Author: pekandesigns

It appears that the teaser from President Donald Trump’s press conference last night about the steps that the U.S. government might take to soften the economic blow of a more severe response from the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. has had the desired effect. At least it looks that way, given how the stock market […]

After suffering its third outage in two weeks, Robinhood’s founders may need to take a deeper dive into the technology stack that powers their business. That’s because the outage the mobile asset-trading platform experienced yesterday was unrelated to previous issues that brought down the company’s trading platform last week, according to a company representative. The […]

BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today. The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed investors. Company founder […]

Uber Advanced Technologies Group has resumed testing autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, two years after the company scaled back its testing program following a fatal crash in Arizona that killed a pedestrian. Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit is tiptoeing back into testing its autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. Uber ATG ended all testing on public roads after one […]

A security researcher said he was forced to take down a blog post describing an apparent bug in Talkspace’s website that gave him a year’s subscription for free, after the company rejected his findings and sent the researcher a legal threat. John Jackson said he was able to sign up to Talkspace, a popular therapy […]

Google VP Vint Cerf has voiced support for a single set of standards for Internet platforms to apply around political advertising. Speaking to the UK parliament’s Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee today, the long time Googler — who has been chief Internet evangelist at the tech giant since 2005 — was asked about the targeting […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. The world is a mess today. Everything that trades is down, and sentiment is in the toilet. Even Robinhood is undertaking its ritual downtime, ensuring that its userbase holds through the selloff. The unicorn’s inability […]

When it comes to the space launch revolution, Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab is by far the fastest emerging contender in that crowded field of startups. It’s also one of the few space unicorns, backed by a who’s who of space investors, which is why we’re beyond delighted to announce that Beck will be joining us […]

Spotify has been slowly rolling out a redesigned mobile app in small sections — first with an update to podcast pages, then to other parts of the experience. Today, the company is revamping the most critical part of the Spotify app: the home screen. Now, when Spotify users launch the app, they’ll notice the new […]

Investors using the trading app from Robinhood were once again locked out of trading after the app went down on another heavy (bad) day of trading on Wall Street. After about an hour of downtime, functionality on the app has now been partially restored. Trading has been partially restored on Robinhood and our team is […]