Gay dating app Grindr has long been viewed as one of the great “bootstrapping” success stories of the tech world, self-funded from inception through years of dramatic growth. It was therefore surprising to see the company sell off 60 percent of its shares to a huge corporate investor for a cool $93 million.
Mary Elizabeth Williams writes in Salon: Yiannopoulos is well known around social media for his fierce advocacy of the trolls of GamerGate — who hide behind the phrase “ethics in gaming journalism” to harass and abuse women on Twitter and
The tech sector is no longer the hottest place to be on the stock market. Initial public offerings (IPOs) have plummeted in tech in 2015, putting the sector behind health care and financial companies.
In the last six months, an exclusive startup accelerator called The Junction, created by Israeli VC Genesis Partners, has come up with a way for huge multinational corporations to use Israel’s bustling tech startup community to their own sweet advantage.
Ninjas In Pyjamas announced today that CEO Per Lilliefelth will be standing down with immediate effect, following a Breitbart Tech report that revealed the team owes its players thousands of dollars. Breitbart revealed the management of NiP had withheld prize money and in-game
The latest brainstorm from the Chinese Communist Party is a system for monitoring the Internet activity and financial transactions of its citizens, computing a “social credit” score on the acceptability of each person’s behavior, similar to the credit ratings compiled by financial institutions.
Crowdfunding site Patreon yesterday announced that a hacker had gained unauthorised access to its user database, as well as email addresses, posts, registered names, and some billing and shipping addresses. In a post on the site, Patreon CEO Jack Conte
We recently shared news with our readers about one of the most extraordinary reports to come out of the UN in years: a document that compared “cyber violence” to physical violence, and advised national governments to censor the internet on the basis of the whining
A mother whose son was murdered by a criminal illegal alien slammed President Obama on Thursday for, what she described as, the “complete disregard we get as parents of children killed by illegals, who have reached out to our President.”
France’s Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron, attended a prominent technology conference this week in Israel as part of an ongoing strategy employed by Paris to bring French Jews back to their home country, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Michigan’s Alpena Biorefinery announced that it is taking a “sabbatical,” after drinking $22 million of taxpayers’ stimulus cash and after consuming unknown amounts of additional and indirect taxpayer funding—all just to show it could convert wood chips into pure alcohol.
In the immigration plan he released Sunday, Donald Trump slammed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for making the path easier for immigrants to land jobs at high-tech firms.
Uber’s low-cost service, UberX, reduces drunk driving deaths all over California and may be responsible for a drop in DUIs on NYE.
(Ferenstein Wire) — White Americans are slowly dwindling into the minority, which poses big problems for Republicans. Democrats’ popularity with minorities has helped them snag the presidency in recent elections. By 2024, Republicans may need to blow past George Bush’s 2004 historic record with Latinos (44 percent) in order to ever have a shot again at another conservative president.
(From The Ferenstein Wire) — The Republican field for president is massive, and conservative contenders are scrambling to stand out from the crowd. Polls tend to swing wildly from month-to-month, as new candidates enter the race or happen to get into a headline-making story.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.
Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”
For a company that is regularly scowled at by the tech media, Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 10 over the last 48 hours has been amazingly smooth, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. In what for Microsoft is a paradigm shift, the
In its last quarter that will be impacted by innovation on Steve Jobs’ watch, Apple booked strong quarterly revenue and earnings yesterday. But the company had to admit that existing Apple customers were slow to upgrade to new iPhone releases and Apple as a status symbol in China may be coming to an end. The stock plunged by -10 percent, or about $80 billion, before recovering somewhat today. But as Breitbart News warned last month, ‘Apple Products: Without Steve Jobs, the Thrill is Gone.’
Intel, one of the nations largest technology corporations, has delivered a stern message to their workers: You’re not good enough.
Over the weekend, political hacks and techies converged for the second annual Reboot Conference in San Francisco. Chief technology directors of campaigns–including Barack Obama’s Organizing for America, along with several Republican campaigns–joined a panel that advised the campaign tech crowd.
On Friday, Lincoln Labs, a liberty-oriented technology thought leadership group, opens its second annual conference: #Reboot2015. Featuring an array of experts from across technology, politics and the ideological spectrum, attendees will discuss how technology can and should impact our politics and how we can harness innovation to improve government, society and life for all Americans.
