Day: May 23, 2019

With a growing number of challenger banks taking on the U.S. market, one of the original startup banks, Simple — now owned by BBVA — has taken the unusual step of removing a core banking feature: bill pay. The company claimed the feature was under-utilized and usage was trending downwards, which is why it decided […]

Gamers feel passionately about loot boxes; turns out some elected officials do too. A new Senate bill was formally introduced today with bipartisan support and it could categorically shift how today’s top platforms and distribution platforms monetize the titles they sell. The bill’s introduction was first reported by The Verge. The bill asserts that “pay-to-win” […]

In an all-hands meeting this afternoon, the scooter and bike-sharing phenom Lime announced co-founder and chief executive officer Toby Sun would transition out of the C-suite to focus on company culture and R&D. Brad Bao, a Lime co-founder and longtime Tencent executive, will assume chief responsibilities, Lime confirmed to TechCrunch. “Lime has experienced unprecedented growth […]

Canopy, an upscale, profitable developer of co-working spaces, has expanded its footprint in San Francisco to a third location on the heels of a strategic financing round. Co-founded by the product designer Yves Behar, the second-generation design-build developer Amir Mortazavi and serial entrepreneur and medical office space developer Steve Mohebi, Canopy bills itself as a […]

It’s not really clear just yet exactly what all these powerful, agile quadrupedal robots people are working on are going to do, exactly, but even so, it never gets old watching them do their thing. The latest is an Italian model called HyQReal, which demonstrates its aspiration to winning strongman competitions, among other things, by […]

Jeff Peters Contributor Share on Twitter Jeff Peters, PhD is a principal at Autotech Ventures, investing in transportation startups. He has published academic and media articles on transportation, optimization, autonomous driving and AI. More posts by this contributor Will self-driving cars kill parking? The AI in your non-autonomous car While Bezos amassed billions, Apple took […]

Streem, an AR startup that is meshing teleconferencing software with computer vision tech, has acquired a small U.K. startup called Selerio that’s also building out augmented reality technologies. The startups were both members of betaworks’ VisionCamp accelerator program last year where they met and collaborated while tackling separate computer vision problems in the AR space. […]

Snap has brought on its first-ever diversity and inclusion lead, former Google Director of Diversity Strategy Oona King. In a memo sent to Snap employees today, Snap Chief People Officer Lara Sweet announced King’s hiring. Although Snap is late in the game of hiring a diversity lead and has yet to release a diversity report, […]

Just ahead of the launch of the Apple Card, a startup that has its own take on modernizing the credit card industry, Zero, is announcing the close of its $20 million Series A. The new round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and brings Zero’s total raised to date to $35 million, […]

Facebook has just released its latest community standards enforcement report and the verdict is in: people are awful, and happy to share how awful they are with the world. The latest effort at transparency from Facebook on how it enforces its community standards contains several interesting nuggets. While the company’s algorithms and internal moderators have […]