Scooter-share, bike-share and ride-hailing are quickly becoming staple commodities in cities all over the world. As companies in those respective spaces try to improve their economics, Zoba is aiming to contribute to those goals by predicting demand for scooters, bikes and, eventually, rides in particular areas. To support Zoba’s mission, the company has raised $3…
A privacy complaint targeting the behavioral advertising industry has a new piece of evidence that shows the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shedding doubt on whether it’s possible to obtain informed consent from web users for the programmatic ad industry’s real-time bidding (RTB) system to broadcast their personal data. The adtech industry functions by harvesting web users’ data,…
Days after a YouTube creator accused the platform of enabling a “soft-core pedophilia ring,” several companies have suspended advertising on the platform, including Nestle, Epic, and reportedly Disney and McDonald’s. Nestle told CNBC that all of its companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, while a spokesperson for Epic, maker of the massively…
Computers have recently gotten much, much better at a somewhat unsettling skill: generating fake human faces. As in, creating an image of a human who has never existed before. We saw the concept go a bit viral this week with ThisPersonDoesNotExist, a website hooked to a machine that generates a new face every few seconds.…
Citymapper is becoming a fintech startup, sort of. The company announced a prepaid card called Citymapper Pass for users based in London. This new product is both a subscription service to aggregate all your transportation subscriptions and a plastic card to pay for your rides. According to Wired, Citymapper will start with two weekly subscription…
China’s largest selfie app maker Meitu has been busy working to diversify itself beyond the beauty arena in China. On Wednesday, the Hong Kong-listed company announced in a filing that it has agreed to pay about HK$2.7 billion ($340 million) for a 31 percent stake in game publishing company Dreamscape Horizon. Dreamscape Horizon, a subsidiary of…
It’s time for another hit off the juice box. Netflix announced today that it will release the remaining eight episodes of “Arrested Development’s” fifth season on March 5, ten months after the first half premiered. In the intervening time, however, the show has dealt with several controversies revolving around accusations of abusive behavior from star…
Under the leadership of its newest chairman, Jay Clayton, the SEC has for the last two years made it clear that it wants more companies to go public already. A new proposal, revealed today, may get it closer to that objective. Specifically, the agency has proposed giving any company that’s exploring a potential IPO a…
Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that he was intending to aggressively scale back plans for the state’s high-speed rail system, which in its most ambitious routing would have connected Sacramento to San Diego. The immediate cause was ballooning costs, which have risen from $33 billion to $77 billion and looked likely to exceed…
Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new UK startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level. Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls “AI triangulation” — simultaneously…
