and tools that pretty much anyone can download and use. Of course, most of it is pretty closely tied to… you know, launching spacecraft and stuff, which most people don’t do. But here are a few items that might prove useful to tinkers and curious lay people alike. Read More
Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo’s new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems… Read More
