Completing almost 8 years at Facebook, Director of Product Management Peter Martinazzi has left the company. His last product, Messenger Day, shipped on Thursday. A Facebook “OG”, Martinazzi was well-liked and respected at the company. He worked with the growth team in some of Facebook’s breakout years before the IPO, and ran all of Messenger product during its modernizing… Read More
from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2mcHjZc Facebook Messenger’s PM director Martinazzi leaves after launching Day Josh Constine http://ift.tt/2naMmyd
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It’s hard to get too worked up about unequal voting rights, which are seen by public market investors as giving founders too much control, while viewed by founders as necessary to protect their companies from short-term shareholders. The reality is that only a minority of companies can command these terms, most famously Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and now Snap. The majority of… 
Prison spending is 5x more than higher education, and ~10 percent of the U.S. prison population is in California. Part of the reason why people return to prison after they are released is because they have no access to education while they’re incarcerated. On today’s Breaking Into Startups episode, we talk about an educational program that is paving the road to success,… 
And a bar called SPiN, where photos of them playing ping-pong have the tech media in a great mood this Friday morning. The reason? At the same time as Houston’s ping-pong birthday fun, SPiN was also holding a (wait for it… it’s totally worth it:) “Babes & Balls” party with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as the theme. 
Verizon Ventures and R/GA are announcing a new program called the Verizon Media Tech Venture Studio. Stephen Plumlee, R/GA’s global COO and managing partner of R/GA Ventures, explained that the interactive agency’s “venture studios” started out similar to other startup accelerator programs, but they’ve expanded to provide access to “financial capital… 
On the heels of acquiring data science community Kaggle, Google is launching a machine learning competition of its own for startups. Google is targeting early stage companies taking an innovative approach to machine learning. The competition is being run in partnership with seven venture capital firms that include Sequoia, KPCB, GV, Data Collective, Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz… 
Facebook’s attempts to clone Snapchat know no limit. The social networking giant is in the enviable position of owning a number of the world’s most used internet services and applications. Facebook the social network is closing in on two billion registered users — a level of global reach that is unprecedented in history — while its Messenger app counts one billion… 
Food delivery startups abound in the U.S., but few of them deliver to customers in second cities and smaller towns. From early pioneers like Grubhub to newer services like DoorDash, food delivery businesses have tended to focus on urban areas with a high concentration of restaurants and people who frequently order takeout. Now, New Orleans Saints Quarterback, philanthropist and angel… 
Hot on the heels of rolling out its own version of Twitter, called Pulse, video game streaming site Twitch today announced its new desktop application, Twitch Desktop App. This is actually a rebranding of Curse App – an application Twitch acquired from the video game community and software maker Curse last year. Twitch says the now “enhanced” app will include community… 
As competition in the live streaming space heats up, Facebook has scored a significant deal that will allow it to stream at least 22 live Major League Soccer matches on its social network. Through a collaborations with both MLS and Univision Deportes, Facebook gained the rights to stream the 2017 MLS regular season matches in English, as well as enhance the video content with various… 
It’s rare that I quote a company’s marketing tagline outright but PassivDom, makers of an “autonomous 3D-printed mobile house” sounds pretty darn rad. The Ukrainian company wants to create mobile homes that can be made anywhere and are completely self-powered. Max Gerbut, a Ph.D. Solid State Physics, built the houses in the Ukraine and is working on spreading the word.… 
In preparation for Disrupt New York in May I’m going to hold a few pitching workshops in New York for you all. We’ll listen to and critique ten pitches on March 13th at 7pm at the Knotel space at 22 West 38th Street, 4th Floor. This is an informal pitch-off but the two best teams will get two tickets to Disrupt New York and the undying admiration of millions of people (actually… 
It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behind. The difference is this thread was mass produced from fermented microbial poop instead and it’s the first product out from materials science startup Bolt Threads. Intrigued? We first wrote about Bolt’s zany ambitions to build a spider silk factory… 
Job finder app, JobToday, has inked a new media for equity deal worth $35 million. 
Startups in the UK will be hoping for better performance from the local broadband market after telecoms regulator Ofcom agreed a deal with the country’s largest broadband provider, BT, to legally separate Openreach: aka the division of BT that builds and maintains the broadband infrastructure. 
Chowbotics Inc. has landed $5 million in a Series A round of venture funding to develop what it’s calling food service robots. These are machines designed to prepare food in restaurants, cafeterias, hotels, or food courts in airports, malls and hospitals. The company’s flagship product, Sally, is a salad-making robot that uses 20 different food canisters to prepare and… 
Ever wonder how design has helped drive success for businesses like Airbnb, Facebook, Slack and IBM? How about how their teams are structured? How they operate? What their processes look like? High Resolution is bringing clarity to these questions, and we’re doing it 25 times. We’re sitting down with 25 masters of the digital design industry to learn how they approach,… 
On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on… 
The Kairos Society isn’t just trying to bring the next generation of entrepreneurs together — it’s investing in their companies, too. The organization today announced a seed fund called Kairos Society Ventures, and the portfolio already includes Abaris (which offers a private-sector alternative to social security), Brazilian education startup Me Salva, Colombian… 
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