Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company, the Chinese ride-sharing and transportation giant said today. Didi’s autonomous driving team was created in 2016 and now has more than 200 employees in China and the United States. Didi’s announcement comes about a month after The Information reported that Didi was in talks with…
The growing popularity of 3D printing machines and companies like Thingiverse and Shapeways have given previously unimaginable powers to makers, enabling them to create everything from cosplay accessories to replacement parts. But even though 3D printing has created a new world of customized objects, most of us are still buying clothes off the rack. Now…
Fever, a startup that uses proprietary algorithms to help companies plan events, announced today that it has raised $35 million led by Rakuten Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet giant Rakuten . Other investors in the round, which brings Fever’s total raised to $70 million, included Atresmedia, Accel and Michael Zeisser, the former chairman…
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!…
Good morning! It’s the first day of a new week so you know what that means. It’s time for Hard Fork’s wrap-up of the weekend’s top cryptocurrency and blockchain headlines. Take a look. 1. Owners of Apple’s hotly anticipated credit card will not be able to buy cryptocurrency with it, Reuters reports. A customer agreement…
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…
To be honest, I’m kind of impressed Facebook held out this long. After buying WhatsApp and Instagram several years ago, Facebook has decided it’s time to let everyone know who’s in charge. A report from The Information details Facebook plans to change the names of the apps to ‘Instagram from Facebook‘ and ‘WhatsApp from Facebook.’ The social…
We spend a lot of time around here covering the latest startup fundraises, and for good reason. While capital is certainly an input and not an output, there is nothing quite like the closing of a round of several million in venture capital to prove that yes, the startup I’m working on is at least…
Users reported issues with Instagram and Facebook Sunday morning. [Update as of 12:45 p.m. pacific] Facebook says the outage affecting its apps has been resolved. “Earlier today some people may have had trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps due to a networking issue. We have resolved the issue and are fully back up, we apologize…
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.…
