Month: January 2019

Sarahah, the anonymous gossip app notorious for promoting cyberbullying among teens, is pivoting to the workplace. On Thursday, the company launched a second private messaging app, Enoff, which aims to combat workplace harassment by providing an anonymous platform for employee feedback. Enoff joins a crowded field of apps and platforms designed to provide a safer

Uber has suspended its ride-hailing service in the Spanish city of Barcelona. The move, outlined in a blog post on Thursday, is in protest of new rules introduced by the regional government of Catalonia. From Friday, local officials will impose a minimum 15-minute wait between a taxi booking being made and a passenger being picked

Mellody Hobson is one of the most prominent black women in finance. And she’s had it with the rest of the business world feeling all-white and all-male. It’s suicide. Corporate suicide. “I live in the investment world, where I am a unicorn just by virtue of being a black woman,” Hobson said at the Upfront

If an app on Facebook behaved the way Facebook has been behaving, Facebook would probably have shut it down by now. Tuesday’s scathing TechCrunch investigation all but guarantees it. The report found that Facebook has been paying people as young as 13 years old to download an app that grants Facebook access to users’ entire

European markets are set to open mixed Wednesday morning, as investors await Federal Reserve monetary policy guidance and the outcome of high level trade talks between the U.S. and China. The FTSE 100 is seen 28 points higher at 6,861, the CAC is expected to open up around 3 points at 4,931, while the DAX

One terrible way to find out what Apple is planning on doing is to ask an Apple executive about Apple’s plans in public, before Apple is ready to make an Official Apple Announcement. People keep trying anyway. Today it was analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research, asking Apple CEO Tim Cook about Apple’s TV plans.

Earlier this month, a WIRED contributor managed to subvert all the warm, fuzzy feelings produced by the “10-year challenge” meme on social media by asking the question that has haunted free thinkers throughout history: Am I doing what I want to do, or what they want me to do? The challenge, which has flourished on

Thousands of gadgets and gizmos were unveiled at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show, but the product taking top marks wasn’t made of silicon or running on electricity. It was a hamburger. It turns out, the win is an apt metaphor for the growing presence of food companies in the tech space. Impossible Foods, creator of

Most Americans have never heard of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a pedestrian-sounding institution that you might think would operate a food bank in San Mateo or a small tutoring program in Palo Alto. But for the past decade, the foundation has amassed tremendous power in the land of the mega-wealthy, collecting $13 billion in

Before they got down to business for the day, students in Devin Tatro’s social studies class were offered a quiet moment of self-reflection: On this golden fall afternoon at Nome-Beltz Junior/Senior High School, were they feeling chipper, distressed, or somewhere in between? About 20 students gazed at their laptops, an online poll open on each

For years, people have speculated about Amazon rolling out a health care service as part of Amazon Prime. Notable early Amazon investor John Doerr is already calling it “Prime Health.” So far, that hasn’t happened. But the former head of Amazon Prime, Rob Schwietzer, who was in charge of scaling the product to millions of

Saudi Arabia is seeking to attract 1.6 trillion riyals (nearly $429 billion) in private sector investment over the next 10 years for a landmark infrastructure and industrial program as part of its economic diversification campaign, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih announced Saturday. The plan aims to channel investments through the National Industrial Development and Logistics Program,

The threat of government regulation has been looming over Facebook like a dark storm cloud for more than a year now, and it feels like it may finally be starting to rain. Last week, we learned that the FTC is considering slapping Facebook with a reported “record-setting” fine for abusing its users’ data and privacy.

