More posts by this contributor Africa Roundup: Terragon’s Asia acquisition, Twiga Foods’ $10M raise, SimbaPay’s China payment service Nigerian logistics startup Kobo360 raises $6M, expands in Africa IBM Research and agtech startup Hello Tractor have developed an AI and blockchain-driven platform for Africa’s farmers. The two companies will pilot the product in 2019 through an ongoing partnership co-financed…
The man who led the Department of Defense for the first two years of the Trump administration will wrap up his tenure early next year. Retired Marine General James Mattis will leave his post by February 28, 2019. Mattis, who retired from the Marine Corps in 2013, received a special congressional waiver to serve as…
WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer…
After a long year fighting underage use of its products, Juul Labs has today struck a deal with Altria Group, the owners of Philip Morris USA and makers of Marlboro cigarettes. The deal values Juul at $38 billion, according to Bloomberg, and injects the company with a fresh $12.8 billion in exchange for a 35…
There’s worrying news from China’s online media world as ByteDance, the $75 billion company behind popular video app TikTok is taking a news site to court for alleged defamation after it published a story about ByteDance’s fake news problem in India. U.S. tech firms have come to rely on media to help uncover issues, but Chinese…
After leaving Elon Musk’s big Boring Company test tunnel reveal Tuesday night, TechCrunch stumbled upon a gem that only the interwebs can provide. And because farting Teslas and an “entirely new system of transport” just wasn’t enough for the last 24-hour Elon Musk news cycle, TechCrunch is sharing what it found. To be clear, this…
Say what you will about MoviePass (and there’s plenty to be said), the company doesn’t give up. The theater ticket subscription service’s production wing has dried the ink on a three picture deal with John McClane himself, Bruce Willis. Deadline, which first broke the news, notes that Willis has a long standing relationship with Randall…
On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for…
Update: Twitter’s response has been added to the end of this post. A new study by Amnesty International and Element AI attempts to put numbers to a problem many women already know about: that Twitter is a cesspool of harassment and abuse. Conducted with the help of 6,500 volunteers, the study, billed by Amnesty International…
Smart security camera maker Lighthouse AI is calling it a day. The news, first reported by The Information, has since been confirmed by CEO Alex Teichman. “I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished – delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing,” the executive…
