HTC stopped innovating on smartphones, new CEO admits

{rss:content:encoded} HTC stopped innovating on smartphones, new CEO admits https://ift.tt/30PHrlJ https://ift.tt/2IGkKKz October 06, 2019 at 01:57AM Several months back, we invited HTC cofounder and CEO Cher Wang to appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Sometimes, however, life happens. Two weeks ago, the company announced that Wang would be stepping down from the role, which would immediately be filled by longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitres. Thankfully, the former Orange exec also agreed to appear on stage at this week’s event. Maitres took the...

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And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2019 is… Render

At the very beginning, there were 20 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner. Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: OmniVis, Orbit Fab, Render,...

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HTC’s new CEO discusses the phonemaker’s future

{rss:content:encoded} HTC’s new CEO discusses the phonemaker’s future https://ift.tt/30Rzsoh https://ift.tt/31LX2DT October 05, 2019 at 12:00AM On September 17, HTC announced that cofounder Cher Wang would be stepping down as CEO. In her place, Yves Maitre stepped into the role of Chief Executive, after more than a decade at French telecom giant, Orange. It’s a tough job at an even tougher time. The move comes on the tail of five consecutive quarterly losses and major layoffs, including a quarter of the company’s staff, which were let go in July...

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$35M-funded Omni rentals in acqui-hire talks with Coinbase

Physical storage-turned-rentals startup Omni is dealing with layoffs today, two sources familiar with the situation tell TechCrunch. Omni just shed seven operations team members. The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack. Omni’s rental business was doing poorly without enough users paying a few bucks to borrow a tent, bike or power drill. Omni had planned to launch a white-labeled platform allowing brick-and-mortar merchants to operate and market their own rental business. But...

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How ‘the Internet broke America’ with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.” That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics,...

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Annual Extra Crunch members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for annual members of Extra Crunch. Starting today, qualified annual members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits. You also must be a startup founder to claim this Extra Crunch community perk. AWS is the premier service for your application hosting needs, and we want to make sure our community is well-resourced to build. We understand that hosting and infrastructure costs can be a major hurdle for tech startups, and we’re hoping that this offer will help better support your team. What’s...

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Snap CEO isn’t expecting much from Facebook antitrust investigations

Facebook’s relentless feature copy of Snapchat has been seen as one of the chief examples of the company’s competitive overreach, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel isn’t sure whether antitrust activity from the government is going to change the company’s near-term prospects of competing with Instagram. “I mean the history of antitrust would basically say that these investigations last like seven to 10 years or something like that and that basically nothing happens,” Spiegel said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. “I think a lot can change in the seven to...

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As Sinai Ventures returns first fund, partner Jordan Fudge talks new LA focus

At age 27, Jordan Fudge is quietly making a splash in the VC world. Fudge is the managing partner of Sinai Ventures, a multi-stage VC fund that manages $100 million and has more than 80 portfolio companies including Ro, Drivetime, Kapwing, and Luminary. His 2017 investment in Pinterest — a secondary shares deal from his prior firm that was rolled into Sinai when he spun out — will have returned the value of Sinai’s Fund I by itself once the lockup on shares expires next week. Fudge and co-founder Eric Reiner, a Northwestern University classmate,...

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Daily Crunch: Facebook faces government pressure over encryption

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Facebook is being leaned on by US, UK, Australia to ditch its end-to-end encryption expansion plan U.S. Attorney General William Barr, acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel and Australia’s minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, have co-signed an open letter to Facebook calling on the company to halt its...

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Ellen Pao calls out Twitter’s ‘public town square’ model as flawed

Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, who has been working to foster diversity, inclusion and ethics in the tech industry, called out Twitter’s “public square” model as flawed — and a decision that indicates a lack of ethical consideration, on Twitter’s part. The topic of Twitter came up on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 this morning, when Pao was asked her opinion as to whether Twitter should make exceptions to its platform rules for public figures — like President Trump, for example. She said doesn’t believe that it should. And not just because...

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Amazon’s Prime Video app disappears from the App Store

{rss:content:encoded} Amazon’s Prime Video app disappears from the App Store https://ift.tt/2LJCXsq https://ift.tt/2YkqzD8 October 04, 2019 at 06:16PM In what will hopefully turn out to be just a mistake, the Amazon Prime Video app has disappeared from the Apple App Store, making it unavailable for new downloads or updates to users both on iOS and Apple TV. Twitter users began to tweet to Amazon for help about the problem on Friday morning, to which Amazon’s support channels have yet to reply. The app’s disappearance was earlier reported by AppleInsider,...

