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Snap took a beating yesterday in its Q2 earnings, but in the midst of the disappointing financials and user growth numbers, the company’s 10-Q SEC document filed today also confirms that it purchased social maps app Zenly for $213 million, as TechCrunch first reported.
After Snapchat rolled out its location-sharing Snap Map feature in June, many were quick to point out the interface… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Machine learning techniques excel at doing a good-enough job quickly in situations where there’s lots of data to grind through. It turns out that’s a great fit for backlogs of plant samples at herbariums and other repositories around the world, which have millions of the things waiting to be digitized and identified — including some that may be new to science. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is concluding his tech tour of the West Coast today with a visit to Google’s Mountain View campus. Mattis spent time at Amazon and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, earlier in the week. His key takeaway from all the socializing with tech leaders is that the Department of Defense needs to embrace technology coming out of the private sector… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
In what is rapidly devolving into an all-out brawl on the board of the world’s highest-valued private company, a group of Uber shareholders have asked the venture capital firm Benchmark to step down from the board of directors. This move comes only a day after Benchmark took the aggressive step of filing suit against Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Facebook has acquired a German company called Fayteq that builds software add-ons for video editing that can remove and add whole objects from captured video using computer vision. The acquisition was first reported by a German startup publication (via Variety) and confirmed to TechCrunch, and could be useful as Facebook pursues additional video filter creation technology, both for its live… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture firm and early investor in Uber, has sued former CEO Travis Kalanick. In a Delaware Chancery Court filing, originally identified by Axios’ Dan Primack, the suit alleges that Kalanick committed fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. Both Kalanick and Benchmark hold Uber board seats. Accusing Kalanick of being “selfish”… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Backblaze is one of the few unlimited backup services standing — in part because of its prowess in securing its own hard drives and building its own cloud services. Today, the company launched version 5.0 of its service and desktop clients. This new version introduces faster backups and restores, as well as improved browsing speed, image previews on the restore page and a new file… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Snap’s cool factor is wearing off. It needs new ways to entertain teens and score ad dollars. That means challenging some of its deepest-held philosophies about who Snapchat is for and how it works. From changing its feed to seducing influencers to fighting Facebook, here’s what we think Snap needs to do. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Global payments processing company PayPal announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire Swift Financial, which provides small business owners with working capital. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition will give PayPal better tools to expand its own Working Capital product. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
It’s been quite a week in tech, with now-former Google engineer James Damore’s controversial post about gender going viral and his subsequent firing. So, right on cue, workplace culture and company review platform Comparably has come out with a ranking of the top 10 tech companies for people of color, as well as the top 10 for women. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch