Month: March 2019

After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. Scooter service providers, the transportation trend du jour, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scatter scooters on city sidewalks (to the chagrin of residents and regulators alike) throughout 2017 and 2018. On the other side of the Pacific, Grab and Go-Jek are raising gobs
0 Comments
An interesting decision came out of Poland’s data protection agency this week after the watchdog issued its first fine under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On the surface the enforcement doesn’t look so remarkable: A ‘small’ ~€220K fine was handed to a Sweden-headquartered European digital marketing company, Bisnode, which has an office in Poland,
0 Comments
“Works with AirPower mat”. Apparently not. It loooks to me like Apple doesn’t treat customers with the same “high standard” of care it apparently reserves for its hardware quality. Nine days after launching its $199 wireless charging AirPods headphones that touted compatibility with the forthcoming Apple AirPower inductive charger mat, Apple has just scrapped AirPower
0 Comments
One of the great things about enterprise chat applications, beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat.
0 Comments
1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much the now-18-year-old, New York-based company says it just closed on for its Series D round, led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from earlier
0 Comments
Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes
0 Comments
Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its U.S. counterpart Amazon has done with AWS. TechCrunch has confirmed that the e-commerce and cloud services giant has acquired Teambition, a Microsoft and Tencent-backed platform for co-workers to plan and
0 Comments
Grab, the $16 billion-valued ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business last year, is in talks with Alibaba’s Ant Financial and PayPal as it considers spinning out of its financial services unit to double down on its non-transportation business, TechCrunch has learned. The seven-year-old company’s coming-of-age moment was a deal to buy Uber’s regional
0 Comments
Fresh from picking up a majority stake in Europe-based The Next Web, the Financial Times is buying another new media startup. The newspaper, which was founded in 1888, is adding Singapore-based Deal Street Asia to its roster with a deal expected to close in April, according to three sources with knowledge of discussions. Founded in
0 Comments
DoorDash launched a new initiative today called Kitchens Without Borders, which it says is designed to promote business owners who are immigrants and refugees. It’s starting out with 10 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area: Besharam, Z Zoul Cafe, Onigilly, Los Cilantros, Sabores Del Sur, West Park Farm & Sea, Little Green Cyclo, Afghan Village,
0 Comments