Blog

 It was well-known that ex-Index VC Ophelia Brown was ‘doing a fund of her own’ after she departed Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe in April, the London-based seed investment firm where she was a General Partner. However, it wasn’t until last month that Blossom Capital, as Brown’s new firm is called, broke cover. As reported by Business Insider, Brown has teamed… Read More

 It could be said that the first few years of this current tech boom were fueled by mostly harmless, relatively easy products—websites for sharing your photos, for looking up stuff, for connecting with old friends. And the people who made them were seen as mostly good people. Yet this feel-good perception has slowly and then suddenly disappeared. Users have begun to regard once trusted… Read More

 Alibaba’s 2018 investment spree looks set to continue after it made a push to buy Ele.me, the food delivery startup from China that it has invested in, in full. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Alibaba plans to purchase the roughly-60 percent of Ele.me that it currently doesn’t own from the other investors, which include search giant Baidu. TechCrunch has confirmed that with… Read More

 A week that begins with the repeal of regulation that prevents dictatorship in China is likely to be a busy one for the country’s censorship people, and so it has proven to be. China’s web scrubbers have been busy banning a collection of terms and dropping the hammer on user accounts after the Xi Jinping, the country’s premier, got the all-clear to become ‘President… Read More

 JD.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies, is launching a new Beijing-based accelerator program for artificial intelligence and blockchain startups. Called AI Catapult, its first batch includes six companies: Bankorus, CanYa, Bluezelle, Nuggets, Republic Protocol and Devery. Read More

 While the largest deal in the history of technology continues to hit a number of speed bumps, we’re now getting into the phase of very strongly-worded publicly-issued statements between the two companies as we get closer and closer to the annual meeting of stockholders in early March. Broadcom and Qualcomm, the former of which is trying to acquire the latter, are continuing to duke it out… Read More

 A federal court has ruled against AT&T in a long-running case that found itself tied up in the net neutrality debate. AT&T had argued that the 2015 FCC order classifying it as a common carrier let it off the hook in a case brought against it by the FTC — which has no authority over common carriers. The case has been heard and reheard, but hopefully this judgment is the last. Read More

 Marvel is making its first move into scripted podcasting next month with the premiere of Wolverine: The Long Night, a 10-episode series that’s launching on Stitcher Premium. Ahead of the premiere, I had a chance to speak to director Brendan Baker about the challenges involved in bringing the famous mutant superhero from comics and film into audio. “That was one of the first… Read More

 Fitbit, which has increasingly had to fend off competition from devices like the Apple Watch and is increasingly making moves in the healthcare space, still hasn’t seemed to nail things down quite yet as it posted weaker-than-expected financial results for its fourth quarter. The quarter was more or less a complete whiff, falling short of Wall Street estimates for earnings, revenue… Read More

 Uber will talk about flying taxis, autonomous aerial transport and everything in between, in an industry event designed to bring together stakeholder on the subject in one place. This is the second year in a row that Uber has hosted its ‘Elevate Summit,’ and this year it’s in LA. The event fill feature a ton of speakers working on making aerial personal urban transit a… Read More