Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]
Zoom announced this morning that it has acquired Keybase, a startup with encryption expertise. It did not reveal the purchase price. Keybase, which has been building encryption products for several years including secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains. The company has […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re taking stock of what’s happening to a number of unicorns, both public and private. This is the third time we’ve sat down to document what feels like a wave of unicorn cuts, capped […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. In December of 2019, this column wrote an entry detailing Uber’s micro-mobility efforts. Just six months ago — a mere two quarters — Uber’s Jump team was on the record saying that its parent company […]
You can now debunk thousands of coronavirus-related hoaxes with a few texts on WhatsApp . Poynter Institute, a non-profit organization that supports journalism, today launched a bot on the Facebook -owned service that will allow people across the globe to debunk over 4,000 hoaxes surrounding the pandemic such as whether the infectious disease originated in […]
Since the start of the outbreak, governments and companies have scrambled to develop apps and websites that can help users identify COVID-19 symptoms. India’s largest cell network Jio, a subsidiary of Reliance, launched its coronavirus self-test symptom checker in late March, just before the Indian government imposed a strict nationwide lockdown to prevent the further […]
New vehicles today can produce a treasure trove of data. Without the proper tools, that data will sit undisturbed, rendering it worthless. A number of companies have sprung up to help automakers manage and use data generated from connected cars. Israeli startup Otonomo is one such player that jumped on the scene in 2015 with […]
More rough figures from Canalys. After reporting a 13% year-over-year drop for global smartphone shipments, the firm is back with even worse numbers for China. Shipments dropped 18% year-over-year for Q1 in the world’s largest smartphone market. And once again, the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame. It tracks that China was hard hit for Q1, […]
In just a few hours, the TechCrunch crew is chatting with investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Kicking off at 8 am PT, 11 am ET and 3 PM GMT, Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will talk startups and the economy with Cuban as part of TechCrunch’s new Extra Crunch Live series (you can join here). […]
Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process. Richard Socher, who heads up […]