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Parrot lays off 35 percent of its drone team
French company Parrot has had a rough year and missed its sales expectations. That’s why the company will lay off 290 employees who were working on drones. In total, Parrot currently has 840 employees on the drone team and more than a thousand employees in total. While the company isn’t just selling drones, it represents a good chunk of the business. But it looks like other… Read More
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Apple moves to expand its US manufacturing at Mesa, Arizona site
Apple has submitted a proposal to expand its manufacturing capabilities at a site in Mesa, Arizona where it already produces certain components for its consumer products. Read More
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Fitbit acquires the Vector smart watch startup, as the wearable giant continues its roll-up
Well this is a relatively fast exit. In March last year a brand new smart watch brand appeared, hoping to offer something different. Combining the incredible engineering talent in Central Europe’s Romania, with the business smarts of London and former executives from Citizen watches, the Vector startup carved out a very credible slot in the ‘affordable luxury’ smart watch… Read More
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‘Uber for logistics’ startup Lalamove raises $30M to expand beyond 100 cities in Asia
Lalamove, a Hong Kong-based logistics on-demand service, has closed a $30 million Series B as it begins to consider a public listing. Read More
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Marissa Mayer resigning from Yahoo board as remaining company renames itself Altaba
Despite hiccups, Yahoo’s planned sale to Verizon appears to be moving forward — but some portions of the company will be left behind and renamed Altaba Inc. Yahoo is hanging on to its 15 percent stake in Alibaba and its 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, and those assets will survive as an investment company under the new name Altaba Inc., as the rest of Yahoo integrates with Verizon. Read More
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Celebrate the iPhone’s 10th birthday by watching the gleeful original announcement
The iPhone turns 10 today, at least if you start counting from the day it was announced. So why not take a few minutes to relive that day, with all its excitement and the palpable pride taken by Steve Jobs in both the product and presentation? Come on, you know you want to. Read More
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Activehours, which makes every day a payday, just raised $22 million in Series A funding
What if you didn’t have to wait every two weeks to receive a paycheck? What if you could be wired the money you earned almost immediately after a shift? What if, unlike with payday lenders, you didn’t have to pay interest on those payments? Instead, you were merely encouraged to donate a kind of tip to the company providing you with this service? That’s the proposition… Read More
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Sources: Amazon quietly acquired AI security startup harvest.ai for around $20M
Amazon’s AWS cloud services division quietly acquired cyber security firm harvest.ai last year, TechCrunch has learned. Read More
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10 of the coolest gadgets we saw at CES 2017
It’s difficult to narrow down everything that happened at CES this year. We met tons of promising new startups and went hands-on with brand new gadgets on the floor of the expo hall, nightly events and on our Hardware Battlefield stage. These, in no particular order, were the hottest hardware startups and most interesting gadgets from the show, and you can find our full coverage of… Read More
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Facebook to test showing ads mid-video with publisher revenue split
Facebook is doing what many publishers had hoped it would one day do, according to Recode: opening up another key revenue stream for video producers. The so-called “mid-roll” ad unit, which inserts an advertiser’s clip in the middle of a video instead of up front or at the end, will enter testing soon according to the report, with revenue resulting from the ad sales split… Read More
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What if the iPhone had never arrived?
Ten years ago the cellphone industry was as teeming with life as a coral reef. Weird, multi-colored Nokias and Samsungs flitted between fronds of seagrass while Sidekicks scuttled in and out of tiny sea caves. Blackberries lumbered through the coral like lions on the hunt, eviscerating all “serious” comers with better software. Apple had released a deeply embarrassing clownfish of… Read More
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Netflix & Amazon score a few Golden Globes, HBO won none
Top streaming services including Netflix, Amazon and HBO didn’t fare as well as in previous years at last night’s Golden Globes. Despite entering the race with 14 nominations, HBO – which streams for cord cutters via HBO NOW and various internet TV services like Sling TV and DirecTV Now – walked away without a single win. Meanwhile, Netflix and Amazon didn’t rack… Read More
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Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired project management service Trello for $425 million. The vast majority of the transaction is in cash ($360 million), with the remainder being paid out in restricted shares and options. The acquisition is expected to close before March 31, 2017. This marks Atlassian’s 18th acquisition and, as Atlassian president Jay Simons noted when I talked… Read More
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WTF is a funding round?
But if you don’t work in venture capital or finance, you might not know what all this means. So, we’ll break it down for you. Why are startups getting the money? Investors are giving the startup money in exchange for an ownership stake. They are hoping that the share price will go up as the startup grows into a larger company. Do they have to pay it back? No. If the startup… Read More
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Crunch Network
The future is a decentralized internet
In a world with many blockchains and hundreds of tradable tokens built on top of them, entire industries are automated through software, venture capital and stock markets are circumvented, entrepreneurship is streamlined and networks gain sovereignty through their own digital currency. This is the next phase of the internet. Read More
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Uber debuts Movement, a new website offering access to its traffic data
Uber is opening up in an area where it might make sense competitively for it to stay more closed off: The ride-hailing company’s new Movement website will offer up access to its data around traffic flow in scores where it operates, intended for use by city planners and researchers looking into ways to improve urban mobility. The basic idea is that Uber has a lot of insight into how… Read More
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Zuckerberg could run Facebook while serving in government forever
Mark Zuckerberg is not limited to just two years working in the government while still controlling Facebook, as has been widely misreported. A closer examination of SEC documents reveals Zuck only needs to still own enough Facebook stock or have the board’s approval to be allowed to serve in government indefinitely. Combined with Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday that his… Read More
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