Online lending firm SoFi announced today that it has acquired Zenbanx, a startup that offers banking, debit, payments and money transfer services to users online and through a mobile app. The combination of the two will allow SoFi to move deeper into the financial lives of its customers. While today it focuses on student-loan refinancing, mortgages and personal loans, integrating Zenbanx… Read More
ForeScout has filed confidentially for an IPO, TechCrunch has confirmed. The security company has submitted its S-1 and will be unveiling it to the public closer to its debut. The IPO is likely to happen in the next few months, with an exact date yet-to-be-determined. The JOBS Act from 2012 made it so that the companies could work on revisions to their filings without public scrutiny. It has… Read More
Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus just became a half billion more expensive. A jury in Dallas, Texas has awarded ZeniMax Media $500 million after finding that Palmer Luckey (and by extension Oculus VR) violated the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. The jury also found Oculus guilty on charges related to false designation and copyright infringement. Oculus was notably found not guilty… Read More
What does Brexit mean for UK data protection rules? Likely mirroring the major part of EU data protection law, according to UK digital minister Matt Hancock, who was giving evidence to a House of Lords Home Affairs sub-committee earlier today on the implications of Brexit for domestic DP law. Read More
The hot air around young and savvy tech startups is not going anywhere, despite dark prophecies that saw 2016 as the “winter is coming” year. Snapchat and Airbnb are warming up on the sidelines of an IPO, BuzzFeed, Palantir and Uber are snatching hundreds of millions of dollars every couple of months and young startups with no revenues and almost no users raise tens of millions… Read More
Nintendo worried many a gamer two weeks ago with its announcement that online play on its new console, the Switch, would be a paid service. But at least the damage is reasonable: Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima told the Nikkei that it would have an annual fee of ¥2,000-3,000 — around $17-26 at today’s exchange rates. Read More
French startup Yomoni is a promising fintech startup operating robo-advisors. It means that you can give the company some of your savings, and the startup automatically manages a portfolio for you, buying and selling stocks, bonds and more. Yomoni just raised $5.4 million from existing investors Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and Iéna Venture (€5 million). The management team is also buying back some… Read More
Slack took a big step in its evolution as a startup yesterday when it launched Slack Enterprise Grid, the enterprise version of its popular messaging platform.
For Slack to continue its growth trajectory, it had to move on from being a tool for discrete teams to one that could deal with substantially more users, and provide some security and governance as it connected to other departments… Read More
Alphabet subsidiary Boston Dynamics doesn’t have much to prove when it comes to producing the robots of your nightmares. Previous iterations of the company’s prototypes have been kicked over by humans only to stand right back up, for example. But at an event this week, founder Marc Raibert managed to unveil something simultaneously more unsettling and technologically… Read More
Everyone can recognize great interior design. But it’s much harder to actually design a space and pick out all the items you need to make it look great. Hutch, a Los Angeles-based startup, is aiming to fix this. Read More
Sheryl Sandberg has been in the news lately for her opposition to the global gag rule and her more recent comments on Trump’s highly controversial and discriminatory immigration ban. Today at the Watermark Conference for Women in Silicon Valley in San Jose, Sandberg spoke about politics, President Donald Trump and leaning in (obvi), in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher.… Read More
A new trends report published by the law firm Cooley report suggests that the venture market remains largely healthy for now. In the fourth quarter, for example, Cooley handled 187 “disclosable” (versus stealth) deals that represented more than $2.7 billion of invested capital. That’s 18 percent more deals than it closed in the fourth quarter of 2015 — though the… Read More
In tech, we often think a few steps further down the road. But sometimes, the present needs some serious addressing. This is one of those times.
As we draw closer to the 10th Annual Crunchies Awards Show, we figured now was a great time to highlight the nominees for the Social Impact Award, which goes to the person or organization that uses technology to create social change.
Here are the… Read More
Trying and failing to be clever on social media? Want your friends to think you’re naturally funny? A new app called CapGenius aims to help. This fun little addition to your iPhone keyboard offers a search engine for quips, puns, quotes, lyrics and other phrases that you can quickly pop into your Instagram posts, status updates, snaps, tweets, texts, and more.
The app was created by… Read More
At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, one of the big topics of conversation was education. Despite billions poured into programmes in developing countries to educate booming populations, the budgets are just scratching the surface. UNESCO estimates that the world would have to increase education development spending to $39 billion a year, or about three times current levels, if it was… Read More
Waymo’s self-driving software had far fewer disengagements in 2016 than it did in 2015 in the state of California, despite a big increase in the number of miles driven overall. The California Department of Motor Vehicles just published Waymo’s most recent disengagement report, which tracks al the times that a self-driving software system must be turned off in a test cars –… Read More
New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman isn’t mincing words in his State Supreme Court lawsuit against Charter’s Spectrum cable, the ISP formerly known as Time Warner Cable. “The allegations in today’s lawsuits confirm what many of you have long suspected,” Schneiderman said during a press conference today. “Spectrum-Time Warner has been ripping… Read More
Google announced several new products today aimed at luring IT pros who are using Windows in their data centers to the Google Cloud Platform. With that in mind, Google introduced support for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on the Cloud Platform. In addition, the company announced support for SQL Server Always-On Availability Group for customers who are concerned about… Read More
iPhone 7 sales put Apple back on top as the world’s top smartphone vendor in the fourth quarter, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics, which attributed at least some of the growth to Apple’s ability to capitalize on Samsung’s recent missteps. The latter, of course, is referring to the Note 7 battery recall, which had led to exploding devices due to design… Read More
DigitalBridge is a U.K. startup based in Manchester and backed by John Lewis via the 150 year-old apartment store’s accelerator. The company is taking a different and, on the surface at least, simpler approach to letting you “try on” home décor products before purchasing. Read More
