Posts

Showing posts from June, 2021

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Florida's Stop Social Media Censorship Act from going into effect, which was scheduled for Thursday (David Ingram/NBC News)

Image
David Ingram / NBC News : A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Florida's Stop Social Media Censorship Act from going into effect, which was scheduled for Thursday   —  A federal judge Wednesday put on hold a first-of-its-kind law in Florida that authorized the state to penalize social media companies … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3w6Thr5

Content recommendation company Taboola closed down 2% in its first day of trading after going public via merger with a SPAC (Megan Graham/CNBC)

Image
Megan Graham / CNBC : Content recommendation company Taboola closed down 2% in its first day of trading after going public via merger with a SPAC   —  - Digital ad company Taboola began trading on the Nasdaq Wednesday following its merger with ION Acquisition Corp. 1, a special acquisition corporation. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3dvHigt

Integral Ad Science, which helps keep digital ads non-fraudulent and "brand safe", closes up 14% in its debut after its IPO, valuing the company at ~$3.3B (Megan Graham/CNBC)

Image
Megan Graham / CNBC : Integral Ad Science, which helps keep digital ads non-fraudulent and “brand safe”, closes up 14% in its debut after its IPO, valuing the company at ~$3.3B   —  - Ad tech company Integral Ad Science began trading on Wednesday under the ticker “IAS.”  — IAS pegs itself as a “verification company” for digital ads. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3AicadS

Nodes & Links raises $11M to — maybe — save billions on the big projects the world needs now

Image
Nodes & Links is a scheduling platform for large-scale infrastructure projects which works out when the nuts and bolts for the bridge (for example) should be delivered, and in what order. Unsurprisingly, complex infrastructure projects often get this wrong. The company has now raised an $11 million Series A funding round led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 , alongside Zigg Capital and Westerly Winds, with participation from existing investors Entrepreneur First, ADV and Seedcamp. Launched in 2018, the company’s Aegis platform is used by Balfour Beatty, Costain and BAM Nuttal, and claims to have delivered millions in cost savings on infrastructure projects, because the building materials and assembly ends up being organized in the right order. Given that most major projects run significantly over time and over budget, scheduling correctly can make a huge difference to costs, as well as the impact on the environment. The company quotes a survey by Oxford University that

Shares of Xometry, a marketplace for on-demand manufacturing, closed up nearly 99% at $87.39 in trading debut, after raising $303.6M in its US IPO (Luisa Beltran/Barron's Online)

Image
Luisa Beltran / Barron's Online : Shares of Xometry, a marketplace for on-demand manufacturing, closed up nearly 99% at $87.39 in trading debut, after raising $303.6M in its US IPO   —  Shares of Xometry, which is looking to digitize on-demand manufacturing, nearly doubled in the company's market debut. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2Thrxmq

Adam Mosseri says Instagram plans to test video more broadly, calls TikTok and YouTube competitors, and says Instagram is "no longer a photo-sharing app" (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

Image
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC : Adam Mosseri says Instagram plans to test video more broadly, calls TikTok and YouTube competitors, and says Instagram is “no longer a photo-sharing app”   —  - Facebook's head of Instagram said the service plans to start showing users full-screen, recommended videos in their feeds. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3x4CGp8

VividQ, which has raised $15M, says it can turn normal screens into holographic displays

Image
VividQ , a UK-based deeptech startup with technology for rendering holograms on legacy screens, has raised $15 million to develop its technology for next-generation digital displays and devices. And it’s already lining up manufacturing partners in the US, China and Japan to do it. The funding round, a Seed extension round, was led by UTokyo IPC, the venture investment arm for the University of Tokyo. It was joined by Foresight Williams Technology (a joint collaboration between Foresight Group and Williams Advanced Engineering), Japanese Miyako Capital, APEX Ventures in Austria, and the R42 Group VC out of Stanford. Previous investors University of Tokyo Edge Capital, Sure Valley Ventures, and Essex Innovation also participated. The funding will be used to scale VividQ’s HoloLCD technology, which, claims the company, turns consumer-grade screens into holographic displays. Founded in 2017, VividQ has already worked with ARM, and other partners, including Compound Photonics, Himax Tec

