There were 300 drones dancing behind Lady Gaga during the Super Bowl halftime show. They’re called Shooting Stars and were previously used in a holiday show at Disney World. These hundreds of Shooting Star drones flash, fall and flock in unison and are all controlled by one person — or rather one computer.
This is the latest project in Intel’s quest to take drones from… Read More
“Category kings,” defined as market-share leaders in particular business sectors, often wind up creating the majority of the market value relative to their competition. This advantage is particularly pronounced in tech: According to some research, over 70 percent of the value created in tech markets is generated by the category’s king (think Amazon in retail, Facebook in… Read More
Messaging apps can amass a lot of user data over time including everything from personal photos and videos users have shared to records of who they talk to most, where they’ve been, and what online financial services they use. Over the last few years, more and more of these messaging apps began to offer end-to-end encryption to win over users who want privacy at least as much as they… Read More
When it comes to obtaining financing to grow your app or game business, there are several options from which to choose that take a debt-based approach, rather than giving away equity in your business. Choosing the right type of financing is critical; making the wrong choice can be costly in both financial and non-financial terms. Read More
In what is being billed as a “multi-million pound” acquisition, San Francisco-headquartered Nextdoor is purchasing the “assets” of U.K. local social network Streetlife. Read More
Everywhere I look, I see the magic number: 3%. On the right, a whole quasi-militia movement is named that. On the left, activists report “it takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships.” Nassim Taleb argues that once an intransigent minority reaches “3 or 4%” of the total population, the latter will “have… Read More
If you’re an average American, your pension fund is likely backing venture capital funds — and subsidizing our massages, dinners and Uber rides. Pension funds are a huge source of capital for VCs, fueling the system that creates minor improvements for the elites while doing little for middle-class America. It’s time to put the money of working class Americans into vehicles… Read More
A U.S. judge has ordered Google to hand over emails stored outside the country in order to comply with an FBI search warrant. The warrant in question pertains to a domestic fraud probe. Read More
It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs. Let’s review some of the KPIs that are important for founders to understand and for which they should have a strategy, or set of strategies,… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Michael Arrington, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
Recorded live Friday, February 3, 2017. Celebrity CEOs, does the Startup Valley have a path for big ideas, the Social Media Administration, and the politics of 5G.
@stevegillmor, @arrington, @dsearls, @dbfarber, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Read More
Elon Musk only noted very briefly that there had been “progress” on the matter of the immigration order made during his meeting with Donald Trump’s economics advisory council on Friday, but on Saturday the Tesla CEO shared a bit more about what happened at the event. Musk said that he specifically requested inclusion of discussion of the travel ban at the closed meeting, as… Read More
Travis Kalanick quits the Trump advisory board, Domino’s updates its Facebook Messenger bot in time for the Super Bowl, GoPro and Amazon have a rough day on Wall Street and Medium plans to monetize. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
President Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven countries could be over just one chaotic week after its hasty introduction. That’s because a federal judge from Seattle has obtained a restraining order which looks set to overrule the order with nationwide effect. The ruling came after U.S. states Washington and Minnesota filed legal action against the order on… Read More
It began shortly after lunch. The texts appeared, first a trickle. It wasn’t long before the deluge began in earnest. “A friend* added you on ChitChat,” they said. “Tap here … to get it,” they said. WTF is chitchat? — Willis F Jackson III (@wfjackson3) February 4, 2017 What ChitChat is I’m not prepared to say, as I refuse to download it.… Read More
After failing to secure another round of funding and shutting down my startup, Katch, I’ve been thinking about candor. While failure isn’t a unique story in our industry, talking about it is. Of course, I don’t advocate dwelling on one’s failures as a key to success, but paradoxically I found the quickest path to moving forward from my startup’s demise was to… Read More
Connections between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley abound, but particularly for Josh Kushner. The latest? Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital just hired Josh Miller, a member of the White House Office of Digital Strategy under President Barack Obama.
Miller, just 24 when he left Facebook to serve as the White House director of product, starts Monday at Thrive and… Read More
The FCC giveth, and the FCC taketh away… from itself. Chairman Ajit Pai has ordered the revocation of several papers and findings issued by the commission before the turnover to the new administration. Spiking investigations into zero-rating practices by telecoms is the most serious about-face, but it’s worth noting the other items going down the memory hole, unannounced, on a… Read More
Make way for one more pivot from Jawbone. The fitness band maker that originally started out in headsets and later made speakers, has abandoned selling and supporting consumer hardware following a deluge poor reviews and media reports that it has run out of money. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Jawbone is preparing to shift its business yet again — moving from a focus… Read More
Greenlight, a three-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based startup, is trying to solve a problem that any parent of an elementary or junior high school student can well understand: how to give kids money without worrying that they’ll lose it or spend it on something they shouldn’t.
It isn’t the first reloadable, prepaid card. MasterCard, Visa and American Express each offer… Read More
There’s a new FCC in town and it isn’t wasting any time. Mobile carriers can rest easy today knowing that the Federal Communications Commission is no longer pursuing an investigation into mobile plans that don’t count services like streaming video or music against a user’s data consumption. The practice is more commonly known as zero-rating. Providers putting… Read More
