Author: pekandesigns

Insight Venture Partners has raised $6.3 billion for its latest (and largest ever) fund as technology investors continue to amass increasingly large war chests. In the wake of SoftBank’s massive $100 billion Vision Fund, investors in technology companies have said that capital has become weaponized as a way to create a competitive moat around a startup’s […]

Facebook and Instagram will more proactively lock the accounts of users its moderators encounter and suspect are below the age of 13. Its former policy was to only investigate accounts if they were reported specifically for being potentially underage. But Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that an “operational” change to its policy for reviewers made this […]

Making sense of DNA data is a two-step process, namely the biochemical-sequencing of the DNA and the analyzing and extracting insights from the sequenced DNA data. As of today in 2018, the first part of this process is now almost fully automated requiring minimal human intervention. Even sequencing costs have dropped below $1,000 and soon […]

In other news bears shit in the woods. In today’s second-day President Trump news: ‘The Donald’ has seized, belatedly, on the European Commission’s announcement yesterday that Google is guilty of three types of illegal antitrust behavior — with its Android OS, since 2011 — and that it is fining the company $5 billion; a record-breaking penalty […]

Uber has teamed up with Cargo, a startup that makes it easy for rideshare drivers to sell goods to their passengers. Cargo works by giving drivers free boxes, filled with goods like gum, phone chargers and snacks, to sell to passengers from the center of the car console. Cargo, which has partnered with brands like […]

The working class of the United States doesn’t get many breaks these days. It’s not just a function of low pay and long hours, but also the incredible uncertainty of income and expenses that makes surviving week-to-week so challenging. One in five Americans have a negative net wealth, even in an economy where the unemployment […]

IBM Watson Health and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) announced today their continued partnership to use Watson’s artificial intelligence to support Veterans suffering from late stage cancer. While perhaps better known as a Jeopardy! winner than an oncologist, Watson joined the VA’s Precision Oncology program in 2016 following the Obama administration’s introduction of the National Cancer […]

Messenger Kids, Facebook’s parent-controlled messaging app that lets kids text, call, video chat, and use face filters, has now arrived in Mexico. The launch follows Messenger Kids’ recent expansion outside the U.S., where in June it first became available to users in Canada and Peru. The app in Mexico works the same as it does elsewhere […]