When I first met Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim, New York City was just beginning to go into lockdown. The BDG offices were empty thanks to the company’s newly instituted work-from-home policy, but it still seemed reasonable to meet in-person to learn more about BDG’s broader vision. At the time, Wagenheim — a former Fusion […]

If you find voice assistants frustratingly dumb, you’re hardly alone. The much-hyped promise of AI-driven vocal convenience very quickly falls through the cracks of robotic pedantry. A smart AI that has to come back again (and sometimes again) to ask for extra input to execute your request can seem especially dumb — when, for example, […]

There are few more messages more timely than the opening line, “Dance your cares away, worry’s for another day” (or is it “worries?”). Today the familiar Fraggle Rock bass line returns, along with the titular felt underground dwellers, as the first of a new series of mini-episodes hits Apple TV+. Apple’s streaming service will post […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops […]

Got something in your medical history that first responders should know about if you call 911? Things like known drug allergies, or the medications you’re on? The iPhone and Apple Watch will soon be able to share this information with first responders automatically (if you opt to let it do so). When a user with […]

Google Meet — the video call service formerly known as Hangouts Meet, which itself was an offshoot from Hangouts, not to be confused with Google Chat, Duo, Allo or any of the company’s other communications products — is finally making its debut on Gmail accounts, where it probably should have been since 2010. Everyone with […]

YouTube is giving advertisers a few more tools to reach consumers and measure ad effectiveness on TVs. These tools already exist for YouTube on other platforms, but now the Google -owned video service is bringing them to connected televisions. In a blog post, it says this is in response to how YouTube viewership has grown […]

Tech Scroll Asia, your guide to the billions made and lost in Asia tech

Banks try to limit fallout from collapse of Singapore commodities trader Hin Leong

Research finds WeChat analyses messages from users registered outside China to train its algorithms

As with other industries reeling in the wake of the pandemic, watchmakers were facing battles long before the virus struck

Founders plan for further expansion in Wuhan and beyond

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]

Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round. ​CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly. “Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to […]

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale-on-demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service […]

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to […]

Founders hunting down capital in the middle of this pandemic may feel like they’re on a fool’s errand, but some investors are still offering financing, even if the terms might not be as good as they once were. One avenue that appears to remain open: corporate venture capital. The corporate route offers its own set […]

After years of working in mobile advertising, founder Niles Lichtenstein discovered a box of records from his late father. That compelled him to start putting together memories and online histories earlier, by documenting his mother’s life history and how he first met his wife. That developed into an interactive timeline where he collected songs from […]

Only about 6 percent of the country’s biggest cities are planning for or thinking about autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars in their long-range transportation plans, according to the National League of Cities. What’s even more surprising is that only 3 percent of these cities’ transit plans are even taking into account the impact of ride-hailing companies like […]

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce […]

With California on a precipice of a ballot initiative next year that could legalize marijuana recreationally, scores of cannabis startups are vying to capture what is the nation’s largest market in advance of such a big regulatory change. Meadow, a Y Combinator-backed startup, was one of the earlier ones with an ordering and delivery service […]

In response to calls for stronger action on hosts that aren’t casual users, Airbnb said it would start sharing some data with governments and getting hosts to agree to a policy of listing only their permanent homes. Here’s what Brian Chesky said in a post today: Today, we’re taking the next step to turn these principles into […]

Early Facebook employee and longtime travel aficionado Julia Lam began studying consumer travel habits over a year ago to see how people planned their vacations and business trips. What she found was that people were often using a mess of Chrome tabs and text files. So she started Bucket with former Facebook engineer John Sichi […]

Honor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company focused on caring for seniors as Baby Boomers tip over into retirement, is making its contractor workforce into a full-time one. The care workers, called CarePros within the company, will have the potential for stock options. “I really don’t want two classes of people in our company. Everyone is in it […]

“When do you think people in the Bay Area started to realize that you could make more money from tech than from real estate?” Jed Kolko asked me. We were sitting at Ma-velous, a coffee shop frequented by San Francisco’s political movers two blocks from City Hall and kitty corner from Twitter’s headquarters in the Shorenstein-owned former San Francisco Furniture Mart.

