Tech Boys

Flyers are tempting us to quickly and easily exchange an old car for a new one. They assure us that this trade-in and trade-off is profitable. Not all drivers fully understand what the essence of the Trade-In service is, what is it good for and is there a catch to it? In many civilized countries, […] The post Trade-In: Exchange or Deception? appeared first on ReadWrite . from ReadWrite http://bit.ly/2IOqFyH via IFTTT

Rather than turn parents into the smartphone police, software companies should be more responsible in how they build and market their products to teens. The post 4 Keys to a Kid-Safe App appeared first on ReadWrite . from ReadWrite http://bit.ly/2UNE8Z1 via IFTTT

What if you could uplift a marginalized community, bring financial independence to those facing homelessness and disability, and share remarkable art with people around the globe? I’d like to introduce you to an organization I have had the pleasure of seeing grow over the past few years: ArtLifting. Their mission to empower homeless and disabled artists by providing them with a marketplace to sell and showcase their art is deeply changing lives and our notion of how all kinds of people can find meaningful work in the world. They are pioneers, mixing great business ideas with great missions to improve our world, and reframing what “success” looks like; not just in terms of finances, but in terms of their positive impact! This is how ArtLifting is giving a voice to the work of marginalized artists, and showing us all how recognizing hidden talents can help more people unlock their potential. Here’s the story: Source: ArtLifting Back in 2014, I was sitting in my dorm room looking

Samsung’s Q1 earnings are in and, as the company itself predicted , they don’t make for pretty reading. The Korean giant saw revenue for the three-month period fall by 13 percent year-on-year to 52.4 trillion KRW, around $45 billion. Meanwhile, operating profit for Q1 2019 came in at 6.2 trillion KRW, that’s a whopping $5.33 billion but it represents a decline of huge 60 percent drop from the same period last year. Ouch. Samsung’s Q1 last year was admittedly a blockbuster quarter, but these are massive declines. What’s going on? Samsung said that sales of its new Galaxy S10 smartphone were “solid” but it admitted that its memory chip and display businesses, so often the most lucrative units for the company, didn’t perform well and “weighed down” the company’s results overall. Despite those apparent S10 sales, the mobile division saw income drop “as competition intensified.” Meanwhile, the display business posted a loss “due to decreased demand for flexible displays and increasing m

Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem is set to get a massive injection of funds after Jungle Ventures reached a first close of $175 million for its newest fund, TechCrunch has come to learn. Executives at the Singapore-based firm anticipate that the new fund, which is Jungle’s third to date, will reach a final close of $220 million over the coming few months, a source with knowledge of the fund and its plans told TechCrunch. If it were to reach that figure, the fund would become the largest for startup investments in Southeast Asia. Jungle Ventures declined to comment. An SEC filing posted in December suggested the firm was aiming to raise up to $200 million with the fund. Its last fund was $100 million and it closed in November 2016. Founding partners Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand started the fund way back in 2012 when it raised a (much smaller)  $10 million debut fund . Digging a little deeper, our source revealed that the new Jungle fund includes returning LPs World Bank aff

Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street, courtesy primarily of ad revenue shortcomings. The hardware team met with some difficulties, as well, owing in part to a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line, following the release of the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL last fall. The executive rightly referenced the company’s relatively recent entry as a standalone hardware developer and painted a hopeful picture of the industry’s innovations going forward. “I do continue to be excited to see 5G coming and the early foldable phones, which Android plays a big part in driving,” Pichai said on the call. Google has notably taken an important role developing an Android UI designed for the foldable form factor, along with working closely beside Samsung on its recently delayed foldable. CFO Ruth Porat echoed Pichai’s comments, while hinting at wha

We’re deep in IPO news, and last week was no different. When this happens, Equity’s Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm fire up their mics and wax financial about the news we can’t possibly fit into the regular episode of the popular TechCrunch podcast. Last week the duo discussed Uber’s IPO pricing and Slack’s S-1 . On Uber: Kate: And before we jump into Uber’s Q1 financials, what do you think of Uber is most recent private valuation of 72 billion. Do you think that’s a wildly inflated valuation or do you think that’s a reasonable price tag? Alex: So I have absolutely no idea. And we’re going to get into this a bit with the Q1 numbers, but I don’t know how to price this company. I really don’t. We talk a lot about SaaS IPOs and there’s a lot of really solid metrics out there about those companies and what they’re worth and what makes them work more or less than competitors. Uber’s a strange beast. It’s got these enormous losses. It’s got slowing growth. It is a global brand. It’s got

Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It’s only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts . At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the company’s video strategy as a crucial part of turning things around,  but since then, the spotlight has moved on to other things (like rethinking the fundamental social dynamics of the service ). And yet the company is still making video deals, with 13 of them being unveiled tonight. That’s a lot of announcements, though considerably less than the 30 revealed at last year’s event . The company notes that it has already announced a number of partnerships this year, including one with the NBA . “When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter,” said Twitter Global VP and Head of Co

Amazon announced today it has begun to ask customers to participate in a preview program that will help the company build a Spanish-language Alexa experience for U.S. users. The program, which is currently invite-only, will allow Amazon to incorporate into the U.S. Spanish-language experience a better understanding of things like word choice and local humor, as it has done with prior language launches in other regions. In addition, developers have been invited to begin building Spanish-language skills, also starting today, using the Alexa Skills Kit. The latter was announced on the Alexa blog , noting that any skills created now will be made available to the customers in the preview program for the time being. They’ll then roll out to all customers when Alexa launches in the U.S. with Spanish-language support later this year. Manufacturers who want to build “Alexa Built-in” products for Spanish-speaking customers can also now request early access to a related Alexa Voice Services (A

