Day: February 18, 2020

Elon Musk is not one to mince words, but he may have just lost a potential customer because of a cutting tweet. That customer is renowned big deal Bill Gates, who sat down recently with YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who joined the platform in 2009 and has amassed more than 10 million viewers. Gates and Brownlee […]

Spotify’s ongoing investments in the podcast-streaming side of its business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year. But today, only 16% of Spotify’s monthly listeners are engaging with podcats — a number the company today hopes to nudge higher by redesigning the podcast side of its streaming app. The new layout […]

Robotic process automation — the ability to automate certain repetitive software-based tasks to free up people to focus on work that computers cannot do — has become a major growth area in the world of IT. Today, a startup called Aisera is coming out of stealth that has taken this idea and supercharged it, by […]

Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes that the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar […]

TC Early Stage SF goes down on April 28, and we are getting pretty damn excited about it! The show will bring together 50+ experts across startup core competencies, such as fundraising, operations and marketing. We’ll hear from VCs on how to create the perfect pitch deck and how to identify the right investors for […]

Kickstarter today announced that its staff has decided to unionize. The move reflects a broader movement for worker representation among tech employees. The site joins a growing list of companies whose staff and/or contractors have expressed public interest in unionizing, including Spin, Instacart and Pittsburgh-based Google technical workers, along with media outlets like BuzzFeed and […]

In the wake of the $5.3 billion sale of banking API provider Plaid to Visa — a deal generally lauded as intelligent for the larger company — fintech became an even hotter part of the venture capital and startup landscape. While companies in the broad fintech and finservices spaces were already attractive bets for private […]

Walmart’s holiday quarter didn’t perform as expected. That’s the big news today from the retailer’s weak Q4 2019 earnings, which saw revenue of $141.67 billion versus the $142.55 expected and adjusted earnings per share of $1.38 versus the $1.44 expected. The company cited a number of factors, including “softer” than anticipated holiday sales in U.S. […]

SpaceX has a new partner for commercial private astronaut flights aboard its Dragon spacecraft: Space Adventures, a private space tourism company that has already launched private astronauts including Anousheh Ansari, Guy Laliberté and Mark Shuttleworth to space. Space Adventures has worked with seven clients across eight separate missions to the International Space Station (ISS) for […]