Weekly Roundup: Verizon buys Yahoo, WikiLeaks publishes DNC emails and Skully crashes

Posted Jul 29, 2016 by Anna Escher (@annaescher)

Yahoo finally found a buyer, Mobileye and Tesla broke up, and some of the largest tech companies reported quarterly earnings. These are the biggest tech stories of the week. You can now get the Weekly Roundup sent straight to your inbox, delivered Saturday mornings.

1. Verizon (which owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch) announced it is acquiringYahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion in cash. This includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities. It’s crazy to think that in 2000, Yahoo was worth a whopping $125 billion. If you won the last computing platform and are on the cusp of the next one you’re not built for, you might want to sell your company. It’s easier to pivot than make a comeback, after all.

2. Major tech companies reported earnings this week, and the highlights are as follows. Facebook smashed its Q2 earnings, hitting 1.7 billion users and a record share price. Apple’s stock jumped 7% after the company reported solid earnings.Verizon missed on declining sales of $30.5 billion. Twitter stock dove after a mixed report, and poor user growth continued. GoPro sales beat investor expectations but are still in steep decline. Alphabet beat expectations, boosting its shares by 5%.Amazon shattered expectations with $30.4 billion in revenue.

3. Once promising AR motorcycle helmet startup Skully is no longer. We discovered that the company’s shutdown will leave several vendors and Skully’s manufacturer Flextronics with unpaid bills and at least 50 full-time employees out of a job. It’s unclear if any of the vendors will be paid.

4. Oracle made a $9.3 billion acquisition of cloud services company NetSuite. It’s clear now that Oracle is serious about growing cloud computing revenue, but this wasn’t always the case.

5. WikiLeaks published a searchable database of 19,252 DNC-related emails packed with personal and financial information. Following the leak, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she will be stepping down from her role as the head of the Democratic National Committee after the end of the event.

6. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump participated in a Reddit AMA, managing to answer 13 questions on topics ranging from NASA to media bias.In a separate facepalm-inducing moment, Trump invited Russia (yes, the entire country of Russia) to hack into Hillary Clinton’s inbox and release “the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” Yikes.

7. During their earnings call, MobileEye announced that it will no longer provide Tesla with its self-driving automotive tech beyond EyeQ3, the processor currently used in Tesla vehicles. It is unclear whether Tesla or Mobileye ended the relationship, but Mobileye investors aren’t happy about the split.

8. Upthere, a new company from Apple and Oracle vets, came out of beta with $77 million in funding. The company believes that cloud storage should be your primary storage and not just a place for keeping backups. It’s now generally available for OS X/MacOS, Android and iOS.

9. Xiaomi announced its first laptop, and it sure does look familiar. The Mi Notebook Air comes in two sizes — 13.3-inch and 12.5-inch — running Windows with a full-HD display, full-metal body and type-C USB charging and two USB slots. The Macbook Air rival will come as cheap as $540.

10. Amazon debuted a dedicated shop for Kickstarter projects. Amazon is now hosting 300 successful Kickstarter products across a variety of categories, now all available for purchase.

11. Uber cofounder and CEO of Expa Studios Garrett Camp unveiled Expa’s latest project, Haus. Haus is a real estate play that focuses on digitizing the discovery, buying and selling of residential property.

 

Weekly Roundup: Didi buys Uber China, Instagram’s Snapchatty ‘Stories’ and new emoji

Posted Aug 5, 2016 by Anna Escher (@annaescher)

This week tech companies worked their angles for the Rio Olympics, Uber China gave into Didi Chuxing and Instagram cloned Snapchat with an ephemeral new feature. Here are this week’s top stories in tech. You can receive the Weekly Roundup in your inbox every Saturday, if that’s your kinda thing.

1. Didi Chuxing will buy Uber China, its former competitor. The two companies will retain distinct brands, app and business operations, and it sounds like the backends will be merged. While at first this may seem like an admission of failure for Uber, it’s actually a win-win.

2. Instagram shocked the social world by launching “Stories,” a Snapchatty new feature for imperfect, ephemeral sharing. We spoke with Instagram’s CEO about the decision to essentially clone Snapchat, and he claimed that “Snapchat deserves all the credit.” Facebook also went as far as adding Olympics-themed filters and frames in further examples of copying Snapchat. Still puzzled? Here’s how “Stories” works.

3. Theranos is still fraught with possible criminal charges, lawsuits, test result recalls and Congressional inquiry. The blood analysis startup was supposed to reveal their tech this week, but instead introduced a whole new hardware product. Theranos unveiled a Zika-detection box – sending the scientific community into further skepticism.

4. Facebook introduced a new anti-clickbait algorithm that punishes headlines based on a ranking scale.

5. Apple dropped a new iOS 10 beta with 100 new emojis. Some notable changes were new female athletes, a gay pride flag, and the gun was redesigned as a cute squirt gun. See them for yourself.

6. Major tech companies continued to report earnings. Highlights are as follows. Tesla missed on Q2 earnings, delivering 14,402 vehicles and reporting $1.56 billion in revenue. Etsy showed signs of life in its Q2 earnings report as merchant sales hit $669.7 million. LinkedIn posted a huge second quarter in its last earnings report ever.

7. Tech companies geared up for the Rio Olympics, including Facebook’s personalized Olympics section in the News Feed and DJI’s temporary restriction on its drones in Brazil. We took a look at the tech US Olympians are using to help them go for the gold.

8. We got a glimpse inside Tesla’s super secretive Gigafactory, the massive building where the company is building the huge amount of batteries it needs. It’s “a machine to build the machines,” as Elon Musk refers to it. The Gigafactory will cost about $5 billion and when completed, will be one of the biggest buildings on earth.

9. Hot off the heels of its acquisition of Yahoo last week for $4.8 billion, Verizon announced another huge purchase: it’s buying Fleetmatics, a telematics company, for $2.4 billion in cash.

10. Say hello to the newest unicorn. Indonesia’s Go-Jek raised $550 million to battle Uber and Grab in Southeast Asia. The round values the motorbike taxi on-demand company at $1.2 billion post-money.

11. We got a look inside Facebook’s new “Area 404” mad science hardware lab. This is where Facebook will prototype its solar drones, Internet-beaming lasers, VR headsets, and next-gen servers. Take the visual tour here.

12. Salesforce continued its buying spree as it purchased word processing app Quip for $750 million.

13. We got our hands on Samsung’s new Note 7. The 5.7-inch smartphone has a dual-edged curved display, bringing the virtually bezel-free curvature to the line for the first time.