The United States government has made a deal with Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE that, once completed, will lift the ban preventing the company from working with American suppliers. The agreement eases tensions in the U.S.-China trade war because the seven-year denial order, which the Trump administration imposed in April after …
Read More »YouTube is fighting fighting fake news with $25M to promote journalism and more context in search results
YouTube announced new measures today to stem the spread of conspiracy theory videos and fake news on its platform, including inserting context from trustworthy sources into search results about hot topics. In a blog post, YouTube also said it is working with the Google News Initiative, which was launched by …
Read More »Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search’
Codenamed “Eagle,” Snapchat is building a visual product search feature that delivers users to Amazon’s listings. Buried inside the code of Snapchat’s Android app is an unreleased “Visual Search” feature where you “Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode, and more! This works by sending data to Amazon, …
Read More »There’s a new, $100 million fund expressly for women founders of color
When Richelieu Dennis came to the U.S. from his home in Liberia to attend Babson College, he wasn’t expecting to stay. But unable to return home owing to the first Liberian civil war, stay he did, building the personal care products company SheaMoisture with his college roommate Nyema Tubman in …
Read More »Trov launches its on-demand personal property insurance services in the US
Trov, the on-demand personal property insurance service, is launching in the U.S., the company announced today. Trov’s first port of call in the U.S. will be Arizona. The service is already available in the U.K. and Australia, where customers have signed up to insure items 1 million times since the …
Read More »Facebook quietly relaunches apps for Groups platform after lockdown
Facebook is becoming a marketplace for enterprise apps that help Group admins manage their communities. To protect itself and its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook locked down the Groups API for building apps for Groups. These apps had to go through a human-reviewed approval process, …
Read More »MoviePass parent says it may sell up to $1.2B in equity and debt to finance operations and growth
The all-you-can watch movie theatre subscription service MoviePass, now with 3 million paying users, continues to burn through cash, and today its majority owner announced one more way it might continue to finance operations and its growth as some investors and observers raise questions about its financial future. Helios and Matheson …
Read More »Business analytics firm Domo closes at $27.30/share, up 30% after raising $193M in its muted IPO
Domo, the business analytics company based out of Utah, today became the latest enterprise tech company to go public, and it did so with a small pop. Trading on Nasdaq as DOMO, the company opened at $23.80/share, up 13 percent on its initial pricing of $21. Last night, the company …
Read More »Bird and Lyft raise $900M, a16z launches a crytpo fund, and $6B more for Sequoia
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Connie Loizos and I were joined by Norwest’s Scott Beechuk. Sadly, Matthew Lynley was reading slam poetry to ambivalent cacti in the Sonora Desert and thus couldn’t join us. He’ll be …
Read More »Facebook launches Brand Collabs search engine for sponsoring creators
Facebook wants to help connect brands to creators so they can work out sponsored content and product placement deals, even if it won’t be taking a cut. Confirming our scoop from May, Facebook today launched its Brand Collabs Manager. It’s a search engine that brands can use to browse different …
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