Tesla announced on its earnings call that CFO Jason Wheeler has decided to leave the company in April to pursue opportunities in public policy. He’ll be replaced by Deepak Ahuja, who was Tesla’s first CFO when he joined the company in 2010 after 15 years of experience at Ford Motor Company. Elon Musk sounded upbeat and jocular about the news on the call, and he also noted, as… Read More
Among the tidbits found in Fitbit’s disappointing new financial filing is the fact that it apparently picked up Pebble’s assets for a relative song. Although the company didn’t reveal the actual numbers when the acquisition was announced, reports pegged it at upwards of $40 million. According to today’s filing, the amount Fitbit paid is actually $23 million. Read More
While Twitter continues to struggle as a public company, Jack Dorsey’s other business seems to be doing pretty well. Today payments company Square announced earnings, beating the street with a narrower loss than expected — $0.04 per share — on revenues of $452 million for the fourth quarter 2016. Read More
Half of the web’s traffic is now encrypted, according to a new report from the EFF released this week. The rights organization noted the milestone was attributable to a number of efforts, including recent moves from major tech companies to implement HTTPS on their own properties. Over the years, these efforts have included pushes from Facebook and Twitter, back in 2013 and 2012… Read More
Waze’s Carpool ridesharing features might be coming to a city near you relatively soon. The Google-owned crowdsourced navigation app piloted carpooling features first in its home country of Israel, and then in San Francisco and the Bay Area – and now it’s looking to spread it further, including in additional U.S. cities, and in Latin American markets. That’s according… Read More
Knotel announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding.
Founded in 2015, the company offers what co-founder and CEO Amol Sarva described as “headquarters as a service” — a flexible office space that can be customized for each tenant while also growing or shrinking as needed.
This might sound like it’s addressing the same need as WeWork and other… Read More
Images of the LG G6 leaked today and overall it looks like a solid phone with soft lines, very little bezel and a face on the backside made up of the dual lenses and power button. It looks surprised and maybe a little shocked.
LG will likely reveal all the details of the phone next week at Mobile World Congress. Read More
The FCC has given several companies the go-ahead to activate a wireless technology called LTE-U in their base stations; if all goes as planned, devices will be able to communicate cellular data over unlicensed frequencies technically overlapping with Wi-Fi’s. Read More
NASA has discovered seven planets with Earth-like qualities orbiting a nearby star making them among the strongest candidates in the continued search for extraterrestrial life among known exoplanets, or planets that exist outside of our own solar system. These new planets all inhabit another solar system which includes seven planets that have a relatively warm climate, as well as rocky… Read More
Snapdeal, one of India’s big online marketplaces connecting sellers of a range of goods with consumers looking to buy them, is feeling the pinch of competition from Flipkart, Amazon and a host of startups that have emerged with the rise of e-commerce in the country. The startup — backed by the likes of eBay, Alibaba and Softbank and last valued at $6.5 billion — issued a… Read More
2016 was the year hacktivists disrupted cyberspace like never before. The December launch of the new movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was well-timed — epitomizing outsiders banding together to bring down powerful enemies against long odds to steal confidential plans. This plot is similar to hacktivist agendas over the past year. Read More
Machine learning has the potential to solve many of our regular human problems, like for instance having too few nightmarish, oddly cat-filled crude images to gaze upon. Luckily, Christopher Hesse created the edges2cats web-based tool to address exactly that issue. The machine learning software uses Google’s Tensorflow to translate one image to another, using training data provided by… Read More
For many promising young startups, displaying in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the best decisions they can make. At Disrupt NY 2017, we’re giving startups the opportunity to participate in the Alley free of charge.
TechCrunch rolled out our featured pavilions at Disrupt SF and Disrupt London last year, but for New York, we’re taking the concept to a whole new level. Read More
A new mobile app called Tap, launching today, introduces a different way to read stories on your phone: as text message-like chats. The app is the latest from Wattpad, a social publishing platform for authors whose community now includes over 45 million readers worldwide, who visit its site or its flagship mobile app to read its nearly 250 million stories. With Tap, Wattpad is stepping… Read More
AMD is launching three new Ryzen 7 processors on March 2 the will attempt to take the crown for fastest PC processors in the world from rival Intel. AMD’s new processors are all 8-core affairs, which the company says will best similarly specced rivals from Intel’s Core i line at similar price points ($330, $400 and $500 respectively). The new Ryzen processors will help bring… Read More
Twitter this morning is launching a new customer service feature for businesses using its service, which will allow agents to respond to direct messages using custom profiles. That is, their names and profile pictures will display when they are engaged in conversations with customers, instead of the company’s Twitter photo and name. The idea is to give these service interactions a… Read More
Sometime around 2013 and 2014, deep learning was going through a revolution that required pretty much everyone to reset their expectations as to how things worked, and leveled the playing field for what people were doing with computer vision. At least that’s the philosophy that Pinterest engineer Andrew Zhai and his team have taken, because around that time he and a few others began… Read More
One of President Trump’s first moves in office was to order a sweeping hiring freeze across the federal government, preventing hiring for all jobs except for narrow exemptions in national security and the military. Although the executive order hasn’t stirred as much controversy has Trump’s more recent orders on immigration, it will have extensive consequences for… Read More
Clinc hopes its AI personal assistant Finie will one day reduce the complexity and barriers many consumers face when attempting to understand their finances. The company claims the voice-controlled platform serves up financial data in impactful ways with minimal effort. And now, with an infusion of cash from mostly Midwest venture funds, the company has a bit more runway to advance its cause.… Read More
Twitter can’t seem to stop the management bleeding, which is complicating its attempts to pull off a turnaround after a tough year of layoffs and sinking share price. Yesterday its head of entertainment talent Lara Cohen, a major figure leading partnerships with content creators, left the company. Today, a director of finance David Bicknell is departing, though he’s more of a… Read More
