As U.S. President Trump preps for a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Twitter doesn’t want you to forget to tweet about it under the right hashtag. In a choice that seems to make light of a lot of really quite serious things at once, Twitter is promoting its new #TrumpKimSummit emoji for
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages were retracted from the inboxes of some users, six sources told TechCrunch in April. Facebook quickly tried to normalize that breach of trust by claiming it would give everyone the ability to unsend messages in the coming months. We haven’t heard a word about it since, and Facebook told me it
Facebook may have disbanded its “Trending” news section, but the social network is not abandoning its media company ambitions, despite whatever CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to Congress. In fact, the opposite of “not being a media business” is now occurring: Facebook is directly paying news publishers to create video, even as it claims its focus
At CES in January I was pleasantly surprised by the LifeDoor, a smart home gadget that’s actually worth having. These little boxes automatically close doors when smoke detectors go off, inhibiting the spread of fire and smoke. The company is heading to KickStarter to fund the production version of the device, which has several improvements
Prøhbtd, a startup that CEO Drake Sutton-Shearer said is designed to “build a bridge” between the cannabis industry and mainstream culture, is announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. It’s not the only cannabis-focused digital media company out there; I wrote about the initial funding for Herb last year. But Sutton-Shearer
Last week TechCrunch reported Instagram will launch a long-form video hub, with a tentative June 20th launch date. Now Instagram is asking reporters to RSVP for a June 20th “special event,” confirming our scoop’s date. The invitation simply reads “Instagram has some news to share, and we want you to be the first to hear
Byton, a Chinese electric car startup, has secured a $500 million Series B funding round to fuel the development of smart, connected cars. Investors include FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. Byton also announced the opening of a new HQ in Nanjing, China. This is on top of Byton’s research and development center in Santa Clara,
San Jose-based Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed $250M Series D funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, bringing its total raised to date to $410M. The enterprise software company offers a hyperconverged data platform for storing and managing all the secondary data created outside of production apps. In a press release today it notes this
In a DevOps world, the operations part of the equation needs to be on call to deal with issues as they come up 24/7. We used to use pagers. Today’s solutions like PagerDuty and VictorOps have been created to place this kind of requirement in a modern digital context. Today, Splunk bought VictorOps for $120
Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: It’s buying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as
New UK early stage VC firstminute Capital launched in June last year to the tune of $60m, with European VC Atomico as its first cornerstone investor. They were joined by 30 unicorns founders from Europe and the US. Last September they brought in the huge China-based company, Tencent reaching a fund size of $85m. Today
A month after it filed for a much-anticipated Hong Kong IPO, Xiaomi has revealed a little more financial information after a monster 621-page document disclosed a $1.1 billion (seven billion RMB) loss for the first quarter of the year. The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100 billion,
LIV Watches is a crowdfunding darling with a number of Kickstarted watches under its belt. Now it’s offering a unique set of watches to backers, including the Liv Genesis GX-AC, an automatic chronograph with date. The watch runs a Sellita Caliber SW500, visible through the see-through back, and features a screw down crown and massive
Elon Musk’s The Boring Company handed out the first batch of flamethrowers, and I was on the list. Subscribe to CNET: https://www.youtube.com/user/cnettv …
Next week professional services firm Accenture will be launching a new tool to help its customers identify and fix unfair bias in AI algorithms. The idea is to catch discrimination before it gets baked into models and can cause human damage at scale. The “AI fairness tool”, as it’s being described, is one piece of
For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out of the tap. But for billions it’s not that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water
I just installed the iOS 12 developer beta, and here’s my very first time running through the new features. As this is beta software, the final version is subject to …
Sometimes you acquire a company for the assets and sometimes you do it for the talent. Today Workday announced it was buying Rallyteam, a San Francisco startup that helps companies keep talented employees by matching them with more challenging opportunities in-house. The companies did not share the purchase price or the number of Rallyteam employees
This week’s stories include rumblings of a standalone Jared Leto Joker movie, all the E3 leaks you can shake a stick at and a huge deal for Jordan Peele’s …
Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate connected to Alibaba which operates the Alipay mobile payment service, has confirmed that it has closed a Series C funding round that totals an enormous $14 billion. The rumors have been flying about this huge financing deal for the past month or so, with multiple publications reporting that Ant
“‘You Are Now Connected On Messenger’ Is The Worst Thing On Facebook” BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos correctly pointed out in a story yesterday. When you friend someone on Facebook or Messenger, or an old friend joins Messenger, you often get one of these annoying notifications. They fool you into thinking someone actually wants to chat with
Tokyo-headquartered Rakuten, Japan’s answer to Amazon, is acquiring the Silicon Valley mobile ordering and pickup startup Curbside, the companies announced today. Terms of the all-cash deal were not disclosed, but Curbside had previously raised between $40 million and $50 million from investors including CVS, Index Ventures, Sutter Hull Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Chicago
The newest BlackBerry phone packs a better physical keyboard, but is that something people want in 2018? For more info, check out CNET’s BlackBerry …
At Apple’s WWDC 2018 — an event some said would be boring this year with its software-only focus and lack of new MacBooks and iPads — the company announced what may be its most important operating system update to date with the introduction of iOS 12. Through a series of Siri enhancements and features, Apple
Essential has been nearly radio silent since reports surfaced late last month that Andy Rubin was looking for a buyer for his hardware startup. The company didn’t really confirm or deny the rumors — or say much else for that matter. A few weeks later, the company does have some news — but it’s not
In May, Facebook teased a new feature called 3D photos, and it’s just what it sounds like. However, beyond a short video and the name, little was said about it. But the company’s computational photography team has just published the research behind how the feature works and, having tried it myself, I can attest that
Stitch Fix, one of last year’s high-profile IPOs, has had a bumpy ride for the past few quarters — but it blew out expectations this afternoon for its most recent quarter, and the stock went absolutely nuts. There’s also a ton of news coming out from the company today, including the hire of a new
Facebook wants a cut of the 3+ hours per week that young adult video gamers spend watching other people play. So today it launched Fb.gg — as in the post-competition courtesy of saying “good game” — a destination where viewers can find a collection of all the video games streaming on Facebook. Fb.gg will show
Facebook has another privacy screw-up on its hands. A bug in May accidentally changed the suggested privacy setting for status updates to public from whatever users had set it to last, potentially causing them to post sensitive friends-only content to the whole world. Facebook is now notifying 14 million people around the world who were
M17 Entertainment, a Taipei-based live streaming and dating app group, priced its IPO this morning on the NYSE and was expected to open trading today according to their final press release. But with just a little more than two hours to go before market closing, it’s still not trading, and no one seems to know