Lyft closes up 9% on first day of trading
Pink confetti fell from the ceiling Friday as Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer celebrated their company’s IPO. The stock offering was a bonafide success, with shares selling for…
Startups Weekly: Why Lyft’s $2.2B IPO wasn’t “crazy land” or “nuts”
Lyft completed its long-awaited IPO this week, trading 21 percent higher Friday than its initial offering price of $72 per share. It closed its first day of trading at about…
Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. There…
Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy
It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments…
Ride-hailing, bike and scooter companies probably raised less money than you thought
After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. Scooter service providers, the transportation trend du jour, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scatter…
User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises $5 million
It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want,…
Covert data-scraping on watch as EU DPA lays down “radical” GDPR red-line
An interesting decision came out of Poland’s data protection agency this week after the watchdog issued its first fine under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On the surface the…
Equity Shot: Lyft is public — what does that mean for other IPO-ready unicorns?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Sure, we just aired a new episode yesterday but things keep happening, and…
Marketing tech vendors need to find right balance between digital and human interactions
As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect…
Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation
Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the US, but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency…
Twitter introduces a battery-saving ‘Lights Out’ dark-mode option
As promised back in January by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the company today is rolling out an even darker version of the app’s existing dark mode. Before, Twitter’s dark theme…
ServiceNow teams with Workplace by Facebook on service chatbot
One of the great things about enterprise chat applications beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise…
Apple sells wireless charging AirPods, cancels charger days later
“Works with AirPower mat”. Apparently not. Looks like Apple doesn’t treat customers with the same “high standard” of care it apparently reserves for its hardware quality. 9 days after launching…
It’s a draw in latest Qualcomm v Apple patent scores
It’s Qualcomm 1, Apple 1 in the latest instalment of the pair’s bitter patent bust-up — the litigious IP infringement claim saga that also combines a billion dollar royalties suit…
Nativo acquires content analytics company SimpleReach
Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools. “If you can’t measure the…
The FT is buying another media startup: Deal Street Asia
Fresh from picking up a majority stake in Europe-based The Next Web, the Financial Times is buying another tech blog. The newspaper, which was founded in 1888, is adding Singapore-based…
Facebook needs a white hat Cambridge Analytica
Rob Blackie Contributor Rob Blackie is a Digital Strategist based in London, England, who has contributed to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. Mike Butcher Contributor More posts by this…
Alibaba has acquired Teambition, a China-based Trello and Asana rival, in its enterprise push
Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its US counterpart Amazon has done…
Focaldata thinks it has some answers for campaigners in the age of Trump and Brexit
Political parties, campaigns, and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political…
Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site
If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her…
DoorDash launches a new program highlighting immigrant and refugee business owners
DoorDash launched a new initiative today called Kitchens Without Borders, which it says is designed to promote business owners who are immigrants and refugees. It’s starting out with 10 restaurants in…
Grab is talking to Ant Financial and PayPal about spinning out its financial services business
Grab, the $16 billion-valued ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business last year, is in talks with Alibaba’s Ant Financial and PayPal as it considers spinning out of its…
Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads
Now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s…
Microsoft gives 500 patents to startups
Microsoft today announced a major expansion of its Azure IP Advantage program, which provides its Azure users with protection against patent trolls. This program now also provides customers who are…
Canon takes on Fuji with new instant-print CLIQ cameras
Instant print cameras have been popular for a long, long time, but they’re seeing a renaissance now — led by Fujifilm, whose Instax mini-films and cameras lead the pack. But…
Xiaomi teases another look at its foldable phone
Xiaomi is back with another teaser of the foldable concept device it first showed off in January. This time around, in a video posted to its Weibo account, the Chinese…
WeWork backs New York tech clubhouse Betaworks Studios
Betaworks Studios, the brainchild of New York City seed-stage venture capital fund Betaworks, has amassed the support of WeWork, or The We Company, as they now call themselves. JLL Spark…
Lyft prices IPO at top of range
Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share, CNBC reports. This…
Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem
A revealing cluster of emails leaked to Business Insider offers a glimpse at how Facebook decides what content is objectionable in high profile cases. In this instance, a group of…
Vizion.ai launches its managed Elasticsearch service
Setting up Elasticsearch, the open-source system that many companies large and small use to power their distributed search and analytics engines, isn’t the hardest thing. What is very hard, though,…