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]

The aggregate gains are distributed unevenly — witness how well the top 1 per cent have done

German and French leaders’ hesitation could be fatal

Hostility to multilateralism means the forces that contained proliferation are dissipating

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, […]

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day delivery service Deliv. The retailer is characterizing the deal as more of an R&D type of acquisition and not one that will have an immediate consumer-facing impact. Deal terms were not disclosed, but we understand the deal […]

Founders hunting down capital in the middle of this pandemic may feel like they’re on a fool’s errand, but some investors are still offering financing, even if the terms might not be as good as they once were. One avenue that appears to remain open: corporate venture capital. The corporate route offers its own set […]

After suspending its self-driving operations at the end of March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Waymo has announced it will resume driving operations on May 11 in Arizona. Waymo will start its driving operations in the Phoenix area again, a decision the company says it made after discussions with “our teams, partners and local and […]

Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass. His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment […]

Four years ago, Adnan Asar, the founder of the new addiction prevention service Lucid Lane, was enjoying a successful career working as the founding chief technology officer at Livongo Health. It was the serial senior tech executive’s most recent job after a long stint at Shutterfly and he was shepherding the company through the development […]

German group’s battle to minimise financial damage from scandal hinges on test case

System devised by neurotech start-up Koniku uses living cells

The combination of rents and retail is toxic in a coronavirus-wracked world

Deal will see e-scooter rental service take over Uber’s e-bike division Jump

Facebook will soon allow users to go on “virtual dates,” the company announced today. The social network is planning to introduce a new video calling feature that will allow users of its Facebook Dating service to connect and video call over Messenger, as an alternative to going on a real-world date. This sort of feature […]

WhatsApp, which began testing its mobile payments feature in India two years ago, could offer at least one more financial service to people in its biggest market. In a filing with the local regulator in India, the Facebook -owned messaging platform has listed credit as one of the areas it will pursue in the country. […]

We knew it was going to be bad — but not necessarily “lowest level since 2013” bad. As Apple was busy reporting its earnings, Canalys just dropped some of its own figures — and they’re not pretty. After two quarters of much-needed growing, the global smartphone market just took a big hit. And you no […]

Peanut, an app that began as a tool for finding new mom friends, has evolved into a social network now used by 1.6 million women to discuss a range of topics, from pregnancy and parenthood to marriage and menopause, and everything in between. On the heels of significant growth in online networking fueled by the […]

Got something in your medical history that first responders should know about if you call 911? Things like known drug allergies, or the medications you’re on? The iPhone and Apple Watch will soon be able to share this information with first responders automatically (if you opt to let it do so). When a user with […]

The U.K. government is pulling in tech firms to connect family and friends with isolated residents and patients in care via video call devices and services during the COVID-19 crisis. First to join is Facebook, which is supplying up to 2,050 of its Portal video-calling devices for free to hospitals, care homes and other settings, […]

BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has entered clinical […]

When Liliana Pertenava decided to go all-in on crypto by investing $2,000 in a mining rig in 2017, she went so far down the crypto rabbit-hole she decided to make a documentary about it. If you’re locked-down and looking for something to watch, you could do worse than sit down and watch “Crypto Rush,” which […]

Back in 2018 Templafy — which had come up with a way for enterprises to more easily make templates out of standard documents (yes, it’s a thing) — raised an additional $15 million from existing investors as an extension of its earlier Series B round taking it to $40.2 million raised. The company integrates with enterprise infrastructure to […]

The Midwest may not be known as the fashion capital of the world (or even the U.S.), but its place in the consumer retail firmament is secure through L Brands and its Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works subsidiaries. Now, venture investors are investing $17.3 million to establish another tent-pole clothing brand in the […]