How Juul made vaping viral to become worth a dirty $38 billion

A Juul is not a cigarette. It’s much easier than that. Through devilishly slick product design I’ll discuss here, the startup has massively lowered the barrier to getting hooked on nicotine. Juul has dismantled every deterrent to taking a puff. The result is both a new $38 billion valuation thanks to a $12.8 billion investment from Marlboro Cigarettes-maker Altria this week, and an explosion in popularity of vaping amongst teenagers and the rest of the population. Game recognize game, and Altria’s game is nicotine addiction. It knows it’s been...

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How Juul made vaping viral to become worth a dirty $38 billion

A Juul is not a cigarette. It’s much easier than that. Through devilishly slick product design I’ll discuss here, the startup has massively lowered the barrier to getting hooked on nicotine. Juul has dismantled every deterrent to taking a puff. The result is both a new $38 billion valuation thanks to a $12.8 billion investment from Marlboro Cigarettes-maker Altria this week, and an explosion in popularity of vaping amongst teenagers and the rest of the population. Game recognize game, and Altria’s game is nicotine addiction. It knows it’s been...

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The top smartphone trends to watch in 2019

{rss:content:encoded} The top smartphone trends to watch in 2019 https://tcrn.ch/2Byvk1M https://tcrn.ch/2T9y64N December 22, 2018 at 05:15PM This was a bad year for the smartphone. For the first time, its seemingly unstoppable growth began to slow. Things started off on a bad note in February, when Gartner recorded its first year-over-year decline since it began tracking the category. Not even the mighty Apple was immune from the trend. Last week, stocks took a hit as influential analyst Ming-Chi Kuo downgraded sales expectations for 2019. People...

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Facebook’s fact-checkers toil on

Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s a failure, but because fact-checking is boring and thankless — and being done quietly and systematically by people who are just fine with that. The “falling apart” narrative was advanced...

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Crowdfunded developer of space sim Star Citizen takes on $46M in funding at nearly $500M valuation

The story of the game Star Citizen and Cloud Imperium, the company developing it, is almost too ludicrous to believe: a crowdfunding effort to create a space sim of unparalleled size and realism, raising hundreds of millions, with backers paying thousands for ships and gear in a game that’s years from release. Yet it’s real enough that it just pulled in $42 million in private funding to help bring it closer to release. Star Citizen began as the brainchild of Chris Roberts, architect of the Wing Commander series and other well-received space games....

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Bounce raises $1.2M to tap local retailers for short-term storage

If you’ve ever found yourself lugging a big suitcase from meeting to meeting, a startup called Bounce could make your life easier. Using Bounce, you’ll be able to pay for short-term storage at hotels, dry cleaners and other local businesses. The San Francisco-based startup is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investors including Structured Capital managing partner Jillian Manus, Seabed VC, Airbnb general counsel Rob Chesnut and Canadian entrepreneur Michael Hyatt. CEO Cody Candee (pictured above with his co-founder...

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Layer1 wants to thrive in the age of the crypto crash

A year ago, crypto was reaching ever new highs, and I was talking about whether ICOs would supplant the VC funding round and warning about Kim Jong Un’s crypto trading operations. And then the world turned upside down. Crypto prices are near rock bottom prices, with Bitcoin hanging around $4,000 and Ethereum around $113, down from their highs earlier this year of around $16,600 and $1,400 respectively. While that has put a dampener on the enthusiasm of a lot of cryptocurrency retail investors, the bigger question is how do institutional players...

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CherryHome raises $5.2M to apply AI to home care cameras, detecting behavior changes

A new startup using AI to look after elderly people at home has raised a new round of funding to apply its platform to detect changes in gait or behavior, falls or stumbles. In other words, it could start to predict changes in long-term health. CherryHome, the home AI security system created by startup Cherry Labs, has raised $5.2 million in funding from GSR Ventures to drive the technology’s use for in-home senior care. CherryHome uses its proprietary computer vision algorithms to interpret camera data into virtual “skeletons.” These are used...

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Spot is a cryptocurrency app to control all your wallets and exchange accounts

{rss:content:encoded} Spot is a cryptocurrency app to control all your wallets and exchange accounts https://tcrn.ch/2Sa4dRK https://tcrn.ch/2AalwLc December 21, 2018 at 07:14PM Meet Spot, a beautifully-designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies. “Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker — we went a bit overboard with this feature,”...

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Spot is a cryptocurrency app to control all your wallets and exchange accounts

Meet Spot, a beautifully-designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies. “Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker — we went a bit overboard with this feature,” co-founder and CEO Edouard Steegmann told me. “Eventually, we want to become the app to manage all your cryptos, a sort of Revolut but with a crypto DNA.” When you first install...

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Join us in Las Vegas during CES

We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street on Wed, January 9, 2019 between 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST. There are only 200 tickets so if you want to come please pick one up ASAP. The meetup is open to everyone so head over if you’d like to talk tech. You can pick up a ticket...

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Twitter stock down after analyst calls it “Harvey Weinstein of Social Media”

Twitter was down 11 percent today after a Citron Research report called the platform, the “Harvey Weinstein of social media” and set a low target price of $20. As of publishing today, the stock was down over 11 percent at $29.29 a share. In their report Citron did not mince words, basing their conclusions on an Amnesty International Report on abuse on the Twitter platform. “Citron has been following Twitter for years and when we read the just published piece from Amnesty International, we immediately knew the stock had become uninvestable...

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Zynga to acquire Small Giant Games, the maker of Empires & Puzzles, for $700M

Social game developer Zynga has entered into an agreement to acquire Small Giant Games, the startup behind the popular mobile game Empires & Puzzles, in a deal expected to total $700 million. Zynga, which has tumbled since its 2011 Nasdaq initial public offering, will initially acquire 80 percent of Small Giant Games for $560 million, composed of $330 million in cash and $230 million of unregistered Zynga common stock. Zynga will fund part of the transaction with a $200 million credit facility. “We’ve been impressed by the quality and...

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WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem

{rss:content:encoded} WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem https://ift.tt/2CpfGY6 https://ift.tt/2Bfz6Qy December 20, 2018 at 08:54PM WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer invite links to join rings...

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WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem

WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active. TechCrunch’s...

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