Here’s an interesting twist in one of the bigger enterprise acquisition stories of 2016. After Mitel earlier this year announced that it would acquire Polycom for $1.96 billion and consolidate the two companies’ enterprise communication businesses, today private equity firm Siris Capital has come in with a higher offer: it has agreed to acquire Polycom for $2 billion in cash and… Read More
The EU-US Privacy Shield, the cumbersomely christened replacement for the now defunct Safe Harbor transatlantic data transfer agreement, is rapidly approaching adoption, with Europe’s Member States today agreeing to support the new data flow deal. Read More
The potential for chat apps in financial services is by no means limited to social payments. Facebook has already confirmed that they are pursuing Wechat’s success, venturing into eCommerce. This is only the beginning. Read More
Fintech companies are continuing to draw interest from investors in Asia. The latest company to pull in financing is Airwallex, a China-Australia startup that specializes in cross-border transactions. Read More
The security nightmare posed by the Internet of Things isn’t just related to the lack of expertise in the types of companies adding connectivity to gizmos and gadgets. It’s the sensitivity of the connected sensors, strewn hither and thither, opening up potential attack vectors for determined hackers. Hence the need for really robust security thinking to lock down the risks. Read More
Coinbase, one of the world’s largest bitcoin companies, has set its sights on Japan after landing funding from a range of Japanese investors, including one firm that helped Twitter set up shop in the country. Read More
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of blood analysis startup Theranos has been banned from operating a blood testing lab for the next two years. Where this leaves the founder of the testing company and how it can continue to operate with her banned from operating a blood testing facility remains to be seen. Holmes’ censure, first noted in the Wall Street Journal, is based on a regulatory… Read More
Google acquires Anvato, Microsoft COO leaves company, Facebook removes a police shooting video then returns it to the site, blames glitch in the system, Lyft Premier launches, self-driving bus launches in Japan. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
As large platforms like Facebook and Apple position themselves as the new go-to places to read news, an independent app that started in Japan has landed a new round of funding to raise its own game. SmartNews — a news aggregation app that works with some 1,500 publications and selects stories for you based on your reading activity in the app — has raised another $38 million in… Read More
As the Chinese economy has boomed in the last decade, millions of people have entered the middle class. And the Chinese aren’t just getting wealthier, they’re getting fitter. China, it seems, is in the midst of a workout craze — and that represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for venture investors to back emerging health and wellness technology companies. Read More
Two weeks ago, we reported that Uber was in talks to raise $1-2 billion in leveraged loans. The Wall Street Journal is circulating new information that the company has closed a $1.15 billion leveraged loan, with a 5 percent yield. This number comes in on the low side of our previous estimates. Last month, sources confirmed to TechCrunch that Uber had plans to raise $1-2 billion in… Read More
Mark Zuckerberg believes Facebook Live could illuminate wrongdoing in the world.
Facebook still hasn’t explained the details of its policy on censorship of Live video. But today in response to the police shooting of Philando Castile whose last moments of life were broadcast on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted that “The images we’ve seen this week are graphic and… Read More
Discussions around diversity and inclusion in the tech industry are not going away. Not on my watch. Earlier today, I sat down with Erica Baker, an engineer at Slack, and Ellen Pao, formerly of Reddit, to talk about their nonprofit organization for diversity, Project Include, as well as the systemic racism that exists in the United States. In the last couple of days, two black men have… Read More
After finding success on Kickstarter, ZUtA Labs is piecing together its mobile robotic printer. Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, the four-inch wireless device makes it easy to produce images on the go. The printer rolls back and forth over a piece of paper, until the on-screen image is recreated in about a minute. The ZUtA Robotic Printer integrates with an app, which enables… Read More
For Amanda Kahlow and 6Sense, one of the most important aspects of the company is its culture. The values of the company have been baked into the operations of the team, how it interacts with itself and its customers. Kahlow says it boils down to family — an acronym for fun, accountability, mindfulness, integrity, love and yes. And as a company, before they start meetings, Kahlow and… Read More
Earlier this year, Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote who is now a venture capitalist at General Catalyst, laid out plans to fund and support (and maybe even build?) his own startups in the burgeoning world of bots — services that use conversational interfaces and varying degrees of artificial intelligence to provide users with information, products and more. Now those… Read More
If you’re going to show off the follow-up to your well-loved mirrorless camera two years after release, you might as well do it in style — classic cars, rail-thin models, terrible music, the whole nine yards. Fujifilm’s X-T2 interchangeable lens camera made its flashy Manhattan debut at the borough’s Classic Car Club, with a slew of different accessories and a number… Read More
Mimicking nature’s most elegant designs has become a popular method for creating equally elegant robots (close, anyway) — but using nature’s raw materials, too? That’s what researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have done, creating a tiny light-controlled stingray with a solid gold skeleton that moves using reconstituted rat muscles. O brave new world! Read More
If you’re Toronto-based startup MagniWare, you’ve learned some hard truths about the realities of what people will bear in terms of keeping tabs on their general wellness. MagniWare began life with a focus on hardware, looking to solve the problem of wearable fatigue by making a powerful sensor that was easy to use. But the hardware focus nearly exhausted the startup’s… Read More
Auto manufacturers are realizing that the future of transportation is not going to be one person, one car. It’s going to be ridesharing, ridehailing and public transit — and these vehicles may not even require drivers. So most major manufacturers have made a turn toward becoming “mobility companies.” It’s been a quick turn, though. In just the first half of… Read More
