Author: pekandesigns

Didi Chuxing will begin picking up ride-hailing passengers with self-driving cars in Shanghai in just a few months, according to company CTO Zhang Bo (via Reuters). The plan is to roll out autonomous pick-ups in Shanghai first, starting in one district of the city, and then expand the program from there — finally culminating in […]

The Volocopter 2X air taxi vehicle is now the first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft to fly at an international airport, fully integrated into the same airspace as other commercial passenger craft. It performed this key milestone flight at Helsinki International Airport, in a demonstration mission that showed it successfully integrated with both […]

The direct-to-consumer trend in fashion has been one of the most interesting evolutions in e-commerce in the last several years, and today one of the trailblazers in the world of footwear is picking up some money from a list of illustrious backers to bring its concept to the masses. Atoms, makers of sleek sneakers that […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we were back in the SF studio, with Kate and Alex on hand to chat venture, business, startups, and IPOs with Iris Choi. Choi is a partner at Floodgate, and one of the very few folks […]

Die Zeit läuft ab, Leute translates very roughly to “time is running out, people!” You have only one week left to save a fat stack of euros on your pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019. Join us and startuppers from more than 50 countries on 11-12 December for the lowest possible price. Our super early-bird pricing […]

Nigerian fintech firm Interswitch has been circulating in business news around a possible IPO on the London Stock Exchange. Last month Bloomberg News ran a story — based on unnamed sources — reporting the financial services firm had hired investment banks to go public on the LSE later in 2019. The piece spurred additional aggregated […]

Security researchers at Google say they’ve found a number of malicious websites which, when visited, could quietly hack into a victim’s iPhone by exploiting a set of previously undisclosed software flaws. Google’s Project Zero said in a deep-dive blog post published late on Thursday that the websites were visited thousands of times per week by […]

Anyone wondering if Alphabet might reprimand its chief legal officer, David Drummond, for a long-ago extramarital, inter-office affair that continues to be a distraction to the company, the answer seems to be . . . not right now. Though a former subordinate outlined in greater detail than ever yesterday the “hell” she says she has […]

In light of gig worker protection legislation Assembly Bill 5 making its way through California’s legislature, Uber and Lyft are amping up their efforts to do whatever they can to prevent it from happening. And in the event that the bill does pass, which would force Uber and Lyft to make their drivers W-2 employees, […]

Next month, Netflix will release a three-part documentary series called “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” in which Davis Guggenheim (director of “An Inconvenient Truth” and “He Named Me Malala”) aims to figure out what goes on inside the head of the world’s second-richest human. Netflix first announced the docuseries last week. Now they’ve released […]