SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app valued at $2 billion as of 2021, today announced a 40% reduction of its U.S. and China workforce, or around 120 people, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The news was announced on Thursday in an All-Hands meeting attended this evening by SmartNews staff. The…
It hasn’t decided on a name, it’s still on the hunt to fill some important roles, and its early alpha has less than 100 users as of today. But, riding the wave of interest in the current state of Twitter, a startup hoping to disrupt it has raised $1.1 million in funding. T2, the project…
Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively. In a 2019 survey, NewVantage partners found that the percentage of firms identifying themselves as being data-driven declined in each of the past three years, with over half admitting that they’re not competing on…
After years of denials and loathing, Apple may finally be getting around to bringing touchscreens to MacBooks. According to Bloomberg, Apple is actively working on this project and may break away from its long-standing approach of designing a traditional desktop system without a touchscreen. Apple could launch MacBooks with touchscreens by 2025 as a part…
Launch startup ABL Space Systems’ first orbital launch attempt ended in failure Tuesday after all nine engines on the RS1 rocket’s first stage shut down simultaneously. The rocket subsequently hit the launch pad and was destroyed on impact. The rocket took off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island at around 6:27 PM…
British newspaper The Guardian has confirmed that cybercriminals accessed the personal details of U.K. staff members during a ransomware attack last month. The Guardian confirmed the data breach in an update emailed to staff on Wednesday, which the newspaper reported shortly after. The email, signed by the news outlet’s chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief Katharine…
Artificial intelligence startups, and (thanks to GPT and Open AI) specifically those helping humans communicate with each other, are commanding a lot of interest from investors, and today the latest of these is announcing a big round of funding. DeepL, a startup that provides instant translation-as-a-service both to businesses and to individuals — competing with…
Carta, the 11-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit whose core business is selling software to investors to track their portfolios, has sued its former CTO, Jerry Talton, who the company says was fired “for cause” almost three weeks ago, on Friday, December 23. In its lawsuit, Carta is suing Talton for damages, citing “his wrongful and illegal…
A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” labs. “After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory,…
Salesforce has been in the news a lot recently, and largely not for positive reasons. It has been an unusually dramatic and turbulent period for the cloud CRM leader, and the first of the year brought little relief: The company announced last week it was laying off 10% of its approximately 80,000 employees. Layoff news…
