Posts

Showing posts from October, 2020

This is what the pandemic has done to Christmas TV adverts

Be prepared for less hugging and big family meals and more animation and forced optimism as advertising agencies grapple with the grim prospect of a Covid-19 Christmas from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/35VyUlJ

The original smartwatch is back

The digital electronic watch is 50 years old. Now the Hamilton Pulsar is back and happily, it hasn’t made too much progress from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/3efTEbJ

The Queen’s Gambit is the must-watch show on Netflix right now

Watching gifted chess players is a reminder that brilliance exists in everyone, even if you don’t understand their game from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/3mTdexB

The WIRED Christmas gift guide to the ultimate tech toys for 2020

We’ve compiled a list of our favourite tech toys for 2020 to take some of the pressure off. Our fun and mind-nurturing edit is ideal for kids, teenagers and adults who make solid life choices... from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/37VXju1

These 16 sensors in smartwatches, fitness bands help in measuring heart rate, SpO2 and more

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/32GKIIc

OnePlus 8T Review: A complete package

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3emypoE

Poco C3 review: Does the job

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3oFmnLP

Indian Army’s WhatsApp-like chat app; new phone launches & more top tech news of the week

from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3jFwzjG

Human Capital: Uber Eats hit with claims of ‘reverse racism’

Image
With less than one week left until the election, DoorDash made a late contribution of $3.75 million to try to ensure California’s gig worker ballot measure Prop 22 passes. Meanwhile, Coinbase is looking for a head of diversity and inclusion and Uber was hit with claims of reverse racism. All that and more in this week’s edition of Human Capital, a weekly newsletter where we unpack all-things labor and D&I. To receive this in your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m. PT, be sure to sign up here . Let’s jump in. Employees at surveillance startup Verkada reportedly used tech to harass co-workers Oof. Just when we thought we were safe from surveillance, we’ve found yet another reason not to trust people with facial recognition tech. Just to be clear, the first part of that was sarcasm. Anyway,  Vice reported earlier this week  that some Verkada employees used the startup’s tech to take photos of their female colleagues and then made sexually explicit jokes. When other employees reporte

Is Wall Street losing its tech enthusiasm?

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays,  based on the column of the same name . You can sign up for the email  here . Over the past few months the IPO market made it plain that some public investors were willing to pay more for growth-focused technology shares than private investors. We saw this in both strong tech IPO pricing — the value set on companies as they debut — and in resulting first-day valuations , which were often higher. One way to consider how far public valuations rose for tech startups, especially those with a software core in 2020, is to ask yourself how often you heard about a down IPO this year. Maybe a single time? At most? (You can catch up on 2020 IPO performance here , if you need to.) IPO enthusiasm exposed a gap between what many venture capitalists and private investors were paying for tech shares, and what the public market was doing with its own valuation calculations. Insurtech startup Hippo’s $150 million private

MG Siegler talks portfolio management and fundraising 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic

This week, GV General Partner (and TechCrunch alum) MG Siegler joined us on Extra Crunch Live for a far-ranging chat about what it takes to foster a good relationship between investor and startup, how portfolio management and investing has changed as the COVID-19 crisis drags on, and what Siegler expects will and won’t stick around in terms of changes in behavior in investment and entrepreneurship once the pandemic passes. We last caught up with Siegler on the heels of his investment in Universe , a mobile-focused, e-commerce business-building startup. The coronavirus pandemic was relatively new and no one was sure how long it would last or what measures to contain it would look like. Now, with a few months of experience under his belt, Siegler told me that things have relatively settled into a new normal from his perspective as an investor – sometimes for worse, sometimes for better, but mostly just resulting in differences that require adaptation. This select transcript has been ed

Toyota to invest $500 million in KDDI to deepen ties for "connected car"

Toyota Motor Corp and KDDI Corp said on Friday that Japan's biggest automaker would invest 52.2 billion yen ($500 million) in the mobile carrier to deepen their partnership in the age of the "connected car". from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/3jKoDh7

The 2020s promise better tech solutions to humanity’s biggest problems

Image
Editor’s note:   Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT).  Subscribe here . Let’s think beyond Monday, for a minute, to the trends playing out in technology this coming decade. While humanity’s problems have never been greater, our tools have never been better. Here’s more, from Danny Crichton : The 2010s were all about executing on the dreams of mobile, cloud, and basic data. Those ideas had historical antecedents going back in some cases decades or more (Vannevar Bush’s description of the internet dates to the 1940s, for instance). But for the first time, we had the infrastructure and the users to actually build these products and make them useful. It was quite possibly the most extensive greenfield opportunity in the history of technology. Yet, that greenfield is increasingly fallow. Business has cycles and seasonality as much as media reporting does. The easy stuff has been done. Building an app to text

This Week in Apps: Facebook Gaming skips iOS, TikTok goes shopping, Apple One bundles arrive

Image
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with  a record  204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now  spending  three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a  combined  $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. Top Stories Here Comes Apple One Thanks for all the market research, app developers. Image Credits: Apple Apple issued a slight beat on earnings  this week, despite the COVID pandemic and a 20% decline in iPhone sales year-over-year, including a drop in China. But for app developers who already have a large install base to serve across Apple’s mobile devices, it’s Apple’s expansion into the services market that may draw more atten