Year: 2018

 Continental is the latest top-tier automotive supplier to work with Nvidia, and the latest to announce its intent to build a full-scale, top-to-bottom autonomous driving system. Continental (which might be most familiar from its tire division, but which supplies a range of automotive parts and systems across the industry) will be using Nvidia’s DRIVE autonomous vehicle platform for… Read More

 Alden Ehrenreich seems to basically channel Harrison Ford in a couple of scenes in this brand new short teaser trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is coming out May 25 in the U.S. He nails the grin, and the instant, ‘just a good dude’ grin that Ford brought to bear on Solo in the original trilogy. As for the rest of it, what we seem to have his a heist movie, although that… Read More

 YouTube on the blockchain is one of the holy grails of the crypto community. The new generation of video artists and their audience seem tailor-made for a blockchain-based distribution and restitution system — one that depends on micro-payments and digitally secured provenance. It’d also be a system that could get creators out from under the yoke of YouTube, Snap, and Facebook… Read More

 Just a week after we reported that Fair.com was acquiring the leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing from Uber, the flexible car-ownership startup is making two more moves. Today, the company confirmed that it has raised another round of funding led by next47, the VC firm backed by Siemens; and it has made another acquisition, of Los Angeles-based Skurt, a service that lets you rent a car, and… Read More

 Zebra Fuel, a London-based startup that wants to eliminate the inner city gas station by delivering fuel directly to your vehicle, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The round is led by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, with participation from Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital, and Alex Chesterman, the Zoopla founder and one of the U.K.’s most active angel investors. Read More

 Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers. The company’s first chip is a custom core Armv8-A 64-bit server operating at up to 3.3 GHz with 1TB of memory at a power envelope of 125 watts. Although James was not ready to share pricing, she promised… Read More

 Two years ago, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang set out to write a book about gender discrimination in Silicon Valley. It wasn’t specifically prompted by that now-famous post of former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, wherein Fowler calmly recounted the many ways that Uber’s internal controls were either very messed up or nonexistent. But the national movement that Fowler… Read More

 Infarm, a startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, has raised $25 million in Series A funding. Read More

 Penta, the German ‘challenger’ bank that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has raised €2.2 million in funding. The seed round is led by Inception Venture Capital, a new London-based VC firm with a heavy fintech focus, and will be used for further hiring, product development and to fuel growth. Read More

 Leshi Internet, one of China’s largest video-streaming services, disclosed that it must pay back 5.62 billion RMB (about $890 million) by the end of this year. Leshi Internet’s (also known as Le.com) heavy debts stem from a financial crisis at its sister company LeEco, both of which were founded by Jia Yueting. Jia resigned as Leshi Internet’s chief executive officer last year.  Read More