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While VCs vie to fund massively scalable businesses, they tend to view their own industry as size-constrained. Common wisdom is that with a limited supply of successful startups, greatly inflating the amount of available capital to invest in them leads to asset bubbles. This year, SoftBank’s Vision fund has been putting that assumption to an unprecedented test. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Questions are being asked about platform power. Regulatory rules and knives are being sharpened. Politicians are eager to point the finger of blame. And with so much tech-fueled ammunition, who can blame them? Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Welcome back to CTRL+T, TechCrunch’s latest weekly podcast in which Megan Rose Dickey and I pick the stories we thought were interesting enough to talk to you about. This week we wondered if cell phones can adversely affect your health (or kill you), the goggles of Magic Leap and the problem Twitter has with the hateful people on its platform. Then later in the ep, Megan chats up… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Unbound, a sexual wellness startup for women, recently raised $2.7 million from Founders Fund, Slow Ventures, Arena Ventures, SoGal Ventures and others. Founded by Polly Rodriguez of Women of SexTech, Unbound aims to empower women to own their sexuality. “Raising money is always hard but it took an exceptional amount of resilience,” Rodriguez said. Unbound’s bread and butter… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
For years we’ve been raging at cheating AI players, bemoaning their bad pathfinding, and laughing at their buggy antics. But AI can be and is being applied creatively, and those creative applications can lead to genuine scientific advances. Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest game publishers, aims to promote these mutually reinforcing goals with a new internal AI research unit it… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
SingularityNET, is an ambitions project to create a decentralized marketplace for AI, has raised a lot of money in its token sale. In around 20 seconds after opening the sale to the public, it sold out of the whole amount of available tokens (the AGI token), bringing the total to $36 million. However, a startup raising a lot of money in a token sale is not really of interest to me. This is… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Has your kid bugged you to let them download Sandbox Coloring? You’re probably not alone. The latest trend blowing up on the App Store is a new twist on the coloring book apps that have been popular for a couple of years. Now, instead of having users pick and choose their colors as before, this new group of coloring book apps – four of which recently snagged spots in the App… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
The idea for Safe Group, a new Los Angeles company that’s developed a mobile app to track and verify a user’s sexual health, started on the Playa at Burning Man. The company’s chief executive and co-founder Ken Mayer was dating someone at the time who demanded to see the results of a recent STD test before agreeing to have sex. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t be cool… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Due to heavy sanctions placed on the country for its nuclear weapons testing, North Korea has long run a series of “side businesses” like drug trafficking, endangered species trading, money laundering, and currency counterfeiting to provide hard cash to the Kim regime.
Naturally, bitcoin trading came next.
There are a couple of ingredients needed to perfect the North’s… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch