Yesterday, Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated prototype application to the first group of testers. We’ve now gotten our hands on the app and can see how the current version differs from the build Twitter introduced to the world back in January. While the original version and today’s prototype share many of the same features, there…
In the wake of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s abrupt resignation, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar III announced that Dr. Ned Sharpless will serve as interim commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Since October 2017, Dr. Sharpless served as director of the National Cancer Institute and, before that, worked as a…
Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange today, per SEC documents and confirmation from CEO Sacha Poignonnec to TechCrunch. The valuation, share price and timeline for public stock sales will be determined over the coming weeks for the Nigeria-headquartered company. With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become…
Editor’s note: Starting as a trial, the Extra Crunch Daily newsletter is going to be delivered Tuesday-Saturday, in order to faithfully analyze the happenings in the startup and financial world Monday-Friday. Open AI’s capped returns OpenAI announced yesterday that they are going to be offering a “capped return” security for investors as part of the…
Tesla is using more than $13 million worth of stock to buy trucks and trailers that will transport its electric vehicles to customers, the latest effort by the automaker to improve its logistics and delivery services. Instead of using cash, Tesla issued $13.8 million in stock, a new securities filing posted Monday shows. Tesla used…
OpenAI may not be quite so open going forward. The former nonprofit announced today that it is restructuring as a “capped-profit” company that cuts returns from investments past a certain point. But some worry that this move — or rather the way they made it — may result in making the innovative company no different…
One of the last top-tier venture firms to resist coming to San Francisco has apparently decided that it’s time to make the move. According to a source familiar with the thinking of Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is opening up a San Francisco office later this year. The WSJ had reported on Friday that the firm…
Niantic’s follow-up to the absurdly popular Pokémon GO, the long-awaited Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, has one major drawback: unlike its predecessor, you can’t explain it in a single sentence. There’s so much to do in this game that it may repel some casual players — but while its depths of systems and collectibles may be…
In the age of Amazon, where up to 90 percent of all consumers use it to buy goods and Amazon is accounting for a rapidly-growing percentage of a consumer’s total retail spend (along with other giants like Walmart), direct-to-consumer brands — leveraging social media alongside tech-first apps — are emerging as sometimes surprising, but often effective,…
Alison Johnston didn’t plan to build a startup around death. An early employee at Q&A app Aardvark that was bought by Google, she’d founded tutoring app InstaEDU and sold it to Chegg. She made mass market consumer products. But then, “I had a family member who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I thought about…