Daily Crunch: Insecure server exposes Byju’s students’ names, phone numbers, emails and more

Image
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 30, 2021. It’s the last day of the quarter. It’s the last day of the first half of the year. It’s the halfway mark for your New Year’s resolutions. The kickoff of Q3 means that we are heading into yet another earnings season. To close the second quarter, a number of companies went public including Didi and SentinelOne. The TechCrunch take is that we’re seeing some interesting pricing differentials between companies from the United States compared to China. — Alex The TechCrunch Top 3 Robinhood fined ahead of IPO: While we count down to Robinhood’s IPO filing, long expected after a strong first quarter , the company was hit with $70 million in fines and penalties today for what the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) described as “widespread and significant harm suffered by customers.” Venture

Lego should snap up this rapid-fire brick-finding iOS app

Image
Lego has worked extremely closely with Apple over the years, experimenting with unreleased iOS tech and demoing it onstage at launch events like WWDC; this has included some pretty heavy tinkering on the augmented reality ARKit platform that they’ve integrated several of their play sets with, adding digital experiences to the physical toys. But one of the most impressive integrations between iOS tech and physical Lego bricks just popped up on the App Store, and it’s built by a team of fans. The new app Brickit is aiming to one-up what even the Lego Group has created with an app that uses computer-vision tech to quickly make sense of a mountain of bricks. All users need to do is haphazardly dump Legos into a single layer on the floor. From there the app is able to quickly analyze and identify bricks in the collection and serve up some fun little projects that users have all or most of the bricks they need to build. The most impressive element of the app is its speed — the app is able

Shares of LegalZoom, which helps customers create legal documents online, close up ~35% at $37.85 in trading debut, giving LegalZoom a market cap of $7.35B (Pia Singh/CNBC)

Image
Pia Singh / CNBC : Shares of LegalZoom, which helps customers create legal documents online, close up ~35% at $37.85 in trading debut, giving LegalZoom a market cap of $7.35B   —  - LegalZoom made its market debut Wednesday, with shares opening 31% above their offer price in the company's second attempt at going public. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3Aeul4i

SentinelOne closed up 21% at $42.50 per share in its debut, valuing the company at $10B+; SentinelOne had the highest valued cybersecurity IPO in history (Riley de León/CNBC)

Image
Riley de León / CNBC : SentinelOne closed up 21% at $42.50 per share in its debut, valuing the company at $10B+; SentinelOne had the highest valued cybersecurity IPO in history   —  - Cybersecurity company SentinelOne made its market debut Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange and is now trading under the ticker symbol “S.” from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3qAJusj

Dispense with the chasm? No way!

Image
Geoffrey Moore Contributor Share on Twitter Known for his seminal book "Crossing the Chasm," Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker and adviser who splits his consulting time between startup companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises — including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google and Splunk. Jeff Bussgang, a co-founder and general partner at Flybridge Capital, recently wrote an Extra Crunch guest post that argued it is time for a refresh when it comes to the technology adoption life cycle and the chasm . His argument went as follows: VCs in recent years have drastically underestimated the size of SAMs (serviceable addressable markets) for their startup investments because they were “trained to think only a portion of the SAM is obtainable within any reasonable window of time because of the chasm.” The chasm is no longer the barrier it once was because businesses have finally understood

SpaceX delivers 88 satellites to orbit, lands first stage onshore for first time in 2021

Image
SpaceX launched 85 satellites for external customers, as well as three Starlink satellites, to orbit on Tuesday, marking the second successful launch of the company’s dedicated rideshare missions. While the Transporter-2 mission will deliver fewer objects to space than the first rideshare mission (the Transporter-1 sent up 143 satellites, a new record ), it launched more mass to orbit overall. The Transporter launches are part of the company’s rideshare business model. Announced in 2019 , these missions split up the rocket’s payload capacity amongst multiple customers, resulting in lower costs for each – many of whom are smaller companies that may find the expenses associated with getting to orbit otherwise impossible to pay. SpaceX still ends up with a full launch and the revenue to operate it. The Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at around 2:32 PM. It’s the twentieth Falcon 9 launch in 2021 and the first launch this year that featured the first stage returnin