blogger better: 2019-05-26

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Twitter takes down ‘a large number’ of Chinese-language accounts ahead of Tiananmen Square anniversary

Twitter has suspended a large number of Chinese-language user accounts, including those belonging to critics of China’s government. It seems like a particularly ill-timed move, occurring just days before thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4. “A large number of Chinese @Twitter accounts are being suspended today,” wrote Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the U.S.-based publication China Change. “They ‘happen’ to be accounts critical of China, both inside and outside China.” Cao then went on to highlight a number of the...

Startups net more than capital with NBA players as investors

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Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s noteworthy venture capital deals, funds and trends. Before I dive into this week’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the sudden uptick in beverage startup rounds. Before that, I noted an alternative to venture capital fundraising called revenue-based financing. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about...

Groupon cofounder Eric Lefkofsky just raised another $200 million for his newest company, Tempus

When serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky grows a company, he puts the pedal to the metal. When in 2011 his last company, the Chicago-based coupons site Groupon, raised $950 million from investors, it was the largest amount raised by a start-up, ever. It was just over three years old at the time, and it went public later that same year. Lefkofsky seems to be stealing a page from the same playbook for his newest company Tempus. The Chicago-based genomic testing and data analysis company was founded a little more than three years ago, yet it has already...

Jumia may be the first startup you’ve heard of from Africa. But the e-commerce venture that recently listed on the NYSE is definitely not the first or last word in African tech. The continent has an expansive digital innovation scene, the components of which are intersecting rapidly across Africa’s 54 countries and 1.2 billion people. When measured by monetary values, Africa’s tech ecosystem is tiny by Shenzen or Silicon Valley standards. But when you look at volumes and year over year expansion in VC, startup formation, and tech hubs, it’s one...

After a decade in the peculiar world of venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz managing director Scott Kupor has seen it all when it comes to the do’s and dont’s for dealing with Valley VCs and company building. In his new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road (available on June 3rd), Scott offers up an updated guide on what VCs actually do, how they think and how founders should engage with them. TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos will be sitting down with Scott for an exclusive conversation on Tuesday, June 4th at 11:00 am PT. Scott, Connie...

According to the startups at Factory Berlin, it’s not just another coworking space. After all, the company took its name from Andy Warhol’s famous factory in New York City, and it describes itself as “Europe’s largest club for startups.” Late last year, we toured Factory Berlin’s five-story, 14,000 square meter location in Görlitzer Park. Yes, it’s a building where startups can rent workspace, but as part of the tour, we had a chance to talk to several entrepreneurs, and everyone described it as a real community. “Being part of the community,...

For a cybersecurity company, Bugcrowd relies much more on people than it does on technology. For as long as humans are writing software, developers and programmers are going to make mistakes, said Casey Ellis, the company’s founder and chief technology officer in an interview TechCrunch from his San Francisco headquarters. “Cybersecurity is fundamentally a people problem,” he said. “Humans are actually the root of the problem,” he said. And when humans made coding mistakes that turn into bugs or vulnerabilities that be exploited, that’s where Bugcrowd...

Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could potentially expand the feature to synchronize playback so you’d actually hear the same notes at the same time, but for now it’s a just a shared queue. Social Listening could give Spotify a new viral growth channel, as...

{rss:content:encoded} Spotify is building shared queue Social Listening https://tcrn.ch/2W5QlJk https://tcrn.ch/2wyaqxm May 31, 2019 at 04:11PM Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could potentially expand the feature to synchronize playback so you’d actually...

Foursquare buys Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of $150M in new funding

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc on the heels of a fresh $150 million investment led by the Raine Group. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Placed founder and CEO David Shim will become President of Foursquare. Placed is the biggest competitor to Foursquare’s Attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact (foot traffic to store) of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured over $3 billion...

Password manager maker Dashlane has raised $110 million in its latest round of funding, the company said Thursday. The company said Sequoia Capital led the Series D round, with partner Jim Goetz joining the board. Dashlane also said Lyft executive Joy Howard was appointed as its new chief marketing officer and will start in August. Dashlane said it will invest its latest funds back into its core product and will focus on addressing the needs of its consumer and business customers. Chief executive Emmanuel Schalit said the company is “only scratching...

For more than 25 years the founders of Thrive Earlier Detection have been researching ways to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsy tests. The fruits of that labor from Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos — all professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins University — is CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test that has demonstrated specificity of over 99% in a retrospective study published by Science. By minimizing false positives in cancer screening tools and providing a test with proven accuracy, doctors can take treatment...

{rss:content:encoded} Google Play cracks down on marijuana apps, loot boxes and more https://tcrn.ch/2XgNjTY http://bit.ly/2Wq5cTh May 30, 2019 at 08:54PM On Wednesday, Google href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/following-ftc-complaint-google-rolls-out-new-policies-around-kids-apps-on-google-play/"> rolled out new policies around kids’ apps on Google Play following an FTC complaint claiming a lack of attention to app’s compliance with children’s privacy laws, and other rules around content. However, kids’ apps weren’t the only area being...

Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada. Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work. To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like...

The pace of malicious hacks and security breaches is showing no signs of slowing down, and spend among enterprises to guard against that is set to reach $124 billion this year. That’s also having a knock-on effect on the most innovative cybersecurity startups, which continue to raise big money to grow and meet that demand. In the latest development, a New York startup called BlueVoyant — which provides managed security, professional services and most recently threat intelligence — has picked up $82.5 million in a Series B round of funding...

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is doubling down on India’s burgeoning video market, looking to fight back local rival ByteDance, Google, and Disney to gain its foothold in the nation. The company said today that it is pumping $100 million into Vmate, a three-year-old social video app owned by subsidiary UC Web. Vmate was launched as a video streaming and sharing app in 2016. But in the years since, it has added features such as video downloads and 3-dimensional face emojis to expand its use cases. It has amassed 30 million users globally, and will...

Written in his company’s handbook, there’s one rule for working at Dragos. “Don’t be an asshole.” “The first key to our success is our people and that we hire good people,” said Robert Lee, the company’s founder and chief executive, in an interview with TechCrunch. “I think building a successful team is about having a standard and saying that I expect you all to be adults and not need a million HR policies,” he said. Lee’s management approach revolves around his company’s greatest asset — his staff. With 125 employees, the company has seen rapid...

{rss:content:encoded} Alibaba pumps $100 million into Vmate to grow its video app in India https://tcrn.ch/2KeViwY http://bit.ly/2XeWoNd May 30, 2019 at 06:46PM Chinese tech giant Alibaba is doubling down on India’s burgeoning video market, looking to fight back local rival ByteDance, Google, and Disney to gain its foothold in the nation. The company said today that it is pumping $100 million into Vmate, a three-year-old social video app owned by subsidiary UC Web. Vmate was launched as a video streaming and sharing app in 2016. But in the years...

OpenAI’s co-founders Greg Brockman and Sam Altman aren’t afraid of Terminator robots. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF in October, they’ll tell our audience why it’s the more subtle repercussions of artificial general intelligence like its impact on employment, cyberwarfare, and concentration of power that shake the duo. But the epic potential for the technology to generate widescale abundance for humanity led Altman to leave his gig as the head of iconic accelerator Y Combinator to become CEO of OpenAI. “I really do believe that the work we’re doing at...

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