The battle isn’t over car sharing. It’s not over bus sharing, either, though that, too, is a growing focus for investors and automotive companies that are desperate to understand how cities and transportation are changing. This clash is over the latest wrinkle in urban bike-sharing – dockless bike sharing. And it has founders and VCs around the globe seeing dollar signs,… Read More
http://ift.tt/2aPVlLl A new on-demand battle is speeding toward the US, and VCs are seeing dollar signs http://ift.tt/2pnfgcm
The European Union is in the process of reforming copyright laws that date back to 2001, as part of a wider strategy to establish a Digital Single Market across the 28 Member States of the bloc, aiming to break down regional barriers to ecommerce. 
If you have 20 minutes to spare before you begin your weekend — or after, for that matter — you might enjoy this short film about a small team of content moderators in India. Thousands of such people make sure you don’t come across gore and porn while on social or dating sites, so the least you can do is see what their job is like! 
LeEco’s coming to America tale has been fraught with one bad piece of press after another. The company added to the laundry list this week by announcing that it formally pulled the plug on its EcoPass content package earlier this month. 
Facebook proudly announced today that it has — it thinks — put an end to the nefarious doings of a “sophisticated,” “coordinated operation” that has been spamming the site for the last six months. 
As writers resort to attention-getting headlines to maintain readership it’s clear that the educated, mobile, and bored reader is now turning into a listener. While written news continues to flood us from every conceivable angle there is one small, quiet voice still speaking to us from our earbuds: the podcaster speaking truth to power, bullshitting about movies, or spinning long… 
A cute, robotic language tutor called Musio, has made it from crowdfunding campaign to full-fledged product with a debut in stores this week in Japan. Priced at JPY 98,000 (about USD $900), Musio is now sold online through Softbank’s marketplace and Amazon Japan, and through handful of brick-and-mortars stores. Musio’s parent company, AI venture AKAStudy, is the latest startup… 
In March, Google introduced its own parental control software for parents of kids with Android devices called Family Link – but there was a bit of a catch. In order for the system to work, it required that both parent and child use Android. That has now changed, as the parents’ app for configuring and monitoring the child’s device usage has just arrived on iOS devices. That… 
A new application for iMessage called “Let’s Watch It!” introduces an easy way for you to share and watch YouTube or Twitch videos with friends to watch together, as well as react to them, and even voice or video chat while viewing. The iMessage App Store doesn’t yet have a lot of breakout hits at this point, but group video chatting seems to be an exception. Last month,… 
A group of Marines is demanding that Facebook get a grip on the systemic harassment that plagues its female servicemembers. In a thorough, thoughtfully articulated letter, veteran and Not in My Marine Corps co-founder Erin Kirk-Cuomo calls for Sheryl Sandberg to take a personal interest in fighting the spread of nonconsensual photo sharing and gendered harassment on Facebook. 
Baidu is acquiring xPerception, a US startup specialized in computer vision, according to Reuters. Details are sparse, but we know the startup has its own module for object recognition and depth perception that can be deployed on robots and drones. The Chinese tech giant has been active in machine intelligence M&A this year. Back in February it acquired Raven Tech, a Chinese startup… 
Nearly a thousand miles away from Silicon Valley and just west of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, in practically the middle of nowhere, is the tranquil cow town of Grantsville, population 9,617. It is there, in a warehouse the size of a combined eight Walmarts, you’ll find Purple, a direct-to-consumer mattress startup, hard at work prepping hundreds of thousands of pillows, power bases and… 
What will Facebook launch next week at its F8 conference? The schedule reveals plans to give Instagram offline features that are already in testing, opening its Camera Effects Platform to developers so they can create more powerful photo and video overlays for people to use, and a Places Graph for developers to do more with Facebook’s location database beyond the existing APIs. Most of… 
Google is getting into the restaurant delivery and home services businesses – nope, not in the U.S., but rather in parts of India. The company has quietly launched a new app called Areo which currently only works in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, allowing users to order meals from nearby restaurants or schedule appointments with local service professionals, including electricians,… 
Major tech trends tend to draw lots of “dumb money” from investors, and machine intelligence is no exception. Some will lose money on insignificant acqui-hires while others may survive long enough to see their investments die at the hands of open source. But for a smaller list of VCs, machine intelligence presents one of the greatest opportunities for return on investment in the… 
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