Year: 2018

 In 2011, WeWork ran an accelerator-type program called WeWork Labs. That program was a bit neglected as the company began to focus on other initiatives, such as international expansion, Powered By We, and acquisitions. But today, WeWork is relaunching WeWork Labs, with 27 spaces secured in 16 markets for 2018. WeWork Labs, which will be run by former Head of Digital Roee Adler, wants to… Read More

 Investors in Indonesia have started a new project aimed at digitizing the kiosk shops that adorn the street of capital city Jakarta. Warung Pintar — ‘smart kiosk store’ — helps street vendors revamp their store with a bright and colorful design, and a range of tech that includes a digital POS, free Wi-Fi, an LCD screen, power bank chargers and more. The venture was… Read More

 In this episode of Technotopia I talk to Jeremy Ring, a former Florida state senator and author of We Were Yahoo!, a meditation on his career as one of the first employees at Yahoo. Ring has a lot to say about the search giant – including plenty of complaints about how things were run over the years – and some insights into technology and modern politics. His book is available now… Read More

 Quietly, Apple has been bringing together a number of moving parts in its strategy around virtual and augmented reality hardware; and now one more element of that has come to light. eMagin, a maker of OLED miniature displays, says that Apple, along with LG, Valve, VR entertainment maker Immerex (which now appears to be operating publicly as Luci), and Stillwater Holdings, are collectively… Read More

 Alibaba Group’s entertainment unit has signed a major licensing deal to show many of Disney’s animated series and movies on Youku, its streaming video service, and other platforms it selects. The agreement covers more than 1,000 episodes from Disney series, as well as many of its films, and means Alibaba is now the largest distributor of Disney animations in China. Read More

 Last fall at Oracle OpenWorld, chairman Larry Ellison showed he was a man of the people by comparing the company’s new autonomous database service to auto-pilot on his private plane. Regardless, those autonomous capabilities were pretty advanced, providing customers with a self-provisioning, self-tuning and self-repairing database. Today, Oracle announced it was expanding that… Read More

 The Snap Map is a feature that received a mixed response when it landed in the Snapchat app, since it basically let you see where all your friends on the platform were at any given time – provided they were okay with sharing that info. Now, there’s a version of Snap Map available for anyone to view on the web, but it’s less about checking out where your pals are at, and… Read More

 Uber has added a feature that will force a six-hour offline break whenever a driver on its platform reaches 12 hours of driving time. The feature is similar to one that Uber has in place in a few markets already around the U.S., which differs depending on local regulations, but this will apply across the U.S., and fully block use of the driver app for accepting trips during the six-hour… Read More

 An attacker injected a crypto mining script into a web plugin’s JavaScript library, and some 4,000 websites — a large number of them taxpayer funded — were co-opted into illegal crypto mining… oopsie… Read More

 TechCrunch is bringing Disrupt back to Europe for the sixth time, and we’re delighted to announce that Berlin, the urban heartland of Europe’s startup scene, will once again be Disrupt’s host city in 2018. Save these Disrupt Berlin dates in your diary: 29-30 November 2018 If you ask,  “Why Berlin?” the answer is simple. Not only is Berlin still Europe’s… Read More