IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced today that the company would no longer sell facial recognition services, calling for a “national dialogue” on whether it should be used at all. He also voiced support for a new bill aiming to reduce police violence and increase accountability. In a letter reported by CNBC, written in support of
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Here at Equity Monday we look at what happened over the weekend, what’s ahead, and a few recent funding rounds. As you’ll hear, we’re heading back into our normal cadence and topics, but if you do want to
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hi friends and first-time readers. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to
The tech industry has generally wished that structural discrimination would go away, while pretending that it already has. But technology can be used by anyone for anything. And so, the world has watched video after video of police brutality against Black people in a real-time stream that plays through the closing days of quarantine, culminating
Millions have taken to the streets across the world to protest the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month. Protesters have faced both unprecedented police violence and surveillance. Just this week, the Justice Department granted the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency typically tasked with
Amy Errett’s company, Madison Reed, sells in-home care color. It may not sound like a glamorous business but, as it turns out, it’s a very durable one, done the right way. Not only has the seven-year-old outfit been slowing chipping away at the dominant personal care giants like L’Oreal that have long controlled what’s currently
Lidar is fast becoming one of the most influential tools in archaeology, revealing things in a few hours what might have taken months of machete wielding and manual measurements otherwise. The latest such discovery is an enormous Mayan structure, more than a kilometer long, 3,000 years old, and seemingly used for astronomical observations. Takeshi Inomata
There’s a decent chance buying music is the furthest thing from your mind right now, and I can’t say I blame you. Here in the States, 108,000 people are dead of COVID-19, and protests against the killing of George Floyd raged on for an eighth night. And neither of these society-shaping events are set to
GM’s electric offensive to bring at least 20 new EVs to market by 2023 reportedly includes a commercial van. Reuters reported Thursday that the company is developing an electric van for the commercial market code named BV1. The vehicle is expected to start production in late 2021 and will use the Ultium battery system that
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. The ZoomInfo IPO slipped through our fingers in the last news cycle, so we’re going to catch up. Founded in 2000, the company has had a somewhat complicated history. ZoomInfo raised a Series A in
In India, it’s Google and Walmart-owned PhonePe that are racing neck-and-neck to be the top player in the mobile payments market, while Facebook remains mired in a regulatory maze for WhatsApp Pay’s rollout. In May, more than 75 million users transacted on Google Pay app, ahead of Walmart -owned PhonePe’s 60 million users, and SoftBank
What price privacy? Zoom is facing a fresh security storm after CEO Eric Yuan confirmed that a plan to reboot its battered security cred by (actually) implementing end-to-end encryption does not in fact extend to providing this level of security to non-paying users. This Zoom ‘premium on privacy’ is necessary so it can provide law
Facebook and PayPal have made investments in GoJek, joining Google and Tencent among other high-profile technology companies that have backed the Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm. Facebook, for which it is the first investment in an Indonesia-based firm, and PayPal did not disclose the size of their checks. Five-year-old GoJek said the companies were participating in
LinkedIn is announcing some new features for advertisers — retargeting capabilities tied on video ads and lead generation forms, as well as new brand safety integrations for the LinkedIn Audience Network. Abhishek Shrivastava, the senior director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, told me that his team has been shifting its product plans in response
Twitter placed a tweet from a close political ally of the president behind a warning label Monday, citing its policy prohibiting content that promotes violence. The tweet, from Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, suggested that the U.S. government “hunt down” anti-fascist activists in the country like it would pursue international terrorists. “We have placed a
Bonusly, a platform that involves the entire organization in recognizing employees and rewarding them, closed on a $9 million Series A financing round led by Access Venture Partners. Next Frontier Capital, Operator Partners, and existing investor FirstMark Capital also participated in the round. Bonusly launched in 2013 when cofounder and CEO Raphael Crawford-Marks saw the
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hi and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. I’m
NASA astronauts Doug Hurley took over manual control of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on Saturday, shortly after the vehicle’s historic first launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Crew Dragon is designed to fly entirely autonomous throughout the full duration of its missions, including automated docking, de-orbit and landing procedures, but it has manual control