Walmart is doubling down on its technology innovations in its brick-and-mortar stores in an effort to better compete with Amazon. The retailer today announced the expanded rollout of several technologies – ranging from in-store Pickup Towers to help customers quickly grab their online orders to floor scrubbing robots. These jobs were, in many cases, previously…
Cryptocurrency mining has become the latest target for the Chinese government seeking to phase out industries considered a drag on the country’s economy. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the top economic planning agency in the world’s largest market for bitcoin mining, released on Monday a list of sectors it plans to promote, restrict…
Zoom, the only profitable unicorn in line to go public, priced its initial public offering at between $28 and $32 per share Monday morning. The video conferencing business plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ZM.” Zoom, valued at $1 billion in 2017, initially filed to go public in March. According to…
Eleven democratic senators, led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), have penned a letter to Juul Labs, asking a series of questions around the product’s marketing, its effectiveness as a tool to help people quit smoking combustible cigarettes, sales figures and, perhaps most importantly, more information on the deal that gave Altria a minority stake in…
As more universities turn to offering online degrees to expand their student bodies by way of cyberspace, one of the pioneers in enabling that trend has made an acquisition to expand into new territory around skills training and continuing education. 2U, which helps build online degree programs for a number of top universities, is paying $750…
Source Code Capital, the venture capital firm that’s backed some of China’s most prominent tech unicorns and boasts a network of high-profile investors and founders, announced Monday it has closed a new $570 million fund as it continues to hunt down early to mid-stage companies. The latest close catapults Source Code’s capital under management to…
Chikai Ohazama Contributor Chikai Ohazama is the founder and CEO of Muxgram, which offers messaging products like the upcoming Sunday Beagle. He previously co-founded Keyhole (Google Earth/Maps) and held leadership roles at Google for 11 years. When I first came out to California, one of my favorite places to go for sushi was in downtown…
Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and buying homes is notoriously expensive. This is where Landed, which just raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Initialized Capital, comes in. Landed helps educators buy homes by providing them with down-payment assistance. That’s because many teachers leave their jobs due to a lack of stable housing. In…
Just days ahead of the return of “Game of Thrones,” Roku has forged a deal with HBO that now gives the media device maker the ability to sell the premium channel as a subscription through its dedicated content hub, The Roku Channel. Originally a destination for free and ad-supported movies and TV, The Roku Channel…
Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you. But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud…
