All U.S. stock markets were down severely today, and tech stocks were hit especially hard, as China retaliated to increasing U.S. tariffs by halting imports on U.S. agricultural goods and finally acceded to market pressures by letting the yuan slide in value against the dollar. At one point, the Dow was down nearly 900 points…
Huawei has almost certainly been working on a software contingency plan for some time now, prepping for a worst case scenario. When the U.S. announced that it was blacklisting the Chinese hardware giant earlier this year, those plans were likely accelerated. One of the things that’s still unclear, however, is what role the company’s Hongmeng…
Sonderangebot! That sounds like a super-cool robotics startup you’d find at Disrupt Berlin 2019, right? But it’s German for special offer — and that’s super cool, too. Our premier tech conference takes place on 11-12 December, and we want to make attending Disrupt Berlin as easy on the budget as possible. Hence, our buy-now-pay-later Sonderangebot!…
Website infrastructure and security services provider Cloudflare will stop providing service to 8chan, wrote Matthew Prince in a blog post, describing the site as a “cesspool of hate.” Service will be terminated as of midnight Pacific Time. “The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic…
A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn. Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P.…
Following a failed attempt in July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the Channel on top of a hoverboard this weekend. Starting his trek in Sangatte in northern France, the journey took 20 minutes, before landing in St. Margarets Bay, England. “For the last five to six kilometers I just really enjoyed it,” Zapata told…
The Entertainment Software Association issued an apology of sorts after making available the contact information for more than 2,000 journalists and analysts who attended this year’s E3. “ESA was made aware of a website vulnerability that led to the contact list of registered journalists attending E3 being made public,” the organization said via statement. “Once…
What founders need to know about pro rata rights Pro rata used to be reasonably simple. Venture investors who bought preferred shares in startups had the right to lock in a certain percentage of equity provided they continued funding the company in the future rounds of financing. But as VCs have raised ever larger funds…
Amazon has tweaked the settings for its Alexa voice AI to allow users to opt out of their voice recordings being manually reviewed by the company’s human workers. The policy shift took effect Friday, according to Bloomberg, which reports that Alexa users will now find an option in the settings menu of the Alexa smartphone…
Approximately 20% of construction costs are wrapped up in fixing errors. Barcelona-based Scaled Robotics wants to minimize the rework by automating progress monitoring with autonomous mobile robots. Leveraging lidar and autonomous vehicle technology (similar to what’s used by Google cars to map the world), Scaled Robotics built a WALL-E doppelgänger to navigate and build maps…