On the latest episode of Recode Decode, Recode’s Kara Swisher spoke with divorce attorney Laura Wasser, whose past clients have included Kim Kardashian, Johnny Depp, and Angelina Jolie. Wasser charges her normal clients $850/hour for her services, but those who can’t afford that rate can check out the online divorce company she has started, It’s

The short-term deal to reopen the federal government could provide a crucial window for biotech firms which have filed to go public — a process that has been stymied by the shutdown at the Securities and Exchange Commission — and for more established drugmakers which faced potential headwinds getting drug approvals at the Food and

This was supposed to be the year when so many of America’s tech darlings — Uber, Pinterest, Peloton — stuck the perfect landing and became public companies like Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Then politics got in the way. The 2019 IPO pipeline now finds itself doubly squeezed by two factors beyond its control: Shaping the

YouTube is trying to reduce the spread of toxic videos on the platform by limiting how often they appear in users’ recommendations. The company announced the shift in a blog post on Friday, writing that it would begin cracking down on so-called “borderline content” that comes close to violating its community standards without quite crossing

In London last month, a team from Alphabet’s UK-based artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind quietly laid a new marker in the contest between humans and computers. Thursday, it revealed the achievement, in a three-hour YouTube stream in which aliens and robots fought to the death. DeepMind’s broadcast showed its artificial intelligence bot, AlphaStar, defeating a

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, defending his company once again, and hitting out at “misreported” claims that the social network sells user data. The article, which is just over 1,000 words long, seeks to explain the reasoning behind Facebook’s targeted advertising model and clear up confusion around

Governments and companies worldwide are investing heavily in artificial intelligence in hopes of new profits, smarter gadgets, and better health care. Financier and philanthropist George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday that the technology may also undermine free societies and create a new era of authoritarianism. “I want to call attention to

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told President Donald Trump in a letter that the House will not consider a resolution authorizing him to deliver his State of the Union address — originally set for next Tuesday — until the government has reopened. Her note to the president came after Trump sent his own letter telling Pelosi

The web can be an annoying and creepy place. Big animated ads try to distract you from what you’re reading, while ads for products you’ve already bought stalk you. That’s led many people to install ad blockers or other tools to inhibit websites from tracking them. According to a survey by identity management company Janrain,

With its CEO setting a goal of going 100 percent electric, General Motors is taking a close look at how, if not when, to offer an all-electric SUV, according to the head of the automaker’s GMC truck brand. While it is not clear how far along such plans have come, GM would join a growing

BuzzFeed is laying off 15 percent of employees throughout the company, according to an email that CEO Jonah Peretti sent to staff on Wednesday evening, a cut that could impact around 225 of the roughly 1,450 employees at the company. Peretti says that while BuzzFeed’s business grew “double digits” over the past year, revenue growth

In an op-ed in TIME last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook called for a new federal privacy bill and a registry for data brokers that buy and sell data from third parties. Doing so would shed light on an insidious industry that many people may not even realize exists. It also wouldn’t be easy. For

With increasing talk of the U.S. and China’s trade war becoming a war over technology, the boss of one software firm thinks it’s now time to start thinking about putting the safety of consumers over global internet standards. The so-called “splinternet” is probably not a phrase you’ve heard of, but it increasingly has experts worried

Google is the first big tech company to be fined under Europe’s strict new data privacy laws, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. On Monday, France’s National Data Protection Commission, which is tasked with enforcing these privacy laws, announced that it was fining the search giant 50 million euros — roughly $57

[This stream is slated to start at 2:30 a.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] Markets have seen a return of volatility of late, with global indexes suffering big losses in December 2018. Equities around the world have had a slight rebound since — the

The human body is frail and people end up in intensive care units for all kinds of reasons. Whatever brings them there, more than half of adults admitted to an ICU end up sharing the same potentially life-threatening condition: kidney damage known as acute kidney injury. The Veterans Administration thinks artificial intelligence could reduce the

Airbnb’s “live like a local” fantasy can quickly morph into a nightmare when your host’s sun-dappled apartment photos turn out to conceal a roach infestation. But hotels can be so homogeneous. Now a new crop of startups is offering a hybrid alternative: apartment hotels, lodging that promises the comfort and roominess of a homestay (minus