Day: December 1, 2017

 Tencent founder and CEO Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) is joining the Breakthrough Prize, sometimes referred to as “the Oscars of Science,” as a founding sponsor. He joins the likes of co-sponsors Sergey Brin of Google, Yuri Milner of DST Global, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe and others. “Fundamental science is the bedrock […]

 It’s been a while since Nokia and BlackBerry were bitter smartphone rivals, but there’s plenty of bad blood left between the two companies. This morning, BlackBerry threw in towel on battle, agreeing to pay Nokia $137 million to the Finnish company. The award stems from a 2016 dispute over patent licensing contract. The details of […]

 As we head into the end of 2017, it’s pretty safe to say that Apple’s fate — barring any major issue with its phones — is now in the hands of its consumers. With the iPhone X now in stores (if you catch them at the right time), Apple has now laid down its hand […]

 Got too much Internet traffic? Get servers on-demand from Amazon Web Services. Got too many pallets of physical goods? Well now you can get on-demand warehousing from Flowspace. The startup aims to become the next critical logistics service by making atoms as easy to store and ship as bits. “We want to introduce flexibility and […]

 Ola, the company battling Uber in India, has turned to pedal power after it introduced a bike-sharing service. China’s Didi Chuxing and Grab in Southeast Asia have invested in bike-sharing companies, which offered dock-less bikes that users can pick up across a city and leave anywhere they want when they’re done, and now Ola — […]

 Twitter’s big push to draw in more live video stars to its Periscope streaming service is now expanding beyond the U.S. The company announced today the Periscope Super Broadcaster program, which allows video stars to earn revenue from their streams through a virtual tipping mechanism, is now available in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. Other […]

 After slowly rolling out across the U.S. over the past two years, Amazon’s Treasure Truck is ready for a bit of international expansion. As with its Stateside introduction, the company’s taking baby steps toward bringing the deal-sporting vehicle to U.K. shores, kicking things off in London and Manchester. The company’s not really giving specifics about […]

 If you’ve ever quickly swiped through Tinder, you know that sometimes your fingers can get away from you – and, all of a sudden, you’ve Super Liked someone without meaning to. Oops! Tinder today is addressing that problem with a new feature now testing in select markets that will make Super Liking a more intentional […]

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-themed podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Katie Roof and Alex Wilhelm were joined by Heather Hartnett of Human Ventures. It has been a surprisingly newsy November, so we narrowed ourselves to just a few topics: Uber, Niantic, Meetup, and Jeff Bezos’ checking account. First up, […]

 Alibaba announced a massive $15 billion research ‘DAMO Academy’ project focused on R&D last month, and it is laying the groundwork for an office in Tel Aviv through a deal to acquire technology and talent from Israeli startup Visualead. Visualead developed a new kind of ‘dot-less’ QR code that Alibaba had used for its business in China. […]