Microsoft’s dumping of 7,800 employees and taking a $7.6 billion write-down related to its purchase of Nokia’s phone manufacturing operation was a cheap price to pay to vanquish the ghost of the Steve Ballmer era.
Given that the world is full of hunger, volatile food prices, and social unrest, a pair of recent MIT Sloan Business School graduates have launched a mobile application called Spoiler Alert to make it quick and easy for companies to sell or donate millions of tons of surplus food.
Global venture capitalists invested $56.31 billion in 4,894 deals during the first half of 2015–the lowest number of deals recorded by the Pitchbook blog over a six month period in the last 25 years. The major reason for a smaller number of companies being funded is that venture capitalists are throwing huge amounts of money at a small number of “unicorns.”
“Live under the stars in the great outdoors of Silicon Valley for a mere $900 a month.” A Mountain View, California man is renting out a tent in his backyard.
On the heels of Apple Music’s $9.99 streaming service getting the bodyslam from a 99-pounder named Taylor Swift, Google has just rolled out “Play Music,” which will offer a free, ad-supported streaming music service. Combined with their “All Access” subscription product released in May, Google appears positioned to crush both Spotify and Apple Music.
Marketing company Turn Inc. of Redwood City has been sued in what looks to be a huge mass tort lawsuit alleging a conspiracy with telecommunications giant Verizon Wireless to engage in undisclosed tracking and storing of Internet browsing histories.
If Robin Leach visited the headquarters of Fibit, Inc. in San Francisco today, it would be all “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” as the leading wearable fitness tracker raised $793.5 million at a stunning valuation of $4.1 billion in the largest initial public offering (IPO) by any consumer electronics company in history.
The California Labor Comission just ruled that Uber must treat its drivers like normal employees, rather than independent contractors, potentially forcing the company to pay benefits and cover expenses. The decision is being hailed as a victory for worker rights and a major blow to the growing billion-dollar transportation startup.
After top tech talent from Silicon Valley helped rescue President Obama’s disastrous healthcare website launch, he decided that there was much more the brightest in Silicon Valley could do for the federal government. According to an interview with Fast Company, the President has been personally recruiting top talent from the likes of Google and Facebook to build next-generation government services.
The “gig economy” is the term for corporations embracing the “on demand economy,” “collaborative consumption” and “sharing economy” bandwagons to restructure “work” into small projects of limited duration so that big business can justify legally dumping employees and hiring contractors. With employee benefit costs exceeding 46 percent of wages and workplace litigation spiking, “employees” don’t exist in the future of work.
Google has just announced a brand new initiative to improve city life, Sidewalk Labs, which will tackle cost of living, transportation, and the environment for urban citizens. While details are scant, it’s worth noting that suburban-based Google is just the latest influential tech giant to join the “cities” bandwagon.
Strange Loop, an annual tech and innovation conference in St. Louis, Missouri, is facing allegations of political intolerance after disinviting a software engineer and influential political theorist from its 2015 lineup. Software engineer Curtis Yarvin was scheduled to give a
With San Francisco offering massive tax incentives to redevelop 77 dilapidated warehouse buildings into a “Twitter Town” for the “digerati” venture capital crowd, the adjacent Mission District community is now in turmoil, as the city’s poor are being booted to make room for new buildings and Airbnb vacation rental conversions.
Bay Area employees are trading in their caffeine for dancing with a new trend that has hit San Francisco: early morning dance parties, minus the booze.
A new economic analysis finds that Santa Clara Country could completely end its homeless problem at zero net cost by providing public housing for every single person living on the street. The study, from the Knowledge for Greater Good Economic
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel revealed Tuesday at the California Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes that the company is planning for an initial public offering (IPO). He said the company, recently valued at $15 billion, had no desire to be acquired in a merger like the Facebook’s $3 billion offer two years ago. Then, in a refreshing twist for such a young captain of industry, Spiegel warned that the Fed’s “easy money policy” and low interest have created a tech bubble and it’s only a “matter of time till it bursts.”
Buying AOL, Inc. was a deal Verizon had to make, given that Verizon’s bundled telephone, Internet and pay-TV services seem headed toward serious decline.
Going “clear” is in this year. First as a perfect score for horse jumping; then in Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; and now as the new project of Ethan Czahor, who had to resign as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the Jeb Bush Presidential campaign over some nasty old offensive tweets. Czahor has just launched a new iOS app called “Clear” to purge offensive “stuff” you may have posted on social media.
