Startups

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Travis Kalanick appoints Ursula Burns, John Thain to Uber’s board

 Former Uber chief Travis Kalanick has appointed two more people to the ridesharing company’s board.
One of the seats is going to Ursula Burns, former CEO and Chairwoman of Xerox. The other is going to John Thain, who has served as CEOs of CIT Group, Merrill Lynch and the New York Stock Exchange.
A spokesperson for Kalanick provided us with the following statement:
“I am happy to… Read More

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Roku nearly doubles since IPO, up another 13% on day two

 Digital streaming business Roku has soared in its public debut. After pricing its IPO Wednesday at $14 per share, Roku finished its first day of trading at $23.50, up nearly 68%. And by the end of Friday, Roku closed at $26.54, or up 90% in less than 48 hours. The company is now valued at about $2.6 billion. So this must be great news for the company, right? Well, sort of. Read More

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Researcher Emilio Ferrara talks about the rise of fake news and botnets

 Emilio Ferrara has been thinking about botnets for over a decade. As the first social networks climbed out of the mire, he noticed that they were very easy to game. Now, it seems, all of those early tools have finally been weaponized.
I spoke to Ferrara about his research work as well as his fascinating study that found that Twitter bots can be used for good. In this episode of Technopia we… Read More

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Heetch raises $12 million to reboot its ridesharing service

 French startup Heetch has been around for quite a few years. Although things were running smoothly, the company had to start over mostly from scratch. In March 2017, a court in Paris ruled that Heetch had been illegally operating a transportation company. The startup is now rising from the ashes and raising $12 million to fund its new service. Read More

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Apple quietly acquired computer vision startup Regaind

 TechCrunch has learned that Apple has acquired a small French startup called Regaind, according to multiple sources. As always, Apple is very quiet when it comes to acquisitions, but it’s always interesting to learn more about Apple’s interests. We’ve reached out to Apple and the company sent us the following statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time… Read More

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With the Sphero Mini, you get a robotic ball for just $49.99

sphero mini It’s been a busy year for Sphero, with the release of products like R2-D2, Spider-Man and Lightning McQueen. But the robotic toy startup is still making non-licensed, non-tie in products too — including the Sphero Mini, its most affordable toy yet. “We wanted to make Sphero products accessible to everyone,” said co-founder and Chief Software Architect Adam Wilson. The… Read More

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Watch Elon Musk’s keynote where he announced SpaceX’s new rocket and Mars colonization

 Elon Musk gave a keynote address yesterday to the International Aeronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. During the 43 minute talk, which is embedded above, Musk laid out SpaceX’s future including colonizing Mars and building one rocket to rule them all. The talk is fantastic. Elon was Elon and revealed countless details about future SpaceX plans. This is why he’s celebrated… Read More

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Here are the 12 startups in Techstars NYC’s Summer 2017 class

 The 12 startups of Techstars NYC‘s latest class are taking over tonight’s NY Tech Meetup. This “community demo day” is part of Managing Director Alex Iskold attempt to rethink the traditional accelerator demo day. (Don’t worry, the startups will get to meet with investors too, through one-on-one sessions during Techstars’ investor week.) I recently visited… Read More

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Accela gets acquired by Berkshire Partners as it looks to move govtech services to the cloud

 Boston-based private equity shop Berkshire Partners announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Accela — a nearly 20 year old startup that sells regulatory management solutions to government clients. Accela has gone through a troika of CEOs in the last year. Previously acting CEO Mark Jung replaced Maury Blackman last October who had managed the company for about a decade. We… Read More

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