After months of back-and-forth negotiations, Washington moved rapidly this past week to fend off the increasing transcendence of China’s tech industry, with Congress passing expanded national security controls over M&A transactions and the Trump administration heaping more pressure on China with threats of increased tariffs. We’ve been following the reforms to CFIUS — the Committee…
Portal founder Jonathan Swerdlin is just the latest media pundit to point to advertising as the root cause of the industry’s problems. But he’s not content to diagnose the illness — he thinks he’s created a cure. “Digital media has become toxic, in part, because of advertising,” Swerdlin said. “The unmet and unarticulated need is…
Lemonade, the New York-based insurance platform, looks set to drop the lawsuit it filed against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company Wefox, and Wefox founder Julian Teicke. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of NY, alleged that Wefox reverse engineered Lemonade to create ONE, infringed Lemonade’s intellectual property, violated the…
EA became the subject of online scrutiny this week when it was discovered that the gaming giant deleted a reference to Colin Kaepernick on the soundtrack for Madden 19. The former 49ers quarterback was name-checked by rapper Big Sean on a verse of the YG song “Big Bank,” only to have the mention deleted. The…
Foundry Group, the Boulder, Colo.-based venture firm co-founded 11 years ago by startup whisperer Brad Feld, has raised a $750 million seventh fund to target early-stage and growth-stage companies, as well as to invest in other venture funds. It sounds like — and is — a lot of money, though the firm notes that it encompasses all of its…
We’re stoked about hosting our first Startup Battlefield in Beirut, where we’ll showcase 15 amazing early-stage startups across the Middle East and North Africa. There’s nothing we love more than learning about, reporting on and supporting creative entrepreneurs in a growing tech startup ecosystem. TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place on October 3, and…
Uproxx Media Group — owner of sites like HitFix, Dime and Uproxx itself — has been acquired. The Uproxx site focuses on entertainment and pop culture news, and was founded back in 2008. It was bought by Woven Digital in 2014, which eventually rebranded as Uproxx. Like many digital media companies, it includes both a…
Yesterday, Spotify became the third tech platform in just over a week to take a stance on Alex Jones’s controversial far-right and conspiracy theorist content. The streaming service removed several Infowars podcast episodes due to their violation of the policy against hate content that Spotify released in May. This action follows strikes given against Jones by both…
Comcast and Amazon today announced a new partnership that will see Amazon’s Prime Video service integrated into Comcast’s Xfinity TV set-top boxes. This is the first time that Prime Video content would be added to a cable operator’s platform in the U.S.. It’s also a particularly interesting choice on Comcast’s part, given that Amazon is directly…
A mere sprinkling of autonomous vehicles exist in a few dozen cities today. A smattering in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. A dusting in the greater Phoenix area and Pittsburgh. A few drops in Boston, Detroit, Gothenburg, Shenzhen and Singapore. And none of them—at least not yet—have been deployed as a true commercial enterprise. While…
