An estimated 80 percent of the companies that raised funding via initial coin offerings (ICOs) have been called scams by researchers at the Satis Group. But Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron, wants to prove that his company is different. Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur who became wealthy as the creator of Peiwo, China’s version […]
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(Reuters) — China’s DJI, the world’s largest maker of consumer drones, has discovered several cases of serious corruption at the company and expects 2018 losses of more than 1 billion yuan ($150 million) as a result, it said on Friday. The company said it was investigating the cases, which came to light during routine quality control […]
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Europe recorded a bumper year for venture capital (VC) investment in 2018, even though the overall number of deals fell by more than a quarter. The findings were published as part of data and research company PitchBook’s annual European Venture Report, which revealed that a total of €20.5 billion ($23.3 billion) was invested across 3,384 deals […]
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After a summer-long saga of accusations, denials, and blockbuster reporting by the American Civil Liberties Union, the dust appeared to have settled on Amazon’s Rekognition scandal. But a letter from shareholders this week rekindled the flames, urging the company, which was worth an estimated $1 trillion in September 2018, to prohibit sales of facial recognition technology like […]
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Nearly two years after pulling its ads from YouTube after they appeared alongside controversial content, AT&T has announced that it is returning to Google’s video-streaming platform. Because YouTube’s ad platform is programmatic, meaning software decides where ads are placed rather than humans, brands haven’t always had as much control as they would like in terms […]
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Three years after the original Apple Watch launched with a heart rate monitor, Apple dramatically improved the cardiovascular functionality by adding electrocardiogram recording to the Apple Watch Series 4. Now the company will partner with Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals unit to study whether the wearable can also be used to prevent strokes. The study […]
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After spending several years without updates, Apple’s iPad mini 4 was finally rumored late last year to have a sequel under development, and a new report offers a release window for both the small tablet and a new version of the entry-level iPad: the first half of 2019. The dates come from manufacturing publication DigiTimes, […]
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Rumors of an early 2019 reveal of HoloLens 2 circulated throughout 2018, and now Microsoft appears to be ready to show off its next-generation augmented reality headset. The company today issued invitations to a media event at Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, which will feature one particularly noteworthy speaker: Alex Kipman, a Microsoft technical fellow […]
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Facebook has been in the news quite a bit for its ad targeting over the past year, most notably with reports that the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica used improperly obtained data to develop “personality” profiles on U.S. voters and target ads toward them during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But many users are still unaware what […]
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After Apple admitted to surreptitiously slowing down iPhones based on the performance of their aging batteries, it apologized by offering customers a discounted battery replacement program throughout 2018 — $29 per device, down from $79. Despite partially blaming this program for an unexpected holiday revenue shortfall, Apple didn’t publicly quantify just how many users had […]
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With a market cap ten times higher than Qualcomm’s, Apple is hard to imagine as a victim of a billion-dollar extortion campaign, but the latest developments in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suit against Qualcomm are calling both companies’ negotiating tactics into question. At issue during testimony today: cross-allegations regarding onerous licensing fees and […]
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During a 5G-focused Mobile Innovation event at last year’s CES, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said he hoped to appear at 2019’s show with a working 5G phone on a live network. Since there were exactly zero 5G phones or networks in existence at that point, his plan sounded ambitious, but his quiet confidence made the outcome seem […]
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Fleets of robots will head to grocery store aisles later this year, thanks to a partnership between Kentucky-based Badger Technologies and Retail Business Services (RBS), the division of Ahold Delhaize that provides services to Food Lion, Hannaford, and other brick-and-mortar brands. The two today announced that Badger’s roving Marty bots, which identify potential safety hazards and […]
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WordPress.com parent Automattic has announced a new publishing platform for news sites, designed to help small to medium-sized publications generate more revenue. The initiative, which is called Newspack by WordPress.com, is launching in partnership with News Revenue Hub and Spirited Media. Interestingly, Newspack is backed by $2.4 million in funding from big names, including Google, through […]
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Apple has confirmed that HomePod, its Siri-enabled wireless speaker, will go on sale in China and Hong Kong on January 18. The Cupertino company revealed in December that it would bring HomePod to China in 2019, and it listed the HomePod on its local website. Today’s news, however, comes shortly after Apple slashed its Q1 outlook, blaming lower-than-expected […]
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Before Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman were billionaire investor-entrepreneurs, they were executives at PayPal in the 1990s. They, and over a dozen other early executives at the company, including Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Keith Rabois, have become known as the PayPal Mafia, Silicon Valley’s most famous network of serial entrepreneurs and venture […]
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CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas last week, had more than 4,500 exhibitors. But a sex toy startup from Oregon called Lora DiCarlo was not one of them. Lora DiCarlo made a sex toy, Osé, that uses micro-robotics to create a “biomimicry” effect which it argued is better than a vibrator. The female-run […]
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(Reuters) — Apple held talks with Samsung Electronics and MediaTek along with existing vendor Intel to supply 5G modem chips for 2019 iPhones, according to an Apple executive’s testimony at a trial between Qualcomm and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Friday. Between 2011 and 2016, Apple relied on San Diego-based Qualcomm as the sole […]
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CES is a yearly ritual to imagine what’s possible and display the strange, innovative, and silly. There can be surprises, but for a highly anticipated conference that attracts tens of thousands of people from around the world, some trends are very predictable: New televisions are rolled out, tech companies take subtle potshots at the competition (see […]
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A vocal minority has created a convincing narrative that has a lot of us assuming that mobile spinoffs of PC and console games must be vapid, cynical cash grabs. I can’t claim to be above the peanut gallery’s influence here. As I walked into an Alien Blackout demo (coming to the Apple App Store, Google […]
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