Alphabet’s smart city project is winding down and Google will take over its products. Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced the news in a letter, in which he noted he is stepping down for health-related reasons. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that Sidewalk Labs products will be folded into Google, though Alphabet plans to spin…
Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to law enforcement, has been hit with another order to delete people’s data. France’s privacy watchdog said today that Clearview has breached Europe’s General Data Protection…
Two years into a worldwide pandemic, outfits around the globe are wrestling with how to resume their in-person operations safely. Consider that Apple just scrapped its office-return deadline, while Google, which plans to require its workforce to return to its offices three times a week at some point next year, made it clear to employees…
I’m going to hand it to Hyundai. The company is building some weird robotics, and I’m mostly here for it. In addition to the more straightforward car-building fare you’d expect, the auto giant has also given us a walking car robot or two, some wild drones and whatever this thing is. All in all, Boston…
Olist, a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator, confirmed it is now valued at $1.5 billion after securing $186 million in Series E funding, led by Wellington Management. The new round follows quickly behind a $23 million Series D extension the company announced in April, led by new investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management to bring its total…
Grindr, a hook-up app for gay, bi, trans and queer people, has been fined around $7.1 million (65M NOK) by Norway’s data protection authority for passing user data to advertisers without consent — including highly sensitive information related to users’ sexual orientation. Specifically, the DPA found that Grindr breached Articles 6(1) and 9(1) of Europe’s…
Kenyan startup Wowzi has secured new funding to expand the reach of its platform, which turns social media users into brand influencers, to West and Southern Africa — as it taps the increasing usage of social sites across the continent driven by the proliferation of smartphones and a deepening internet penetration. Wowzi, which connects social…
Jaime Bosch is the co-founder and CEO of Voicemod. In the many conversations around “the metaverse” sparked by the Facebook corporate name transition to Meta, much has focused on the visual elements. What’s hardly mentioned is audio. Yet voice really matters when making a virtual environment come to life. Sometimes, it’s everything. Just ask Spike…
While Coinbase is better known for its cryptocurrency exchange, the company has also been working on a couple of self-custody wallets under the Coinbase Wallet brand. This type of wallets put you in charge of your crypto assets as private keys are stored on your devices. Today, the company is bringing NFTs to the desktop…
Now that the world appears to have settled longer-term into working in a significantly more distributed way in the wake of Covid-19, companies are getting more serious about using tools to manage how their teams operate within those new parameters. Today, a startup that’s addressing that challenge and how it relates specifically to expenses is…
