Five months ago, the Bay Area-based electric scooter rental company Lime joined forces with the ride-hailing giant Uber, which both invested in the company as part of a $335 million round and said it was going to promote Lime in its mobile app. It’s looking now like that may have been a mistake for Lime. Though Lime presumably shared information with its investor, Uber is now on the cusp of acquiring Lime’s fiercest rival Bird, according to several sources, none of whom quite knows at what price as of this writing. What we’re hearing at the moment: talk in the neighborhood…
Author: geekfenceblogger
Tech companies and VCs in the insurance space have probably read many of the news articles about Amazon and Google entering insurance (here, here and here). Given their nearly unlimited resources, this may be intimidating to some in the industry. Whether one views these moves as a threat, a welcomed development or something in-between, it’s important to note that both Google and Amazon have focused almost exclusively on personal lines, which is only one aspect of insurance. There are many reasons for this — not least of which is Google and Amazon’s desire to add value to their customers who are, for…
Quora said today that a security breach may have compromised data from about 100 million users. In an email sent to users today and a blog post by CEO Adam D’Angelo, the company said a “malicious third party” gained unauthorized access to Quora’s systems on Friday. Its internal security teams and a “leading digital forensics and security form” are currently investigating the breach. Law enforcement officials have also been notified. The company believes it has identified the root cause of the breach and “taken steps to address the issue, although our investigation is ongoing and we’ll continue to make security…
YouTube is preparing to move its original programming out from behind its paywall. According to reports from The Hollywood Reporter and Variety on Monday, which the company confirmed, Google’s video site will change its strategy around originals starting next year. Instead of requiring a monthly subscription, YouTube Originals will become free and ad-supported, like most of the content available on YouTube today. The company is referring to this new strategy of making its original content free as “Single Slate” as it’s unifying its Premium Originals and ad-supported initiatives into a single programming effort that, by 2020, will provide free “windows”…
Germany automaker Audi, Airbus and Italdesign presented Tuesday a scaled-down version of its vision of the future: a drone that can pluck the cab off of an autonomous electric vehicle and then fly off to its intended destination. The companies showed off the flying taxi concept Tuesday during Drone Week in Amsterdam. To be clear, what the companies showed was a working prototype and one that isn’t big enough for human being to ride in. The prototype of “Pop.Up Next” was a 1:4 scale model. Still, the companies provided a bullish vision of the future that they say could be…
Apple is looking to better support female-identifying founders through its new Entrepreneur Camp, a technology lab focused on app development. The free two-week camp, which kicks off in January, will give female founders the opportunity to receive one-on-one coding assistance from Apple engineers, as well as attend sessions on design, technology and App Store marketing. The idea is to help teams shave off overall development time. To be eligible to participate, the company must be female-founded, female co-founded or female-led, and have at least one woman on the development team. The program is inclusive to all who identify as women.…
Ever thumped over a pothole while driving and cringed, wondering if you’re one step closer to a flat tire and cursing the powers-that-be that roads never seem to get fixed? The founders of RoadBotics certainly have. They developed technology that identifies and catalogs every crag and crack in streets, alerting authorities of issues through an interface that zooms into the tiniest detail of the asphalt beneath your wheels. RoadBotics is one of several companies that has received crucial funding and guidance from URBAN-X, an accelerator for startups re imagining city life powered by MINI and Urban Us, whose mission is…
1. Black Friday predicted to hit $5.9B in online sales, $645M spent so far After a record-breaking Thanksgiving with $3.7 billion in digital sales across desktop and mobile devices, Black Friday pulled in a bumper year for e-commerce. Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across a range of retail sites — says that $6.22 billion was spent in the day, up just over 23 percent on a year ago. That was in line with estimates earlier in the day, after tracking sales that saw $4.1 billion was already spent online by 5pm Pacific time. More than one-third — 33.5 percent…
A win for privacy on LinkedIn could be a big loss for businesses, recruiters and anyone else expecting to be able to export the email addresses of their connections. LinkedIn just quietly introduced a new privacy setting that defaults to blocking other users from exporting your email address. That could prevent some spam, and protect users who didn’t realize anyone who they’re connected to could download their email address into a giant spreadsheet. But the launch of this new setting without warning or even a formal announcement could piss off users who’d invested tons of time into the professional networking site…
WhatsApp already ruined Snapchat’s growth once. WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories, now has 450 million daily active users compared to Snapchat’s 188 million. That’s despite its 24-hour disappearing slideshows missing tons of features, including augmented reality selfie masks, animated GIFs, or personalized avatars like Bitmoji. A good-enough version of Stories conveniently baked into the messaging app beloved in the developing world where Snapchat hasn’t proved massively successful. Snapchat actually lost total daily users in Q2 and Q3 2018, and even lost Rest Of World daily users in Q2 despite that being where late-stage social networks rely on for…