Investors definitely aren’t stoked by the deafening silence coming from Tesla after its chief executive announced in a tweet that he plans to drop a fat sack of cash on public shareholders in a bid to take the company private. Tesla’s shares have tumbled from their post-tweet highs as investors are now left with the embers…
With the growth in cross-border payment services and ‘challenger’ bank cards for consumers, you’d be forgiven for wondering where the options are for small business — where cash is particularly precious. They do exist. One of the newer options is Neat, which is nested in Hong Kong but open for business worldwide. The startup started off…
Open worlds have been a staple of gaming for a long time, but recent titles like Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn have significantly pushed the boundaries of what players expect from their environments. Rockstar, of Grand Theft Auto fame, is looking to make them all look like toys with Red Dead Redemption…
Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks or Target is a task Apple’s virtual assistant can handle with ease. But what about local businesses with names that Siri has never heard, and might mistake for another phrase or the user misspeaking? To handle these, Apple has created libraries of hyper-local place names so Siri never hears…
TaskUs, the business process outsourcing service that moderates content, annotates information and handles back office customer support for some of the world’s largest tech companies, has raised $250 million in an investment from funds managed by the New York-based private equity giant, Blackstone Group. It’s been ten years since TaskUs was founded with a $20,000 investment…
Julie Cart is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who writes for CALmatters, a nonprofit, non-partisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. As crews across California battle more than a dozen wildfires — including the largest in state history — the blazes are spewing enough carbon into the air to undo some of the good done…
Techcrunch’s super-sized Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the only Disrupt event in North America this year — takes place September 5-7. We’re not kidding when we say brace yourself for three unprecedented, program-packed days. In addition to Startup Battlefield — with a special $100,000 prize — the Virtual Hackathon, Startup Alley and a battalion of headlining speakers, we’ve…
Facebook is diving deeper into in-house game development with the launch of its own version of Snapchat’s multiplayer augmented reality video chat games. Today, Facebook Messenger globally launches its first two AR video chat games that you can play with up to six people. “Don’t Smile” is like a staring contest that detects if you…
Amazon today is continuing to make good on its Whole Foods acquisition by introducing a new grocery pickup service at select Whole Foods locations in the U.S. The service, which is available only to Prime members, will initially be available at stores in Sacramento and Virginia Beach, but will expand to more cities through the…
It’s not infrequent these days if you’re a big tech company to receive a brusquely worded letter from a group of Senators or Representatives asking you to explain yourself on some topic or another. One recent such letter sent to Apple and Alphabet asks specifically about practices meant to track users or their interactions with…
