The intelligence community’s annual transparency report revealed a spike in the number of warrantless searches of Americans’ data in 2018. The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28 percent rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications.…
In February 2016, Blake Murray wrote down an idea for a business expense and budgeting platform on the back of a napkin. Today, that’s Divvy, a tech-enabled replacement of monthly expense reports. The company, not to be confused with Divvy Homes or Divvy Bikes, has raised an additional $200 million in venture capital funding as…
At the Open Infrastructure Summit, which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he…
Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street, courtesy primarily of ad revenue shortcomings. The hardware team met with some difficulties, as well, owing in part to a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line, following…
Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference is taking over the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose this week and TechCrunch will be on the ground covering any and all announcements. The week is sure to have its fair share of fireworks as the company’s top brass takes the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s…
The Audi RS 5 Sportback is an animal. Tamed, sure, but not domesticated. It’s important to remember as one day, maybe next week or next year or both, the RS 5 will revert to its natural state and become fervid, wild and unforgiving. The RS 5 sedan shares a similar look to the everyday Audi…
The success of Airbnb — and observations of its acquisitiveness as it continues to scale — has led to a surge of interest among investors in other fast-growing startups in the travel sector. Just last week, Selina, which runs a network of hostel-style work/live accommodations around the world for digital nomads, raised of $100 million at an…
Whatever happened to the ethics of engineering? We’ve seen just one disastrous news story after another these past few years, almost all knowable and preventable. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear power plants melting down. Foreign powers engorging on user data. Environmental testing thrashed. Electrical grids burning states to the ground. The patterns are…
This week, I published a piece called the “The master list of PR DON’Ts (or how not to piss off the writer covering your startup).” The problem, of course, with writing a “master list” is that as soon as you publish it, everyone takes the opportunity to point out all the (hopefully) long-tail stories that…
The last year has been the worst on record in the US for measles outbreaks since the disease was declared ‘eradicated’ in 2000. Even though vaccination rates across the country are still high, (according to the CDC) there remains some communities where disinformation campaigns which claim that ‘vaccines are dangerous’ (often called ‘anti-vaxx’ campaigns) have…
