Uber, the ridesharing behemoth that recently began operating driverless cars and exploring self-flying drone taxis, can’t seem to catch a break these days in the legal arena. The New York State Department of Labor has ruled that two Uber drivers, Jakir Hossain and Levon Alesanian, are indeed employees — not contractors — and therefore eligible to receive unemployment… Read More
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Most won’t have noticed a recent $6.5M Series A for a company called Mobilize, but it’s indicative of a major change occurring in businesses today. Companies’ growing reliance on a distributed workforce have been occupying headlines and podcasts for the past couple of years. However, these conversations must now turn to how companies increasingly depend on partnerships as… Read More
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Consumer virtual reality has a clear new leader today, and it’s the just-launched PlayStation VR. Unequivocally, this is the best VR experience currently available outside of the kinds of high-flying, super secret test rigs that exist out there for army training or whatever that cost millions of dollars. That includes top-of-line hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as… Read More
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mParticle announced today that it has raised $17.5 million in Series B funding. The New York City startup helps marketers collect user data through a variety of services and then funnel that data to other marketing and analytics tools. Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz said this not only reduces integration challenges and technical difficulties, but also helps businesses get a more unified view… Read More
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This morning, fintech startup Affirm announced a new $100 million credit line from Morgan Stanley. The money will go directly to supporting the company’s current financial products that help customers purchase goods and spread their expenses over a period of time. Morgan Stanley is not the first institutional lender to issue a line of credit to the company. In May of 2015, Affirm closed… Read More
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A maker of delivery drones called Zipline began nationwide delivery of blood and other critical medical supplies in Rwanda today, through a partnership with the Rwandan government. The program strikes a hopeful note about drones, following news earlier this week that ISIS fighters had packed a hobbyist drone with explosives in Iraq, killing two Kurdish fighters who captured and disassembled it. Read More
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Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015. However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it would hit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015. We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to… Read More
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It’s been an open secret that Amazon’s AWS division and VMware were going to announce a partnership at a press conference in San Francisco later today. Thanks to VMware mistakenly posting its announcement early, we didn’t have to wait for the afternoon to know what the two companies will announce.
In what is surely a play to get more enterprises to move to AWS over its… Read More
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Facebook wants you to lean back and watch its News Feed videos on your television with a new feature that lets you stream clips via Apple TV, AirPlay devices, Google Chromecast, and Google Cast devices. The move could help Facebook generate more video ad revenue, and increase usage time by giving people the richest possible viewing experience while at home. The feature is now available on iOS… Read More
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Samsung is hoping to keep its customers with incentives, including a $100 credit for Note 7 owners who stick with a Samsung device as their replacement hardware. But carriers are leaving the door open for buyers to pick whatever kind of smartphone they want instead. A new survey conducted by e-commerce agency Branding Brand suggests that a decent number may end up moving to other brands,… Read More
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