Joseph Flaherty Contributor More posts by this contributor Why the ‘end of the startup era’ could be great for entrepreneurs Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money There’s a seemingly insatiable demand for Theranos content. John Carreyrou’s best-selling book, “Bad Blood,” has already inspired an HBO documentary, The Inventor; an ABC podcast called…
This week, Facebook invited a small group of journalists — which didn’t include TechCrunch — to look at the “war room” it has set up in Dublin, Ireland, to help monitor its products for election-related content that violates its policies. (“Time and space constraints” limited the numbers, a spokesperson told us when he asked why…
Microsoft didn’t rush to bring blockchain technology to its Azure cloud computing platform, but over the course of the last year, it started to pick up the pace with the launch of its blockchain development kit and the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Today, ahead of its Build developer conference, it is going a step further by…
Microsoft today announced that it wants to bring the ease of use of Plug and Play, which today allows you to plug virtually any peripheral into a Windows PC without having to worry about drivers, to IoT devices. Typically, getting an IoT device connected and up and running takes some work, even with modern deployment…
Ahead of its Build conference, Microsoft today released a slew of new machine learning products and tweaks to some of its existing services. These range from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with a number of new APIs and other services in-between. The core theme, here, though, is that Microsoft is continuing its strategy of democratizing…
Meat alternatives are getting a big public market debut with the Beyond Meat public offering, as shares of the company rocketed above their initial list price. The company’s shares surged up 135% in their market opener, valuing the company as high as $3.52 billion. Volatility was so high on the company’s stock that the Nasdaq…
Cedric Kovacs-Johnson launched Flume Health after watching his own family struggle with payments for his sister’s surgery. “When we looked at who was calling the shots [on prices] it was this litany of service providers that was unknown to us and the cost was unknown to us until we got the bill weeks later,” says…
Fitbit’s financial rebound continued in the first quarter, as the company generated $271.9 million in revenue, beating Wall Street expectations of $259.7 million. The good news is almost exclusively the domain of the company’s increased focus on smartwatches, which grew 117% year over year. That, in turn, is thanks to this year’s debut of the…
You expect to lose money gambling, but you don’t really expect to lose it abstaining from gambling. But if you’re a FanDuel user who hasn’t made any bets or deposits for two years, the site will now deduct $3 per month until you put some money on the table. You have to play to win,…
At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today launched Ax and BoTorch, two new open-source AI tools. BoTorch, which, as the name implies, is based on PyTorch, is a library for Bayesian optimization. That’s a pretty specialized tool. Ax, on the other hand, is the more interesting launch, as it’s a general-purpose platform for managing, deploying…
