GM has made a number of big acquisitions and investments in the past few years. It picked up self-driving company Cruise earlier this year and dropped $500 million into Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor. For the most part, GM acknowledges that it needs to figure out how to tap into new aspects of the automotive experience, CTO Jon Lauckner said. But all these companies start somewhere. And… Read More
Mark Zuckerberg gave new insights about how he sees Facebook’s role in informing the world today during a Live video one-on-one year-end chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s CEO also lent support to employees trying to fight fake news today, though reports indicated some employees were dissatisfied by his initially tepid response to the issue. “Facebook is a new kind… Read More
Drug production is generally a matter of big factories churning out millions of aspirin or ibuprofen tablets a day, but there’s a lot to be said for manufacturing common drugs on a small scale, close to where they’re used. Researchers from the Netherlands have created an efficient and simple method for doing so that uses a method much like plants have for making their own resources. Read More
VC dollars aren’t as readily available as they were in previous years, and for the companies that are receiving funding, they’re finding that the terms are becoming increasingly less palatable. The good news for startups looking for funding is that a new pathway for direct investment is emerging: the family/multi-family offices of wealthy individuals and families. Read More
Debugging startup Backtrace I/O was launched to solve a real problem that its founders faced when they were engineers at adtech company AppNexus — at least according to Backtrace CEO and co-founder Abel Mathew. Mathew told me Backtrace aims to “solve the process of debugging,” something that most companies tackle by “cobbling together very old, outdated solutions”… Read More
U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) has penned an open letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick asking the executive to provide more transparency around its recent changes to user location data collection. The letter contends that consumers should have more direct control over their personal data, but, failing that, they should at least be provided a full and clear understanding of how and when… Read More
After years of advocating for diversity and inclusion, and telling tech companies how to improve in that area, the Anita Borg Institute has released a diversity report of its own. The Anita Borg Institute, the organization behind the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, is on par with the likes of the tech companies it critiques when it comes to diversity.
The… Read More
Facebook released its latest transparency report today, detailing government requests for user data for the first half of 2016. According to the report, government requests for account data increased by 27 percent globally as compared with the last half of 2015. The number of requests grew from 46,710 to 59,229, Facebook said.
The majority of the requests (56 percent) received from U.S. law… Read More
Facebook is turning its public figures-only Mentions app into a handheld video studio with a slew of new Live broadcasting features rolling out the next few weeks. Mentions on iOS and Android will let broadcasters control brightness and mirroring through an adjustments tray, add category tags, set up comment blocklists, trim their video replays, and see their audio, battery, and… Read More
We are entering an era when our digital lives spill out uncontrollably into our “real” lives. Whether or not you believe these two are separate, I would wager that the mass of humanity still sees a wall between Facebook and talking face-to-face at a PTA meeting. But a few people don’t. It’s these people – people emboldened by the seeming anonymity of the Internet… Read More
Facebook’s shadowy Building 8 research team needs help from academia to invent futuristic hardware. But today’s pace of innovation doesn’t allow for the standard 9-12 month turnaround time it takes universities to strike one-off research partnerships with private companies. Enter SARA, aka Facebook’s “Sponsored Academic Research Agreement”. It’s a… Read More
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday our daily guided tour of the biggest tech stories from the past 24 hours will appear here on TechCrunch.com. To get The Daily Crunch in your inbox every day of the week, sign up here and be sure to take a look at the rest of our newsletters while you’re at it. Twitter’s 2016 is trouble to the end, Oracle management’s political choices have… Read More
Google (or Alphabet, if you prefer) has long been plagued with a problem with its advertising business: while the number of ads people are clicking on has been growing, the value of those ads has been constantly dropping. Google has always excelled at showing the best ads against a search result, but that business may not last forever as the way people interact with technology starts to… Read More
Spectacles seem to be a hit for Snapchat parent Snap Inc., thought their unconventional rollout via pop-up shops (including a new one at a Dave & Busters in Illinois this morning) makes it hard to judge the scale of their success. Here’s a decent indicator: Snap is opening a new research and development technology office in Shenzhen, near where Spectacles are assembled, CNN reports.… Read More
This year was an interesting one for Apple — but not necessarily in a good way. iPhones aren’t selling the way they used to, the Apple Watch isn’t a big hit and Alphabet is emerging as a bigger and formidable competitor. And that has Wall Street asking some serious questions about Apple’s future. Read More
Family friendly streaming service VidAngel is refusing to shut down, in defiance of a court order issued earlier in December. The service, which alters copyrighted material in order to remove adult language, violence and nudity, was found to be in violation of the law and ordered to temporarily stop circumventing copyright protections, copying copyrighted materials, and streaming them over… Read More
Uber has some late 2016 feature additions it’s unveiling Wednesday, including a way to hail a ride directly to people in your contacts list, and a new Snapchat team-up that opens access to custom filters during your Uber ride. The new location feature lets you request a one-time static location share from your contacts, which the app will then automatically set as your destination and use… Read More
Chariot’s roots may be in easing the grinding urban commute in the San Francisco Bay area, but the crowdsourced commute company is getting a little more recreational with a pilot holiday season project with Tahoe’s Squaw Valley / Alpine Meadows ski resort. Chariot, which is owned by Ford Smart Mobility as of earlier this year, is deploying a free transit service that will operate… Read More
For most, this week marks the beginning of the holiday season. Presents and office parties and an extra day off here and there. In the tech world, it means we’re a mere two weeks away from the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual event held the first week of the year in Las Vegas that will set the tone for the next 52 weeks’ worth of hardware announcements. Over the past few… Read More