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Google-backed Dunzo raises $45M to expand its hyperlocal delivery startup in India

An Indian startup that is increasingly posing a threat to established food and grocery delivery businesses and e-commerce giants just closed a new financing round to expand its business in the nation. Bangalore-based Dunzo said today it has raised $45 million from Google, Lightbox Ventures, STIC Investment and STIC Ventures, and 3L Capital in a new financing round. The round, dubbed Series D, valued the startup at about $200 million, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startup has raised $81 million to date. Dunzo, a four-year-old...

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Stephen Curry invests in Guild Education

Stephen Curry, along with SC 30, Inc. President Bryant Barr, just announced an investment in Guild Education, which helps Fortune 1000 companies, like Disney and Loews, offer debt-free degrees to their employees. “We pioneered what we call education as a benefit,” Guild Education co-founder and CEO Rachel Carlson told TechCrunch. “We’re the tech platform and network of non-profit and public universities. We built those things together so that every employee at those companies has access to go back to school with the support of their employer.” Guild...

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Tourlane co-founder Julian Stiefel to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December

Back in May, Tourlane raised $47 million in its ongoing mission to address the complex problems that still exist today around booking group travel. Tourlane has become a major player in this sector. We’re excited to announce that co-founder/co-CEO Julian Stiefel will be speaking at Disrupt Berlin in December! Tourlane works directly with service providers and offers customers flights, accommodations, tours, activities and transfer options in one place, thus saving time when coordinating multiple bookings from different vendors or working with offline...

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Startups ‘are staying private way too long’ says Salesforce founder Marc Benioff

“What public markets do is indeed the great reckoning. But it cleanses [a] company of all of the bad stuff that they have.” That’s Salesforce founder and chief executive officer Marc Benioff talking about the benefits of public markets. It’s something that private companies seem to be ignoring in the go-go days of the current venture capital boom cycle and something that’s led to a lot of the erosion in investor value, says Benioff. “I think in a lot of private companies these days, we’re seeing governance issues all over the place,” says Benioff. The...

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Alteryx acquires machine learning startup Feature Labs

Alteryx, a publicly traded analytics company, announced this morning that it has acquired Feature Labs, a machine learning startup that launched out of MIT in 2018. The company did not reveal the terms of the deal. Co-founder and CEO Max Kanter told TechCrunch at the time of the launch, that company had been based on research at MIT that looked at how to automate the creation of machine learning algorithms. “Feature Labs is unique because we automate feature engineering, which is the process of using domain knowledge to extract new variables from...

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Why San Francisco is still the gold mine for tech startups

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where each week we discuss other people’s copious dollars and lacking sense. This week was special! Kate and Alex at Disrupt where they recorded live in front of an audience. Equity has recorded at Disrupt before. Equity has taped before an audience before. But this was the first time that we taped it at Disrupt and in front of an audience that actually had chairs. Progress! Thanks so much to everyone that came to our live episode of #EquityPod today at #TCDisrupt....

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AI Medical Service raises $42.9 Series B for AI-based software that checks endoscopy scans for signs of cancer

AI Medical Service, a Tokyo-based company developing AI-based software to help detect gastric cancer, announced today that it has raised a $42.9 million Series B. Investors include Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. The funding will be used for clinical trials of its software, which looks for signs of cancer in real-time during endoscopies, product development and overseas expansion. This brings AI Medical Service’s total funding so far to $57 million, including a previous round of $9 million from the...

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Here are the five Startup Battlefield finalists at Disrupt SF 2019

Over the past two days, 20 startups have taken the stage at Disrupt SF, laying out their visions, demonstrating their technology and answering questions from our expert judges. The startups came from all across the world, and they’re tackling industries ranging from cholera detection to orbital refueling. Now we’ve taken the judges’ feedback and chosen five finalists — who will be presenting tomorrow, October 4, for a new group of judges. The ultimate winner will take home $100,000, equity-free, as well as receive temporary ownership of the Disrupt...

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Zuckerberg says Facebook will sue to stop EU’s global content takedowns

{rss:content:encoded} Zuckerberg says Facebook will sue to stop EU’s global content takedowns https://ift.tt/2oNtNSM https://ift.tt/2LHZAgT October 04, 2019 at 01:40AM Facebook plans to challenge Europe’s top court, which today ruled that EU countries can order Facebook to globally remove content that violates local laws. Facebook currently complies with proper legal requests to remove content that breaks a nation’s laws, but can leave it up for global viewers if the post doesn’t violate its Community Standards. But today during a livestreamed...

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Zuckerberg says Facebook will sue to stop EU’s global content takedowns

Facebook plans to challenge Europe’s top court, which today ruled that EU countries can order Facebook to globally remove content that violates local laws. Facebook currently complies with proper legal requests to remove content that breaks a nation’s laws, but can leave it up for global viewers if the post doesn’t violate its Community Standards. But today during a livestreamed Q&A with Facebook employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “This is something I expect us and other companies will be litigating.” Live from our weekly internal...

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