After announcing his departure from Facebook yesterday, the parent company filed an SEC document stating that former WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum will no stand for re-election to Facebook’s board of directors. That confirms the Washington Post‘s report that Koum would exit Facebook’s board. “On April 30, 2018, in connection with his resignation from his position as Chief Executive Officer of WhatsApp Inc., Jan Koum informed Facebook, Inc. (the “Company”) that he will not stand for re-election to the Board of Directors of the Company at the Company’s 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the “2018 Annual Meeting”). The Company will file a supplement to…
Author: geekfenceblogger
As TechCrunch launches our first day-long event in Tel Aviv, there could be no better person to help us discuss the Israeli technology scene than Yossi Matias. The founder of Google’s research and development center in Israel, Matias has had a long and storied career as a technologist going back decades. He’s a recipient of the Gödel Prize and an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer science and the field of search. At Google, Matias was instrumental in the creation of a slew of key products including Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, Google’s Visualization API, ephemeral identities for the internet of…
It’s tough being part of IT Ops these days. Your company could be operating across public and private clouds, and in many cases, an internal datacenter too. Meanwhile your developers are generating more code ever faster. ScienceLogic wants to help with it latest release, ScienceLogic SL1. As company CEO Dave Link sees, we are seeing this vast confluence of technology influences coming together very quickly. He says the goal with this release is nothing less than a comprehensive, full-stack view of how an application is behaving, and how the different pieces that make up and connect to that application could be affecting…
CoinMarketCap seemed to appear out of nowhere last year during the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, establishing itself as the de facto source for tracking the rise and fall of valuations. That’s brought incredible amounts of traffic and attention. Alexa ranks it as the world’s 174 most popular website, and it enjoys more traffic than the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other media. Yet despite that power, precious little is known of the company, as the Journal wrote earlier this year. CoinMarketCap has also done nothing to expand out and take advantage of its position at the center of the…
Paragraf, a Cambridge University graphene spin-out, has closed a £2.9M (~$3.9M) seed round. The funding is led by the university’s commercialization arm, Cambridge Enterprise, with Parkwalk Advisors, Amadeus Capital Partners, IQ Capital Partners and angel investors also participating. Graphene refers to the one atom-thick latticed carbon material that’s been exciting scientists with its potential for more than a decade. Although turning a nanomaterial with transformative promise into practical and robust commercial products has not turned out to be a cake walk. Paragraf reckons it’s onto something that can help accelerate developments though, having come up with what it says is a novel (and…
In 2012, Cisco made one of its biggest-ever acquisitions — and a major step into the Israeli tech world — when it acquired video and security specialist NDS for $5 billion. Now, the company is selling part of that business to one of its previous owners, the private equity firm Permira, as it looks to refocus itself and boost growth in networking, multi-cloud, security, data, and collaboration services. Permira says it is acquiring selected video technology assets, along with other cloud technology services, which it plans to launch as a new, standalone business. The new, rebranded company will be “focused…
Kevin McNamara, a former Apple and Pixar employee, is bringing his virtual world creation expertise to the domain of self-driving cars. And he has $2.5 million from Costanoa Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and others to do so. At Apple, McNamara says he worked on an autonomous systems project, where he explored automatic content generation of simulated virtual environments. The idea was to figure out how to use that type of technology to train, test, validate and develop artificial intelligence in autonomous systems, he told me. Since leaving Apple, McNamara has gone on to start Parallel Domain. The platform generates virtual worlds…
Yes, it’s that time of year again! It’s time to grab tickets for The Europas, the annual gathering of Europe’s hottest startups in London, in partnership with TechCrunch. On 3rd July, The Europas will feature an afternoon of awesome networking with its famous Unconference, a series of great speakers leading deep-dive discussion, a fantastic opportunity to pitch your startup and a new “Crypto Zone” featuring Europe’s hottest Blockchain and Crypto projects. Combine that with a fantastic awards ceremony and afterparty, and a heady mix of founders, investors and the media, and you have an incredible event. So grab your tickets.…
Mark Twain had it right: There’s no such thing as a new idea. To wit: Facebook is currently testing arrows to let users ‘up’ vote or ‘down’ vote individual comments in some of its international markets. Digg eat your heart out. Reddit roll over. This particular trial of upvoting/downvoting buttons is limited to New Zealand and Australia for now, according to Facebook (via The Guardian). The latest test is a bit different to a downvote test Facebook ran in the US back in February — when it just offered a downvote option. (And if clicked it hid the comment and gave…
CoreOS, the Linux distribution and container management startup Red Hat acquired for $250 million earlier this year, today announced the Operator Framework, a new open source toolkit for managing Kubernetes clusters. CoreOS first talked about operators in 2016. The general idea here is to encode the best practices for deploying and managing container-based applications as code. “The way we like to think of this is that the operators are basically a picture of the best employee you have,” Red Hat OpenShift product manager Rob Szumski told me. Ideally, the Operator Framework frees up the operations team from doing all the grunt…