Startups Weekly: Remote-first work will mean ‘globally fair compensation’

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. Most tech companies base compensation on an employee’s local cost of living, in addition to their skills and responsibilities. The pandemic-era push to remote work seems to be reinforcing that — if you only skim the headlines. For example, Facebook said last week that it would be readjusting salaries for employees who have relocated away from the Bay Area. But Connie Loizos caught up with a few well-placed...

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Jeremy Conrad left his own VC firm to start a company, and investors like what he’s building

When this editor first met Jeremy Conrad, it was in 2014, at the 8,000-square-foot former fish factory that was home to Lemnos, a hardware-focused venture firm that Conrad had cofounded three years earlier. Conrad —  who as a mechanical engineering undergrad at MIT worked on self driving cars, drones and satellites — was still excited about investing in hardware startups, having just closed a small new fund even while hardware was very unfashionable and remains challenging. One investment his team had made around that time was in Airware,...

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4 views on the future of retail and the shopping experience

The global spread of COVID-19 and resulting orders to shelter in place have hit retailers hard. As the pandemic drags on, temporary halts are becoming permanent closures, whether it’s the coffee shop next door, a historic bar or a well-known lifestyle brand. But while the present is largely bleak, preparing for the future has retailers adopting technologies faster than ever. Their resilience and innovation means retail will look and fee different when the world reopens. We gathered four views on the future of retail from the TechCrunch team: Natasha...

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Daily Crunch: Trump takes aim at social media companies

President Trump follows through on his threat to challenge the legal protections enjoyed by social media and internet companies, Magic Leap’s CEO is stepping down and China sees its biggest autonomous driving round yet. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 29, 2020. 1. Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the legal shield that internet companies rely on to protect them from liability for user-created content. Next, we’ll almost certainly see...

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The best investment every digital brand can make during the COVID-19 pandemic

Steve Tan Contributor Steve Tan is a Singapore-based serial entrepreneur and full-stack digital marketer with over 14 years of hands-on experience who is also the CEO and founder of Super Tan Brothers Pte. Ltd, which operates e-commerce, software, logistics, marketing, educational and investment companies around the globe. Intuitively, stores that sell online should be making a killing during the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, everyone is stuck at home — and understandably more willing to shop online instead of at a traditional retailer to...

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Bunq adds donations to charities and tests redesign

Challenger bank Bunq is adding a new feature that lets you donate to charities directly from the app. In addition to that, Bunq is also in the process of redesigning its app. The company is launching a public beta test to get feedback from its users. Other fintech startups, such as Revolut and Lydia, have launched donation features in the past. But in those cases, startups have selected a handful of charities. Bunq has chosen a different approach, as you can create your own donation campaigns in the app. As long your local charity has an IBAN number,...

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How startups can leverage elastic services for cost optimization

Joey Lei Contributor Share on Twitter Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek, a global systems integrator and managed services provider. Prior to joining Synoptek, he was a lead product manager for Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division and was a founding product manager for Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell EMC’s newest generation data protection and data management solution. Due to COVID-19, business continuity has been put to the test for many companies in the manufacturing, agriculture, transport, hospitality, energy...

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Facebook takes on Twitter with Venue, a ‘second screen’ companion for live events

Facebook’s R&D group, NPE Team, is launching a new app for engaging fellow fans around live events, Venue. This is the third new app to launch just this week from Facebook’s internal team focused on experimenting with new concepts in social networking. With Venue, the company aims to offer a digital companion for live events, starting with this Sunday’s NASCAR race. The new app appears to be a challenge to Twitter, which today serves as the de facto “second screen” for commenting on live events and engaging with fellow fans. On Twitter, fans...

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Cisco to acquire internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes

When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company announced it intends to buy another monitoring company, this time snagging internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes. Cisco would not comment on the price when asked by TechCrunch, but published reports from CNBC and others pegged the deal at around $1 billion. If that’s accurate, it means the company...

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Twitter screens Trump’s Minneapolis threat-tweet for glorifying violence

After applying a fact-checking label Tuesday to a misleading vote-by-mail tweet made by US president Donald Trump, Twitter is on a roll and has labeled another of the president’s tweets — this time screening his words from casual view with what it calls a “public interest notice” that states the tweet violated its rules about glorifying violence.  Here’s how the tweet appears without further interaction (second tweet in the below screengrab): The public interest notice replaces the substance of what Trump wrote, meaning a user has to...

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The secret to trustworthy data strategy

Daniel Wu Contributor Dan Wu is a Privacy Counsel & Legal Engineer at Immuta, an automated data governance platform for analytics. He’s advocated for data ethics, inclusive urban innovation, and diversity in TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, and FastCompany. He's helped Fortune 500 companies, governments, and startups with ethical & agile data strategies. He holds a Harvard J.D. & Ph.D. More posts by this contributor As FTC cracks down, data ethics is now a strategic business weapon Market map: the 200+ innovative startups transforming...

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Former Lime exec launches Cabana, a company that merges #vanlife and hotels

Is it glamping on wheels? Hotel #vanlife? It’s Cabana, a new startup from a former Lime executive that’s bringing tricked-out vans with all the amenities of a Holiday Inn hotel room to cities on the West Coast, starting in Seattle. “Because of Lime I spent 54 consecutive weeks on the road staying at hotels,” recalls Scott Kubly, the co-founder and chief executive of Cabana. “I got this bug that there needed to be a better way.” So with the benefit of a few years of startup salary in the bank, Kubly launched Cabana. “The way I would describe it...

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Join GGV’s Hans Tung and Jeff Richards for a live Q&A: June 4 at 3:30 pm EDT/12:30 pm PDT

What does a global mindset look like in a world where most of us no longer travel? And what does it mean to be local when everyone is connected? Those are the first questions we had in mind when we read GGV Capital’s Twitter bio, which asserts that the investing shop with offices in five cities is a “global venture capital firm that invests in local founders.” Certainly, some of its investments are far from home, including Khatabook (based in Bangalore), Keep (Beijing), Coder, (Austin) and Slice (New York City). And those are just GGV deals from...

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BeeHero smartens up hives to provide ‘pollination as a service’ with $4M seed round

Vast monoculture farms outstripped the ability of bee populations to pollinate them naturally long ago, but the techniques that have arisen to fill that gap are neither precise nor modern. Israeli startup BeeHero aims to change that by treating hives both as living things and IoT devices, tracking health and pollination progress practically in real time. It just raised a $4 million seed round that should help expand its operations into U.S. agriculture. Honeybees are used around the world to pollinate crops, and there has been growing demand for...

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Going to war with Twitter, Trump threatens critical social media legal protections

Accusing Twitter of censorship for adding a contextual label to false claims he made about the 2020 election process, President Trump has again declared war on social media companies. After the White House told reporters that the president would soon announce an executive order “pertaining to social media,” the draft of that order is out in circulation. We’ve reviewed the draft, and while its contents are somewhat shocking by the standards of a normal administration, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Trump administration lash out at social...

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