Day: August 4, 2019

Website infrastructure and security services provider Cloudflare will stop providing service to 8chan, wrote Matthew Prince in a blog post, describing the site as a “cesspool of hate.” Service will be terminated as of midnight Pacific Time. “The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic […]

A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn. Japan Post Capital led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest LP. The […]

Users reported issues with Instagram and Facebook Sunday morning. The mobile apps wouldn’t load for many users beginning in the early hours of the morning, prompting thousands to take to Twitter to complain about the outage. #facebookdown and #instagramdown are both trending on Twitter at time of publish. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more […]

We spend a lot of time around here covering the latest startup fundraises, and for good reason. While capital is certainly an input and not an output, there is nothing quite like the closing of a round of several million in venture capital to prove that yes, the startup I’m working on is at least […]

Following a failed attempt in July, French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the Channel on top of a hoverboard this weekend. Starting his trek in Sangatte in northern France, the journey took 20 minutes, before landing in St. Margarets Bay, England. “For the last five to six kilometers I just really enjoyed it,” Zapata told […]

Last year, “Amazon employees met with ICE officials … to market the company’s facial recognition technology,” the ACLU informs us. Amazon VP Brad Huseman later said “We believe the government should have the best available technology.” Then, last month, Motherboard revealed Amazon has partnered with police departments around the country to create “a self-perpetuating surveillance […]

Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries is acquiring 87.6% stake in Fynd, a seven-year-old Mumbai-based startup that connects brick and mortar retailers with online stores and consumers, for 2.95 billion Indian rupees ($42.33 million), the two said in a brief statement late Saturday. Fynd, which was founded in 2012, helps offline retailers sell their products to consumers […]

Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about the Facebook FTC fine, the Sprint/T-Mobile deal getting […]