At the Open Infrastructure Summit , which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he said. “Nobody asked for that.” He then put a point on this, saying, “what’s the difference between a vendor that only promotes the ideas that are in its own interest and a foundation that does the same thing. Or worse, a foundation that will only represent projects that it’s paid to represent.” Somewhat uncharacteristically, Shuttleworth didn’t say which foundations he was talking about, but since there are really only two foundations that fit the bill here, it’s pretty clear that he was talking about the OpenStack Foundation and the Linux Foundation — and maybe more precisely the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of the inc

With news that the We Company (formerly known as WeWork) has officially  filed to go public confidentially with the SEC today, there’s a big question on everyone’s mind: Is this the next massive startup win or a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the glare of the public markets? No company I follow has as much polarized opinion as the We Company. And while the company will have to reveal at least some of its hand in its official S-1, my guess is that the polarization around the company will not be alleviated until well after it goes public, if ever. The challenge with understanding its business is how much the details of each of its leases, real estate markets and tenants matter to its bottom line. We already know the top line numbers : the company had revenue of $1.8 billion in 2018, and a net loss of $1.9 billion that year. That led to the received opinion that the company has an extraordinarily weak business. As Crunchbase News editor Alex Wilhelm put it : from TechCrunc

Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting ( ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional options like advertising to get more users to engage with your messaging channels. ManyChat is just one of several  startups hoping to build a business around Facebook Messenger bots , but this sounds like a product that businesses are actually using. The company says more than 1 million accounts have been created on the platform, with customers coming from e-commerce, traditional retail, gyms, beauty salons restaurants and more. Those customers have collectively enlisted 350 million Messenger subscribers, and there are 7 billion messages sent on the platform each month. Plus, with an average open rate of 80 percent, these messag

No one ever said consumer robots were easy. But Anki’s actually made a pretty strong go of it, all things considered. After wowing the world at Apple’s 2013 WWDC keynote with its Drive cars, the company went all in on robotics, first with Cozmo, then Vector. After earlier reports of an understandably emotional Monday morning staff meeting led by CEO Boris Sofman, the company has confirmed with TechCrunch that it will be letting go of its staff, effective later this week. Here’s the full statement: It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday. We’ve shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications. But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time. Despite o

Menlo Ventures was founded in 1976 but it took 35 years for the venture capital firm to hit the jackpot. Since the dot-com boom, Menlo Ventures has teetered between good and great. A prolific Silicon Valley investor, it’s never quite reached the heights of Accel or Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), or established the level of name recognition as Benchmark or Sequoia, firms that struck gold with bets on Facebook, Instagram and Snap. But where others missed the boat entirely on one of the most valuable tech startups of all time, Menlo Ventures gnawed its way into an early deal at the last possible moment. In 2011, the firm led a $32 million Series B funding in a fledgling on-demand car service called Uber, agreeing to value the startup at a colossal $322 million after the company’s first-choice investor, a16z, failed to accept Uber’s sky-high terms. Menlo would go on to invest a total of $66.5 million in the company on expected total returns of up to $3.1 billion. “I wouldn’t have dared

After warning investors that it would be taking a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) charge this quarter due to a fine from the European Commission over anticompetitive advertising practices, today Google parent Alphabet reported its quarterly earnings  for Q1. Overall it’s a tough quarter for the company that speaks to struggles with its growth. Alphabet reported revenues of $36.3 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $9.50. Analysts were expecting Alphabet to report GAAP earnings of $10.17 per share, with adjusted EPS expected to be $13.10, on overall revenues of $37.34, according to estimates from Yahoo Finance . The company’s stock is down by 7.35 percent in after-hours trading at the moment. Google’s canned statement in the earnings release struck a positive tone: “We delivered robust growth led by mobile search, YouTube, and Cloud with Alphabet revenues of $36.3 billion, up 17% versus last year, or 19% on a constant currency basis,” said Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Office

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. Last week, TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha gave us his recap of the TED2019 conference  and offered key takeaways from the most interesting talks and provocative ideas shared at the event. Under the theme, “Bigger Than Us,” the conference featured talks, Q&As and presentations from a wide array of high-profile speakers, including an appearance from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was the talk of the week. Anthony dives deeper into the questions raised in his onstage interview that kept popping up: How has social media warped our democracy? How can the big online platforms fight back against abuse and misinformation? And what is the internet good for, anyway? “…So I would suggest that probably five years ago, the way that we wrote about a lot of these tech companies was too positive and they weren’t as good as we made them sound. Now the pendulum has s

Last night’s episode of “Game of Thrones” was a wild ride and inarguably one of an epic show’s more epic moments — if you could see it through the dark and the blotchy video. It turns out even one of the most expensive and meticulously produced shows in history can fall prey to the scourge of low quality streaming and bad TV settings. The good news is this episode is going to look amazing on Blu-ray or potentially in future, better streams and downloads. The bad news is that millions of people already had to see it in a way its creators surely lament. You deserve to know why this was the case. I’ll be simplifying a bit here because this topic is immensely complex, but here’s what you should know. (By the way, I can’t entirely avoid spoilers, but I’ll try to stay away from anything significant in words or images.) It was clear from the opening shots in last night’s episode, “The Longest Night,” that this was going to be a dark one. The army of the dead faces off against the allied l